To Me, Nothing In The

John Baldessari, The 79-year-old Conceptualist, Has Spent More Than Four Decades Making Laconic, Ironic Conceptual Art-about-art, Both Good And Bad.

Art Schools Are Partly The Villain Here. (never Mind That I Teach In Them.) This Generation Of Artists Is The First To Have Been So Widely Credentialed, And Its Young Members So Fetishize The Work Beloved By Their Teachers That Their Work Ceases To Talk About Anything Else. Instead Of Enlarging Our View Of Being Human, It Contains Safe Rehashing Of Received Ideas About Received Ideas. This Is A Melancholy Romance With Artistic Ruins, Homesickness For A Bygone Era. This Yearning May Be Earnest, But It Stunts Their Work, And By Turn The Broader Culture.

Contrary To Popular Opinion, Things Don't Go Stale Particularly Fast In The Art World.

There Are Many, Many Art Worlds. Art Contains Multitudes.

Batty As It Sounds, Subject And Style May Choose Artists, Through Some Unfathomable Cosmic Means. How Else To Explain That Even Artists Who Enjoy What They Do Can Be Perplexed Or Even Horrified That They're Doing It?