Guston's work fails in its visual ghastliness and profound lack of visual interest. His work is just awful design. He is significant in that he is probably the only wildly successful expressionist painter in which all of his work is objectively ugly. Bacon, Pollock, Dekoonig, Twombly, Kline - all were brilliant designers and aestheticians, even if many find certain works to be visually harsh. They had design control, while Guston does not. He doesn't 'use ugliness' (as Ensor or Schiele), his paintings drown in it.

Many art critics, blinded with the acid of post-modernism, may find interest in the ugliness - but then criticisms of his work always rely on the unsophisticated 'naive' representations and shallow existential narratives - because there's nothing else to talk about!

You don't like Guston. You don't like the abstract impressionist Guston or the Guston who returned to the figure. You don't like his drawings and you don't like his paintings. You do not like green eggs and ham.

Wow, that's deep. And by the way, throwing a bunch of names at Guston (Ensor, Schiele) may wow the boys in your art history classes, but it doesn't actually MEAN anything. And wrapping yourself in the flag of anti-post-modernism is so over. Post-modernism itself was dead and gone more than thirty years ago. Like conceptual art, it came and went in the seventies. Given your surly dumbshit attitude about painting, you probably weren't yet born then.

Guston operated, from beginning to end, within a narrow and unvarying chromatic range. I guess that makes his work look ugly to you. Not enough yellow paint, I guess. Not enough beeeeeeeeyoooooooty.

Ok mr seasoned art professor, I'll give you that i was shamelessly name dropping which was an amateurish misstep in this clearly prestigious venue, but really, "wrapping yourself in the flag of anti-post-modernism is so over" is one of the silliest things i've ever seen written in a forum. I was just ranting a little about a painter who is really overrated and naming some examples that anyone with a cursory knowledge of painting would get. Its not like i'm writing a thesis here. A "surly dumbshit attitude about painting," says the pot to the kettle.

But seriously - I'm pretty sure that since we are "30 years past the death of post-modernism" beauty (beeeeeyoooooooty) is once again a safe part of painting criticism. We do have to actually look at Mr. Guston's crap paintings after all and not just discuss them using jargon and references to obscure submovements of art that are already irrelevant to anything happening in art today.

I do not like them sam i am!

Guston made beautiful paintings, lots of them. If you don't like them, I have to assume you simply have no taste for painting. You were the one who started throwing jargon around, apparently to make your trashing act look smart.

If we must return to beauty, which kind shall we return to? As you should know, being as you're some kind of university boy, there are four -- that's according to Kant, whose authority seems to mean everything to the beauty boosters, like Hughes. You have to specify; otherwise "beautiful" ends up no more meaningful than "interesting."

Art today is way too fractured for talk about what's happening in it, or what's relevant to it as a whole. Apparently you had to learn about some of those obscure submovements in Art Survey and are still grumpy. But you've chosen to work out some of your petty anger on one of my favorite painters. What the hell do you mean Guston's paintings aren't beautiful? Have you actually SEEN them, or is this rant of yours based entirely on some art history slide show you were compelled to attend?

If Guston isn't good, who is? If you have some kind of taste, what does this taste prefer? All you've established so far is you have an opinion, which like an asshole is something everyone has. Big deal.

I already named several painters I like. You can't judge a man's taste based on his dislike of one painter. You still haven't said a single reason why Guston is worth looking at.

I dislike Guston so much precisely because i've seen so many. You can't go the the NGA or the Whitney or MOMA without running into 12 of them. The National Gallery just installed 2 on their concourse.

For the record, you're the only one talking about textbook theory nonsense. I was just comparing him to his contemporaries. You've obviously read way too much BS art theory to know a damn thing about painting. I have a feeling that you neither paint nor buy paintings. You probably keep art books out on your coffee table and go to openings without your checkbook.

I actually did give the type of beauty i was specifically talking about in this instance, but you seemed to have been too set off by the beauty buzzword to care: design, control, handling of color. Believe it or not, these things matter in the art world again. I'll leave the theoretical stuff to people who give a rats ass.

