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From: CAP Category: Art Date: 10 January 2010 Time: 02:30 PM Review: We're too familiar with the rhetoric of advertising to truly be beguiled by Ed Ruscha now. His work seems from a distant period- when all things American were automatically cool. According to Patricia Bickers, editor of Art Monthly, Ruscha has not been painting at all for the last fifty years but engaged in a form of conceptual art. But its clear that Ruscha only had a shot at being a painter if he could find a way of dumbing the medium down. That is touchingly modernist, though not conceptual. Ruscha's phrases and symbols are appropriately "other" rather than expressions of his own ideas . They are fragments of other lives, and therefore unknowable. The effect is beguiling and enigmatic and almost sublime. As conceptions Ruschas work is meaningless, as paintings they flaunt their own totality like a rhetorical showman. No wonder Obama has one in the White House. They are an aesthetic oratory.They fail as conceptual art if you regard conceptual art as being intellectual. If you regard conceptual art as being a confidence trick inflicted on halfwits, then Ruscha is a conceptual artist. But it would be more to his benefit to regard him as a highly illusionistic painter.