Meanwhile, 1990s pathetic - aesthetic progenitor Cary Leibowitz (a.k.a. Candy Ass) is still working at top
form; Cameron Rowland
revives what should be the dead conceptualism of
art that is only in the labels by having a feel for objects that is almost
as formalist and striking
as Donald Judd's.
They have been cast, like Burton and Taylor, in a variety of showy roles:
as painters interested in
reviving aspects of the
art form in its most staid and classical modes;
as Marxist or Marcuseian critics of commodity culture and its discontents;
as leering champions of youth movements and counter-culture stylings;
as strict, detached, ironic appropriationists; and, finally,
as sincere and romantic poets attendant on the tragedy of age's advancing degenerations of the body and of the melancholy states of nostalgia associated primarily with the waning of youthful beauty.