Ada? Not Nabokov's Ada, is it? I don't know of it.

No, I didn't mean to complain that ARC doesn't have other people I like better, just to toss out a few I like, and try to indicate why. But I was trying to indicate what kinds of things seem missing in work I find rather empty, though I can't say what should be there--just something, some kind of particular stuff. I'm a wee bit proud of my line about Hopper. I may certainly be missing something in a casual scan of works by many different artists, and not even seeing the works in the actual--which makes all the difference sometimes. But that's why one prods and all--sometimes somebody helps you out, gives you a clue. But there is some sort of element at work, some kind of rampant excess, that makes it too easy to generalise about that kind of "classical" stuff. It's like a national style, somehow. Like airbrush. There's nothing wrong with airbrush, it's just a technique, like any technique, there's nothing to complain about. But for some reason, somehow, almost everyone who uses it gets sucked in, does "airbrush" art, it takes over. There's something like that going on. There's nothing intrinsically amiss, nothing necesarily wrong, but somehow you know you aren't going to find much of interest, and I don't. I remember De Kooning trying to explain his reaction to a Soviet show, and he couldn't pin down what was wrong. Because it was just illustration? No, he said, because you could say Raphael was illustration too.And you could, that's not it. It seemed to him to be "the wrong sort of pressure". I'd say the stuff on the ARC doesn't seem to be about a genuine attempt to share a human vision of the world, it seems more about a means of sharing a vision, which it forgets to get around to.

    I really do think there's a perfectly good reason these people are left out of the popular art world, and it's quite simply that they are not convincing to most people who are actively into art, however convincing they may be to people who aren't. There aren't any rules to appeal that. They ignore the dialogue, don't listen, and want to be heard. The ARC guy can suppose he could do this or that absurd sounding installation, and be considered great by the art world today, well, let him actually try. It's really not that easy. You start to care what you are doing, whatever it is. It's like when my brother said he could play folk-style guitar "if he wanted to". I said "but you can't want to, and that's the thing." Photo-realists are considered, and taught, because they are convincingly addressing and exploring aesthetic issues and ideas about representation that are involved not just in painting, but literature also--like those Borges stories that "review" a non-existant book, the idea that a medium can perfectly represent a thing of it's own kind--things that people find engaging. And not novel for it's own sake, or arbitrary--Shakespeare had the same kinds of concerns, in some degree. The first novel was a fictional manuscript. These concerns come up in the so-called art-world like threads, and sometimes people are interested and engaged, but there's no appeal if nobody responds. I don't get how it's humanist to ignore everyone's concerns, and simply insist that you are interesting, too. A clue as to why, and how, in what respect, would help. A lot of successful post-modern painters use the old techniques, too, and well. The conspiracy of exclusion is a vain fantasy of artists who aren't bad, or evil, just boring to many.

I really liked your balance of the ideas of the art market, it's very like what I suppose about it. Another traditional view of the development of painting is that it had to identify itself as an art more distinct from what photography can do. And there's something to it. The ARC philosophy hits on that idea that Bouguereau captures the souls of his subjects--well, is that like how some cultures believe a photograph steals the soul? Why paint it? But it's not a completely convincing idea either. A painted image is just not the same, no matter how "photographic" the style of painting, it feels different, it's a different kind of fiction. Does it have much power, anymore, without a real special degree of aesthetic attention--I don't think so, really, you have to have a thing for it. That's all right. Painting is an embattled medium, and it's subbornly materialist, I think, hard to make sense out of.