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Tom Moody notes the difference in critical stance Roberta Smith takes on Richard Prince’s mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1992 and now at the Guggenheim in 2007. Smith takes a much softer tone the second time around while Moody in a post that follows observes weakness in virtually all of the later work. I too see the weaknesses Moody points out, and rather wish I’d seen a review by a mainstream critic who felt this way, particularly because Prince’s car hoods, joke paintings and master inspired works so obviously lack the substance of his earlier rephotographed advertisements. Schjeldahl wrote negatively about the exhibition as well in the New Yorker, largely getting it right, though by the end he criticizes a deKooning rip off for not being executed well enough, which even if correct, misses the point, and sounds awfully conservative. As an intellectual exercise this kind of practice just isn’t engaging, (though I have been known to make exception for his Britney Spears deKooning portraits.)
BACK in 1981, Tom Wolfe published the archetypal work of reactionary architectural criticism, "From Bauhaus to Our House," a happy-go-lucky evisceration of modern design and the men who brought it to America. Wolfe's short romp through history struck a nerve, but one close to the funny bone. Reviewing it in the Nation, critic Michael Sorkin quipped, "What Tom Wolfe doesn't know about modern architecture could fill a book. And so, indeed, it has, albeit a slim one."
Now John Silber, former president of Boston University and failed Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, has set himself the dubious task of assuming Wolfe's cranky mantle. It's a game effort: What Silber doesn't know about modern architecture has also filled a book, although one 46 pages slimmer than Wolfe's and absent the master's wit. Indeed, "Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art" is so riddled with red herrings, half-truths and gratuitously provocative exaggerations that Colin Powell might try reading it at the United Nations.