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From: blp Category: Art Date: 10 October 2006 Time: 06:57 AM Review: Bah. 'The Painted Word'? I've read it. A dumb, boring, reactionary book by a right wing twit. His fuckwitted idea is that, from Greenberg on, art somehow got so caught up in the verbiage of the criticism that surrounded it that it that it eventually, whoops, turned into text itself. This is all he has with which to rubbish conceptualism and, to do it, of course, he has to give us more words. To make it stick he has to alight on a few pieces, some of them quite good, that sort of rely on text, e.g. Robert Barry's closed gallery (the 'text' being the 'closed' sign - not exactly a torrent of critical logorreah) and ignore all the excellent conceptual work that doesn't, e.g. Bas Jan Ader's falls, Vito Acconci filling his mouth with a woman's hair. The whole point is that things HAVE changed. The contemporary scene is amateurish, unfocused and trite compared to the stuff that was happening in the late sixties. Art's lost its sense of purpose.