Gorky Says San Francisco artist JAMES CAMPBELL: "The only way to see the John Currin show; in fact, the only REASON to see the John Currin show, is if you need to use the men's room adjacent to it." Samaras WHAT WERE THEY THINKING at the Whitney, sandwiching a lightweight like Currin between someone as deft a draftsman as ARSHYLE GORKY and someone as innovative and imaginative as LUCAS SAMARAS making him paler still? Perhaps looking for a theme: Abstraction, Figuration, Kitsch? Did the Kitsch and Figuration merge? Disingenuous. A "mid-career retrospective" of someone who has barely been painting 10 years? Yet another disjointed / dyslexic Whitney production!

Is this a case of "the king's new clothes"? Look at what this gushy duo of would-be esthetes has to say... Gleaned off the internet where they attempt to proselytize....

JAKE BIALOS (wannabe amateur illustrator - - poster salesman):
"I have not seen this show yet , but, I WILL ... and I recommend that you do , too...It is my feeling that he is a major American Artist producing Major American Paintings."

MIND YOU, HE HASN'T SEEN THE SHOW YET.... AFTER VIEWING he foams:

"Finally, someone who can inspire, frustrate and inhabit art history on canvas in America... Paintings that shock , inspire rueful laughter and hold up a searing mirror to the american mi se-en-scene. Knowledge of art history and the paintings of Mantegna , Courbet and Cranach will be rewarded at this show as will sensitivity to recent culture wars in america. There is some of the most aesthetically accomplished paint handling and "finish" put in service of portraying sheer beauty in a feminine love object."

Straight out of the if-you-can't-dazzle-them-with-brilliance-baffle-them-with-bullshit school of thought, Mr. Bialos' writing, like Mr. Currin's painting, as enticing as a mashed potato sandwich. Confusing vomit with discourse? Yet again?

NEVIO CARCICH (dabbler):
"This is a young painter who has already established himself on the Map of the art world....Much to be admired is the way John Currin renders the texture and surfaces of the materials worn by the subjects in the paintings."

SIGNS OFF SIGNOR CARCICH:
"And I must give THANKS TO JAKE BIALOS for introducing me to this painter's work."
BIRDS OF A FEATHER...?
Surprising is the absence of NYPhew cohort and NYU legal - fleagle MICHAEL TICE. Perhaps he's just not into the "sheer beauty in a feminine love object."

"...established himself on the Map of the art world"??????
"...inhabit art history on canvas in America"???
"...the way John Currin renders the texture and surfaces of the materials worn by the subjects in the paintings"???
"Mantegna , Courbet, Cranach" ???

PUH-LEASE!!! What blather!

Another Ross Bleckner meteorite destined to burn and extinguish in the artistic Firmament! Very much a Lisa Yuskavage,


Lisa Yuskavage

just as bad, she's a lot better.
In the end, another inconsequential enjoying 15 minutes of fame, the end sum of the "Corporate Museum".

Cadmus "Haircut"

Currin: "Fisherman"

Rockwell "Thanksgiving"	Forget Mantegna, Courbet and Cranach. That assessment doesn't deserve a pixel. Does Mr. Bialos even know who these people are? Norman Rockwell on a bad day? Maybe.... Been there, done that? A LOT!!! Nowhere the acerbic humor of AL CAPP. Ne'er the political savvy of a JACK LEVINE. Nor the studied stylization of PAUL CADMUS. Neither the command nor the finesse of VARGAS. Not the sardonic punch of a young ERIC FISCHL's social commentary. This is the standard and milieu to compare and judge Mr. Currin by.	Currin "Thanksgiving"
Levine "The Three Graces"		Currin "The Pink Tree"

Fischl: "Bad Boy"

Currin: "Stamford After-Brunch"

Capp "Daisy Mae"

Currin: "Nude"

Vargas "Nude"

According to MICHAEL KIMMELMAN in his ludicrously positive review ( New York Times: November 21, 2003 ), “Mr. Currin is among other things a latter-day Jeff Koons, trafficking in lowdown humor, heartless kitsch and ironic smutt...." Is this meant to be a positive comment? To be compared to, of all people, JEFF KOONS?!?!?! Perfect fit.

"HUMORLESS", I would say. Unless you find cheap shots and vulgarity masquerading as humor "humorous".
One need not go to these masters of caricature and satire. Compare.

Paul Corfield "Caged Beauty"

John Currin "Bra Shop"

What difference is there between the much heralded Mr. Currin and a relatively unknown pin-up artist such as Paul Corfield? Media hype and corporate sponsorship on the one side and the fact that Mr. Corfield's rendering is more engaging, better executed and delivers a great deal more bite on the other. Mr. Corfield's is social satire; Mr. Currin's nothing but frothing, unadulterated if disguised, misogyny.

"I had also hoped that there would be satirical edge to the work but, more than anything, Currin implicates himself as an admirer of the upper middle class morals he appears to be lampooning," complains painter NIKOLAI KLEIN. " All the figures have a saccharine grin and the large eyes of cupie dolls but underneath this noxious expression is a fetishization of shallowness. In the end, the paintings celebrate a dead and lifeless view of humanity. That the paintings are the work of a nasty, smarmy and soulless artist is not nearly as depressing as the fact that the general viewing public thinks they are the real thing."

