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The Hudson River School for Landscape
James Panero of The New Criterion wrote one huge piece (all of 1,881 words) on the revival of the Hudson River School painting style. In all those words, he managed to do just three things: there is a revival, the original Hudson River School were looking for God in nature, and the current crop haven't found God.
What does finding God in a painting look like? How does he know that the young painters, obviously just starting out, will not seek and find God as they progress with their art and craft? Did the original Hudson River School painters enter the mountains with such a lofty goal in mind, or were they eventually, and inevitably, drawn to the spiritual in nature?
Since Panero is obviously a wordsmith, has a whole ivy league arts education under his belt, and is supposedly a "critic", he is bound to write the way he does. He's not giving these brave young students any slack, and slashes them gently with his erudite vocabulary.
I say this from experience, because whenever an artist or a designer embarks on a tentative, different path, all the "experts" descend on him. I'm not sure why this is, although I've often thought that it is something to do with them jealously guarding their shaky edifice which is about to collapse at any moment. Much of modern art and modern criticism is based on shaky ground.
Panero's final sentence struck me as especially disingenuous: "Deep in the Catskill wilderness, they may be in a house of God, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got religion." He's making the Hudson River School revival to be some kind of evangelical revivalism.
I came upon another article of his on Picasso. Anyone who has studied Picasso will realize the fraud that he is, just as Tom Wolfe writes. Every step of Picasso's, which was so radically different from his previous steps (from his blue period, to his "cubism" to name the more famous ones), was a copy of other more serious artists in his milieu. An art critic who doesn't recognize this is being dishonest, to say the least.
For all his "they are the products of an art world that shouts but has little to say", presumably a jab at the current Damien Hirst-like atrocities going on, he still isn't much different from those who look suspiciously and cynically at artists who try to pull themselves out of that very rut. A little nod of encouragement might have been more magnanimous. But then, these courageous students have already come a long way without the supporting words of critics and teachers.