by Jon Lackman | 11 May 2006 | Museums
From an op-ed by Dore Ashton in the Brooklyn Rail: “…There is something a lot more serious going on and it is not at all those Trimalchian banquets in Miami, Basel, Venice and New York at the many bazaars called art fairs. Curators have powers to erode the confidence of serious viewers, as they are in charge of shipping out our patrimony at will. The most egregious example comes from the venerable National Gallery that has been circulating an abominable exhibition of studio leavings by poor Mark Rothko. I saw this miserable parody of a retrospective in Mexico City, where local audiences had no works of Rothko to compare this show to and thereby correct this total misrepresentation … Quis custodiet ipso custodes: who will keep the keepers themselves?”