Continues Kimmelman: "That his work goes from good to awful and back again, is a measure of his age and of his calculated ambition.” Yeah, RIGHT! Tell it to Andrea Rosen who created the monster that betrayed her by seducing and being seduced by Larry Gagosian! Self-proclaimed "BEST ARTIST" on the fast track, an arriviste concerned only with social climbing and the ladder of success, who could add the weight he so lacks and sorely needs if, for once, he got off the ladder-and-fast-track long enough to grow up and develop some depth in both his character and his art.

"Totally market driven," says designer Tony Vermillion, "...an ambition-driven egomaniac. Undeserving. The Whitney jumped the gun on this one. Filler. Nothing but filler -- one in ten works at best has any staying power -- a lot of really unmemorable fluff."

Continues Klein: "If you’ve ever seen a reproduction of a Currin painting, you’ve seen a Currin painting. The images are flat and lifeless. That people think they resemble old master paintings shows how little they actually look at real paintings. What Currin's paintings are really like is advertisements for master paintings. They have no depth of field, nowhere for the eye to travel; they exist solely on the surface."

Trite and shallow, pretentious poseur, this half-baked Rockwell with a pissy-prissy attitude so full of himself, this self-contented hack, schlockmeister.... While there is no doubt that Mr. Currin is a capable painter and competent draftsman -- still undeveloped, still in search of a style he can call his own, still in need of maturation and life experience. His wooden, inarticulate figures beg for direction. He is at his technical best at still-life, where he doesn’t enjoy the luxury of self-satisfied gumption.

Currin "Thanksgiving" ( Detail )

Those still lifes that subsist as details in his painings are consistently far superior than the vitriol that surrounds them. The pathos in John Currin's oeuvre is that, while he COULD dazzle us with brilliance, he CHOOSES to baffle us with bullshit.

"Form and subject are one. If form predominates...there is a loss of vitality and of that humanity that should underlie even the most idealized construction; but if the subject predominates, the mind release its hold. In both cases the chance of a masterpiece is deminished." - Kenneth Clark

"Without doubt, Currin offers good reasons to look at his work" writes MAUREEN MULLARKEY, a painter and writer on art and culture. "But more compelling are the reasons to look away, because the problems with Currin do not lie in his brush. They lie in a deficit of meaning. And in his disdain for his subjects. The over-riding character of this work is a casual nihilism that disdains its audience as well.

"His paintings are parasites on their allusions, with no inner life of their own. Currin's facility gives the paintings a credibility they do not deserve. All showmanship, the work derives from the history of practical jokes. Whatever loveliness it holds is put to the service of sight-gags that have more in common with P.T. Barnum than any of the masters he burlesques."

"There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character...only the false, the artificial is ugly in art." - August Rodin

Points out DAVID COHEN, Editor of ARTCRITICAL.COM:"For Rockwell, vulgarity is merely a side effect of his hackneyed strategies, whereas for Currin, it is the strategy itself." Cohen continues, "Currin is quite simply on a no-lose ticket (a good hiding to everything): bad painting with quality technique. Keep the theorists chattering and the buyers salivating. Conceptually, he adds nothing....He is a fashionable footnote to Picabia. And technically? It is here that one has to despair, because of what the warped prevailing taste for Currin says about actual sensibility for painting of the past. If sub-Rockwellism actually looks to taste makers and key educators to be on some kind of parity with the art from the raided image-bank of history, if old-master technique is merely an abstraction to be referenced, like a brand or celebrity's name knowingly dropped, then we are in trouble. If you think this sounds like Tory hysteria, that the old masters can stand their own, that a bit of lighthearted iconophobic misreading won't do them any lasting harm, just stand back and think through the practical consequences of such bad taste."

"It is one thing to die individually or to be wiped out en masse. It is another an far more grievous thing entirely to be forced to live in a time of squalid art." - J. D. Landis in Longing

We live in the time of "celebrity" synonymous with nasty; the time of Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight, of Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, of Paris Hilton and P. Diddy, of status attained through oral sex.

We live in a society that treasures trash, celebrates sensationalism, glorifies vulgarity and caters to a least common denominator. Mr. Currin's work is one that, as Hilton Kramer bluntly puts it in his 26 January review of Marc (another gem in the crown jewels of art) Quinn: The Complete Marbles for the New York Observer, "titillate(s) so many faded sensibilities...with an eager embrace of perverse, degraded or otherwise repulsive subjects." Mr. Kramer has so far chosen to totally ignore the Currin spectacle. Good for him. I can't. My mission is different.

"LOOK AT THE KING! Look at the King! Look at the King, the King, THE KING!! The King is in the altogether, he's altogether, he's altogether as naked as the day that he was born!" - from Hans Christian Andersen, "The King's New Clothes", with Danny Kaye

Hideous! - "Smarmy."

Off with them to the dustbin of Art History !!!

"YOU HAVE THE NERVE TO DRESS UP A TURD AND CALL IT A CARAMEL" ...is the inspiration for our less than inspiring monthly award. Here we do NOT discriminate. There are no sacred cows. High and low beware! Our CARAMEL statuette is derived from the traditional cagané figure or 'shitter' from the northeastern Spanish region of Cataluña where no manger scene can be found without one. It's attributes are far more pedestrian here.