Perl on Contemporary Painters

Jed Perl, art critic for the New Republic , has a rant about John Currin and other contemporary painters in the Feb 16 issue of TNR . Scathing is too weak for this review. He says that Currin produces trash, and incompetent trash at that. Currin believes in nothing other than his own self-promotion. And he is only one of a “band of sleazeball figure painters” that are rising in reputation today, rising because of a nefarious alliance of art critics, promoters, and artists-on-the-take. A taste will suffice: Viewers who credit Currin as an important painter “are simply not accepting the evidence of their eyes. They are instead looking for rationalizations for Currin’s glassy surfaces, weird passages of impastoed paint, fakey feathery brushwork, and violations of anatomy, which may be conscious stylizations but are more likely signs of plain incompetence. Formally, Currin does not have strategies; he has twitches. And the attitude that he takes toward the aging matrons and the snub-nosed lads and lassies whom he paints feel slapdash, perfunctory. You are left wondering whether Currin love or hates these people. My guess is that he doesn’t know or care.”