Of course, the minimalist in the end may have taken the prize; I mean what could surpass a dot on an empty canvas or a gessoed canvas, if at all, with nothing but white blobs with a single razor cut in it. I mean these were no balls of fire Mona Lisas or Garden of Earthly Delights to which they didn’t come close. Then came the wraparound and wrap up artists. Then there were those who made towering symbols out of toothbrushes and toothpicks not to mention the enlarged beyond life-size offset prints of cartoons and comics. Corporations funded vast amounts of plastic cling-on wrap and tons of bricks and rocks parading their contributions to the arts that were actually translated by advertising their brand name product. Then there were the artists geologists that took up acres of space bringing in tons of dirt and bricks and stones inside museums. Last but not least let’s not forget the weirdoes that shot themselves as part of their performances and who did it before the advent of suicide bombers who at least were promised virgins. And they did it for a shot in the dark, pardon my pun, at some post mortem publicity.

In cahoots with big name gallery sharks, they chummed the seas for the parroting fry that followed, and not the least an ignorant if not gullible public who in the long run became irrelevant to the art scene. Besides, that public claimed their children could paint better even though their own schooling never taught them to read between the lines or form their own opinions. On this subject I stand to be corrected but until then let me expose my point of view. As a matter of fact, not unlike the present so-called sub prime borrowers that finally have an unwitting revenge on the well-to-do white-collar gangsters… most artists went bankrupt. But let me not digress…

The world has been and will always be full of macrocosmically compacted black holes and an infinite telescopic expansion of the already existing. Everything is yet to be discovered since everything is ever changing and forever moving farther than our reach will ever grasp.

Hardly anyone of the aforementioned artists has created any truly original art that has not been done decades earlier in one form or another by such luminaries as Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinski, Rene Magritte or Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst or Jean Arp and why not Hieronymus Bosch circa 1500. To boot, the preceding cartoon-art was meant to be a lark as most of their originators declaimed. However, most these poorly academically trained artists latched onto the apparent facility of abstracts found in nature. Starting during the late 19th century, technology spilled to the masses. By the 1950’s technological advances and mass production revolution and mastery of new compounds in nearly every field, especially in sociology and psychology, to scientific electro-mechanical gizmos. Yet hardly any one of their work compares to the masters they mimicked. I see them as copycats convinced of their uniqueness promoted through the Peter Principle and the overwhelming marketing savvy able to sell gravel as art to its culturally ignorant clients.

In early times the purpose of art was practical. It was to inform and record. Images transcended words since there was none yet created to describe what one saw or envisioned. The art today has no purpose except to add interest to bland walls and for the most part must be accompanied by more words than is contained in the meaning of the images.

With that in mind I wrote, a bouillabaisse describing so-called chef d’oeuvres. Please bear with me.

In this artwork, white kidney bean gaps in fields of pink, read as subterranean nests incubating ellipses of color. In a small green and a larger sky-blue form a darker pink shape twisting at the top suggests a pair of women’s soiled underwear. The brown oblong traces are subtly brushed as if the washing cycle was set on delicate and did not bleach out the traces. I don’t dare look too close for fear of putting my nose so close as to maybe smell what has been known actual feces just like that other schmuck who submerged dead cows and sharks in sealed aquariums.

I would not describe any one of the aforementioned artists as creative giants of the second half of the 20th century or even among the most original of all modern performers though some have come closer to the truth when they proclaimed they were really not avant-garde at all but simply a continuation of another’s beginning.

I further propose that these so-called chefs d’oeuvres confirm that Abstract Expressionism was a national, not a New York painting style. But they also suggest that this school of painting tilted the improvisatory style toward creating a variant of Abstract Expressionism that sidestepped the style’s solemnity and its wholeness in favor of something fractured and accessible. Rereading the above, at this point I cannot help but laugh aloud at myself but let me continue.

Their painting process is transparent, which is nothing new, which it is in most Abstract Expressionist work. You can usually see all the way through to the raw canvas of a Pollock drip painting. But that school added a more complicated awareness to the process, punctuating ragged blocks of layered color with lines and quasi signs, introducing irreverence and, at times, sexual innuendos. Typically, a painting would feature maybe in some quadrant a bright, brushy egg-yolk yellow over white and red to which a bubble-like outline would add a bulbous head. In another quadrant a series of cursive lines and loops might imply an outburst of language, culminating with a colored alphabet letter at the top edge that is really a pronged patch of color that escaped an incursion of white from just below it. And beyond all this an empty speech balloon bobs at the painting’s edge, too small to contain the verbiage I incorporated here.

In addition to painterly gifts, that school had an eye for progressive art and a knack for synthesis in artworks that emphasized the painting process in areas of layered color punctuated by darting black lines. These works have a humor with feistiness absent from most other artwork. What is especially startling is that they assimilate an odd style broached earlier, primarily in black-and-white and sepia hues, whatever that means is up to you.

All these works preceding theirs were respectively seen by the aforementioned artists intent on marrying line and brushwork in their own art. Most would go on making grander, more complex figurative and abstract paintings. But too many of these later works are tamped down by their studious reserve and touch; balancing on the cusp of vitality without really getting their feet wet. In many ways these painting were never freer, less predictable or fuller of the future. Now figure what the hell I wrote!

What is really frustrating, even after showing off  a certain knowledge of art history is that all these words are wasted in a culture that has no culture and where humanities rank just below the root of the grass where the pursuit of the dollar exceeds any number of so-called dead enemy. That, to say the least, would be the final hypocrisy. Of course I do not wish to take away the advantages of a constricted education, which is of the specialist. I mean when visiting an oculist with dust in your eye you do not want that doctor to stick their finger in your other hole telling you that you also have dangling hemorrhoids or worse them telling you need an occultist!

The problem faced by any civilization is of paralleling their technological advances with the humanities so that its people keep intellectually abreast. Unfortunately that’s where in America we lack the most. We are modern Romans. We should know what happened to them!

In a small Abstract Expressionist the painting introduces the irreverence of a subterranean nest incubating ellipses of women's underpants. I suspect these creative giants of color fields suggest a pair of well-endowed women with their meaningful half dripped a la Pollock. I also think a field of something more of a complicated awareness towards the top suggests a tradition of white kidney-bean gaps confirming it is not avant-garde at all but a rather transparent irreverence among the most Abstract Expressionism improvisatory style. They suggest a subterranean nest of incubating ellipses of color that was nothing new to the self-promoted creative giants of the style's solemnity and quasi signs, punctuating ragged blocks of all modern art.

Another painting features a bubble-like outline with a bulbous head. In the upper left, dry brush egg-yolk yellow over white emphasizes the painting process. But many of the layered colors are punctuated by darting black lines emphasizing the painting's edge while the lower right, culminates with humor with an exquisite touch assimilating a bulbous head with a knack for synthesis. In addition they balance marrying lines and highlight a patch of vitality without any bright paint that culminates in a series of cursive lines where feistiness is absent.

In conclusion, the exquisite touch of humor balances these painting featuring a series of cursive lines emphasizing the top edge, which is a knack for art balancing in a large blue sky complicated by a most startlingly emphasized verbiage. I mean what the hell does this pretentious literati hocus pocus really mean?

Finis