Art: Neo

Since trend-spotting is supposed to be what art criticism is all about, it’s worth going to the SoHo art galleries even if you hate everything you see, for there’s always a lot of free literature around touting this or that cause, praising this or that artist; you quickly get an idea of what’s being talked about in so-called “advanced” circles. Recently I picked up the SoHo News, the radical arts neighborhood paper; a mimeographed letter urging me to write to Senator Javits and Congressmen Brademas and Koch supporting their bill to restore to artists their right to tax deductions on works they give to museums; and Art-Rite, a dimly printed sheet replete with advertisements from fancy galleries, uptown and down.

Art-Rite, despite the spelling of its title, is not easy reading, but a few words by John Howell summed up my impressions of the New York art scene in the first weeks of 1976: “It looks as if the Sixties are about over, in art as elsewhere. . . . This may or may not be a proto-romantic conceptual era [I’m not quite sure I follow him here, but that’s how Art-Riters write], but it no longer seems a post-anything time. . . . Looking beyond the question of critical camps, media fashion, generational and individual career moves, let’s just note that, as periodically occurs, a certain ‘neo’ is in the air.”

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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Since trend-spotting is supposed to be what art criticism is all about, it’s worth going to the SoHo art galleries even if you hate everything you see, for there’s always a lot of free literature around touting this or that cause, praising this or that artist; you quickly get an idea of what’s being talked about in so-called “advanced” circles. Recently I picked up the SoHo News, the radical arts neighborhood paper; a mimeographed letter urging me to write to Senator Javits and Congressmen Brademas and Koch supporting their bill to restore to artists their right to tax deductions on works they give to museums; and Art-Rite, a dimly printed sheet replete with advertisements from fancy galleries, uptown and down.

Art-Rite, despite the spelling of its title, is not easy reading, but a few words by John Howell summed up my impressions of the New York art scene in the first weeks of 1976: “It looks as if the Sixties are about over, in art as elsewhere. . . . This may or may not be a proto-romantic conceptual era [I’m not quite sure I follow him here, but that’s how Art-Riters write], but it no longer seems a post-anything time. . . . Looking beyond the question of critical camps, media fashion, generational and individual career moves, let’s just note that, as periodically occurs, a certain ‘neo’ is in the air.”