On Mar 30, 1996 07:29:05, '"Christine L. Roch" <[log in to unmask]>' wrote: >This is going back quite a few years, but how about the Armory Show of 1913, >particularly its Chicago run? Everyone denounced it, from >schoolteachers, to the city's methodist ministers, to the Art Institute's >director (who left town before the exhibit opened). Students at the >School of the Art Institute burned an effigy of Henri Matisse/"Henry >Hairmattress" on the museum's front steps. _Nude Descending a Staircase_ seems >old hat now, but modernist art really through the city for a loop. Here is an example of what I call the investor's fallacy, well known to everyone who reads advertisements for financial instruments: "Past performance should not be taken as an indicator of future prospects." Just because there was a popular outcry against the later-to-be-successful "modern" art of the Armory Show, it does not follow that all populist objections are necessarily myopic and closedminded. Some may be so, but you cannot argue that current mores must be just as wrongheaded as history has shown past ones to be. I'm afraid that we have to leave it to history to judge the value of these shows (just as with the Armory Show), and we may have to wait for history to rejudge and rejudge again the significance of what is occurring here. I noted recently in some magazine (forget which) a picture of Newt sporting a hat decorated with American Flag motifs ala Abby Hoffman. In the 1960s would a social conservative have seen fit to wear the sacred stars and stripes so flippantly? The irony is that one never knows where our language of symbols and metaphors will take us. Art is made of art. Dada toilet bowls, manifestos urging the destruction of museums, and other acts of symbolic revolution may all lead inexorably to the previously discussed unexpected fusion of the Flag and that epitome of American domestic ceramic sculpture. Inelegant? Surely. Anti-aesthetic? Certainly. Confrontational? Of course. Unprecedented? Surely not. Significant? Who can say? -- Robert A. Baron Museum Computer Consultant P.O. Box 93, Larchmont N.Y. 10538 [log in to unmask]