I just attended a preview of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, NYC, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976. My advice: Drop whatever you're doing and go see it!
Not only is the selection of works from the American Abstract movement beautiful and well presented, but more impressive to me, is the organization and mounting of the show. The art works are punctuated with intelligent and highly informative curatorial narrative as well as with a good amount of original, period documentation. All of the paintings are exhibited in the context of continuous references to the historically significant critical writings of the period's two pre-eminent art critics: Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. This exhibition is as much about the important role which art criticism and artistic dialogue play in the creation of an art movement and the shaping of the art that defines it, as it is about the specific American Abstract artists included in the show.
Even though I frequent museum exhibitions and have always been attracted to the art of this period, I was relatively unaware of the role which these two individuals played in shaping and defining their contemporary art scene. My fascination with their writings was made even more intense when I realized that there is no comparable critical dialogue evident in our contemporary art community. Today, we are asked to judge artists and their works, by the continuous loops of spiraling auction prices and gallery price increases.
When covering contemporary trends, the art press generally seeks out the opinions of auctioneers, art dealers and affluent collectors. Hardly any attention is paid to the more academic and critical segments of the art community. And with good reason: they have disappeared from the scene.
While we can't instantly create knowledgeable art critics or writers or reporters who can invest the time to learn about something before they report on it, it is a step in the right direction to realize that our dialogue is incomplete, that an important element is missing. From the perspective of a collector, or from that of a contemporary art curator, this realization should, at a minimum, encourage us to go slow when acquiring contemporary art at contemporary prices.
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