You seem to be so sure about my taste and credentials, but what do you know about painting anyway? I'm a fan of Alex Kanevsky, Caio Fonseca, Kent Williams, Jeffrey Hein, and Geoffrey Johnson, and scores of others who you probably have never heard of. I like Low Brow art too, but maybe I'd just rather see artists who actually give a damn about what theyre doing rather than giving up serious painting to make some infantile statement about their childhood traumas.

Oh yes, you think Cy Twombly is a great designer. You're also enraptured by Francis Bacon's use of color. This is silly -- we're like punks in a bar throwing band names at each other.

And you were the one who brought up post-modernism, etc. So you're a fan of middlebrow designer art. now I understand what you mean by Design. You mean Interior Design. How droll.

Cy twombly was indeed a decent designer. Looks great over a couch, and i say that with dead seriousness. If you think there's more to art than beauty and money, you've been tricked. The only reason Guston was around was because he got his start as a WPA grant artist. No one would have paid for that stuff. Now the government has bought back all of that god-awful government grant work and placed it in I.M. Pei cathedrals on the national mall, completing the cycle of hemmoraged tax dollars wasted for the amusement of tenured socialists whilst almost completely killing the market for american painting, which is finally rising back from the grave in the form of, yes, designer art. And you wonder why we can't have good art programs in public schools anymore!

Painting is back to stay, no thanks to the best efforts of some. The public likes it, the painters get paid, the galleries are a hell of a party every friday night, and we don't need critics to tell us what great art is. As an architectural designer and proudly "middlebrow" painter, i'll try not to be offended by your snotty comments.

Oh do be offended, please. "Whilst"?" Oh christ, you're a Brit. No wonder you think the world of Bacon. You probably also think the world of other crappy Brit painters like Auerbach and Turner.

Your champion snotty remark to make about critics who have the nerve to think about art more than you do is that they're socialists, and don't arrive at openings with their checkbooks out.

You think it's all beauty and money, all tits and ass. It's a nice party for preppies with nice suits and interesting shoes. The vapidity and cynicism of the British art world has yielded as its ultimate product the Prince of Conceptualists, Damien Hirst. You'd think that would teach you something about the value of vapidity and cynicism, but apparently it hasn't.

Are you really a designer, or are you someone who trades on class and buys furniture for a living?

I'm a lifelong Marylander, a real life architect and a commercial graphic artist as well, thanks for asking. I don't appreciate conceptual art and you clearly don't appreciate non-conceptual art, so we're just not going to see eye to eye, but we do share a common affliction of vitriol and verbal incontinence. so, cheers!

And cheers to you. I'd recommend to anybody reading this thread, that they look up the artists you list as your current faves. Just google them.

I'll bite my virtual tongue and say no more about all this art. If you hate Guston and love these guys, well, that's your taste. As Kant notes, we all assume that our tastes reflect an obvious common sense. But one of us is wrong.

all best,

m

What I like about Guston, at least some of them, is how a form can be two things at once. A sole of a shoe is at once a brick or a loaf of bread, a gap in a brick wall is also an oven and the gestalt is a comment or memory of the holocaust. A cigarette butt becomes a tube of paint, a reference to the artist's dilema. I find great imagination in much of Guston's work, not all of it but much of it. Particularly the later work when he seems able to make an abstract expressionist painting out of somewhat recognizable imagery.

What I find lacking in Kanevsky's work is this depth of metaphor. There seems to be no freedom to twist the image into something other than what it is. There is style but no voice. Even in the blurred images it is simply an act of motion as if caught by a camera. He's a good painter but that doesn't make him a good artist. Seems to me to rise to the next level one must have something to say.

I'm a painter living in Ohio.

Kanevsky's work is partailly about superficiality. Jenny Saville is Kanevsky with "metaphorical depth" - but her work is often cheesy and boring. Her technique is beautiful, but her subject matter is trite. Kanevsky's work reflects that there is something to the superficial, to design, and to the act of seeing that cannot be separated from painting. at his worst, kanevsky can cold, but at his best you see the exuberance and anxiety in the act of painting. Its nothing that hasn't been said before, but its still quite excellent work.

meh.