Great post, John.

I think the nudes get talked about because they're the most interesting, especially to some 70's photorealists. No, not learned or parroted, they didn't teach this sort of thing when I was in school, not even to denigrate it. I just looked at the pictures, which it seems to me it would be hard to deny in point of fact, with the images in front of you, have exactly that bag of stuff going on in them. What grade would I get if I just said "bleah"?

   But I'd love to hear how anyone else would describe it, short of it's "spiritual" whatever effect on them, or it's breath-taking beauty, which to me is like watching a hypnotized person make barnyard animal noises.

Your general analysis of modern stylistic "revolution" has it's points, but it largely ignores the invention of photography, and modernist literature, music, dance, and art that doesn't function by the same market rules as art-objects for sale. It also ignores other highly disciplined crafts--which is what painting is when it can't be bothered to become art. It ignores the many significant painters who already had the training and the talent, but set it aside to pursue more interesting work. I'm not sure what grade you'd get, but who knows, who cares. It's especially endearing that ARC acts as though facile hokum is a new emerging aesthetic paradigm, as if it ever took a break, ever quit panting in everyone's face.

It's silly to argue any unearned aesthetic quality for fashionable art-world pranks and mere intellectual armatures troted out in un-felt, arbitrary forms. But it's equally silly to argue that that the exercise of the craft of painting has of itself any artistic depth or quality. Literate people can write without being Tolstoy. Same goes for people who can paint--it's the very fact that classical technique isn't rigorously taught that supports the scam, the con, the canard that it's inherently artistic, in and of itself. It's work. It's just like any other work. The ARC stuff looks just like a bunch of Soviet Russian painters, or illustrations in how to paint books. That's the real content in it, too.