There was a review of the MoMa by a critic from the Village Voice, NYC. He likened the new museum to a temple, cathedral. I feel spiritual in art museums like most artists do. There is a sort of communion in [front] of a great painting. However, knowing the art world in New York and in most cities, I can't help but feel a little sick when I read his reviews. They smack of all of the things that religions do when they manifest control and cultural power: they become purveyors of dogma, censor dissenting views, and make it very difficult for non-believers in general, like say, in schools where freedom of thought is essential. Think how many realist artists are shown in the MoMa... well, none, save Andrew Wyeth. By contrast, realism is widespread in the States with a substantial collecting base that rivals modernism in fact. One would think, by contrast, that it was a vanguard movement with few followers and fans. That is, if one were to visit the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Moma, the LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and so on. When the Dahesh museum showed the Charles Bargue exhibition, the New York Times wrote scathing but uniformed articles to deride the museum, its mission, and the exhibition itself. Now, one wonders why such a place, the only museum of its kind in the country but with a paltry budget, would bother such illustrious paper at all? Why would it threaten the establishment so? Moreover, if realism is established, only an orthodoxy would deny or continue the need to censor it. This is not intellectual honesty but something pernicious and unearned.
For most of us, the foundations of Modern Art are so silly, so lacking in reason, skill and merit, that they would be easily crumbled if the seeds of the Enlightenment were healthy or growing at all in this century. One simply has to look at modern art to know that any child could do it: its aesthetic quality is thin, and it is intellectually impoverished and puerile. Any rigor in the discussion of art and modernism would be in peril.
What is disturbing about Freud on one hand, is that he is embraced by such an orthodoxy. Perhaps it's just this crudeness, which to my eye, is not in the service of the painting, but an unwanted excess. By contrast, Ribera's paint handling and perspective dignifies his subjects. The brushing is careful. One gleams from his pictures an reverence for his subjects, the same kind of love you equate with the religious experience. I can't see this in much of Freud, although there are times when that sort of inner light is revealed.