writing – Page 13

The ‘Essential Triad’ & The ‘Right To Creativity’

It has been fun reading The New Art (1966), one of critic Gregory Battcock’s contemporary anthologies of critical art writing. Also sobering, how dated and/or blinkered many assumptions these pre-eminent minds operated under turned out to be. Not the least of which is the illustrious role of the critic himself, and I do mean him. Here are some choice quits from Battcock’s own introduction, which are not unrepresentative of the attitudes of many of the contributors:

Art is humanism and reality, and as such cannot be seen accurately in terms of the past. At this point, responsible criticism becomes absolutely essential. The critic has, as it were, to paint the painting anew and make it more acceptable, less of a threat than it often is. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the art of our time could not exist without the efforts of the critic. It is, however, to be remembered that words are ores and art is art; in presenting art, the critic cannot resate or reproduce it. All he can do is assume some of the concern for clarification in his effort to leave himself free to experiment as obscurely as he likes, unhampered by any need to compromise his integrity for the sake of public approval.
Objections to this state of affairs can logically be only of degree and not kind, since an art of total clarity wouldn’t be art, and would need no criticism at all…modern Art is a discipline, not a World’s Fair all three members of its essential triad– artist, critic, and viewer–obtain only such rewards as they are prepared to work for or for which they have the love to spare.

love that. Sounds pretty tough. Here’s another part about one of those marginal figures left out of the essential triad:

another characteristic aspect of the new criticism is revealed in the way it’s practitioners tend to review group or retrospective exhibitions almost solely in terms of the selectivity displayed by the person responsible for the show, while oaring little or no attention to the merit of the individual artworks or artists included. This peculiarity is very much a part of the new way of looking at art; the position of the curator or director is regarded as equivalent to that of the artists whose work he selects, since he is the creator of the exhibition, if not of the individual works within it. The critic’s own right to creativity comes through his relationship with the artist whom he alone fully understands, appreciates, and can interpret to others.

good times, good stuff.

‘There Was A Discussion’

‘There was a discussion January 1972’
That’s it. The complete documentation of one of the conversation works by Ian Wilson in the Panza Collection, as reproduced in Art of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies the second edition of the collection catalogue, published in 1999.
Only the caption lists the artist as Jan Wilson [ouch]. There are inventory numbers running from IW 1 [above] to IW 13, so it appears Panza and Wilson chatted quite a bit over the years. [At what point, I wonder, does being a conceptual artist working in the medium of conversation start to complicate your daily interactions with people? Are you like Midas, cursed to turn every topic you touch on into art?]
The catalogue includes Christopher Knight’s lengthy interview with Panza, but as mentioned before, it also includes a trove of documentation–sketches, working diagrams, specs, certificates, and invoices–for a great number of artists, including several pages of reproductions of instructions between Panza and Donald Judd concerning the fabrication of his pieces. Great stuff.

Hilton Kramer: TMI

God bless him, even if he’s on the wrong side of [most of the intervening 40 years of] contemporary art history, you gotta love Hilton Kramer’s eviscerating takedown of MoMA’s 1970 conceptualist exhibition, Information, curated by Kynaston McShine:

The exhibition is, in its way, amusing and amazing, but only because it upholds an attitude one had scarcely thought worth entertaining: an attitude toward the artistic process that is so over-weeningly intellectual that it is, in its feeble results, virtually mindless. Here all the detritus of modern printing and electronic communications media has been transformed by an international gaggle of demi-intellectuals into a low grade form of show business. It leaves one almost nostalgic for a good old-fashioned hand-made happening.

Though he only mentioned one artist by name in his NY Times review [Hans Haacke], Kramer did note the “great many blowups of junky photographic materials…of earthworks,” which I assume is a reference to the four Gianfranco Gorgoni photos that introduced the just-completed Spiral Jetty to the public.
Show at The Modern Raises Questions, July 2, 1970 [nyt archives]

Otto Piene’s More Sky

Alright, all y’all who didn’t tell me about Otto Piene’s classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?

Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a plea for more scope, more space for art–for making public property artful and making art public property–for freeing the arts from the tight economic bonds that give the curators and the collectors a near monopoly. He writes, “The artist-planner is needed. He can make a playground out of a heap of bent cans, he can make a park out of a desert, he can make a paradise out of a wasteland, if he accepts the challenge…. In order to enable artists of the future to take on planning and shaping tasks on a large scale, art education has to change completely. At this point art schools are still training object-makers who are expecting museums and collectors to buy their stuff….”
The first part of More Sky covers “things to do” arranged alphabetically, A-M (Piene will take up N-Z some other time.) Like city planning, clothing, collaboration, electronic music, elements, engineering or government, graffiti, graphics, green toad jelly.
All these notes cohere into a larger statement in support of an environmental art for social use, the interaction of art and architecture and the city and the open landscape, a total ecological and elemental aesthetics.
The last part of the book, “Wind Manual,” gives a practical demonstration of things to do in just one area. But it’s a big one–the whole sky–and a lot can be done in it, making use of the wind; making human clouds, rain, rainbows; and making things that fly and float. This section is made up almost entirely of full-color illustrations of some of the things that man the artist can do to purify the skies polluted by man the money-maker and rendered fearsome by man the war-maker. The illustrations show different kinds of flags, banners, ribbons, wind socks, wind sculptures, riggings, kids and other things.
The first part was written plain, in the Spring of 1970, with no trace of artspeak jargon. And the second is plainly drawn and colored. (Piene is more versatile than most contemporary artists: he can do his abstract light-ballet things, and he can span rivers with man-made rainbows, and he can draw a recognizable picture of a bull.) The “Wind Manual” was originally drawn for instant use in schools and colleges in Pittsburgh–it was created as part of a Piene-guided public art project called Citything Sky Ballet.
The MIT Press
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02142

Otto Piene’s More Sky is available the 1973 edition with the fun, blue cover, and a print-on-demand version with a boring black cover. So heads up when you buy. [amazon]

Works On Paper

Thanks to Judd [no relation] Tully, I pulled Martha Buskirk’s book, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art down again and was reminded of how awesome it is on the fascinating conflicts between Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Donald Judd [and Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre, and Bruce Nauman].
To one degree or another, these artists disputed Panza’s fabrication of their works from plans, schematics, and certificates he had bought. The most spectacular disagreement, where Judd took out ads and wrote manifestos disclaiming sculptures and installations which Panza had realized, seems the most cut & dry. On paper.
Buskirk goes through Panza’s archives at the Getty–and Christopher Knight’s collection catalogue–to show that “Judd signed a series of certificates that were remarkably broad in the latitude granted to Panza,” that authorized Panza and followers to reconstruct work for a variety of reasons, “as long as instructions and documentation provided by Judd were followed and either he or his estate was notified.” This even included the right to make “temporary exhibition copies, as long as the temporary copy was destroyed after the exhibition; and, most astonishingly, the right to recreate the work to save expense and difficulty in transportation as long as the original was then destroyed.” [emphasis, appropriately, in the original]
The questions seem inevitable, especially in an era when Panza was the first, earliest, only, or largest buyer of both Minimalist and conceptual work. In a 1990 interview, he even conflates the two: “Minimal art is closely connected to the project, and the collector has the right to produce it, but his freedom of interpretation is very limited. He must simply see to it that the fabrication conforms to the project.”
Knight’s collection catalogue, Art of the Sixties and Seventies, gets a special mention for making “a tacit argument for the connection between minimal and conceptual art by presenting both through an intermix of photographs of objects and installations and reproductions of plans, diagram, certificates, and other documentation.” The publication of which Judd also protested, it turns out.
I wonder how much these document-based conflicts are related to the particular circumstances of Panza’s collecting: remotely, en masse, via correspondence, and largely alone. He told Knight in 1985 [before these particular conflicts arose over a show at ACE Gallery in LA of Panza work that was fabricated locally instead of shipped] that he basically spent all his free time managing paperwork for his collection. It’s not surprising if it all starts to look conceptual at some point.
[I’d point out that Panza and Flavin, at least, eventually got square, at least judging by the presence of one of Panza’s pieces in Judd’s NGA retrospective.]

So, Shall I Call You Count Panza?

On 2nd, 3rd and 4th of April 1985, there was a discussion between Christopher Knight and Count [sic?!] Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. What was said remains in the collection of Christopher Knight. And in the Archives of American Art. And in this book. And a little bit in the Los Angeles Times.
An appreciation: Giuseppe Panza di Biumo [latimes]

The Name Is Dumas

Figure in Landscape, 2009
I’m probably enjoying reading the legal filings in Craig Robins’ lawsuit against David Zwirner a little too much. [Randy Kennedy’s got a nice summary in the NYT today; basically, Robins says Zwirner revealed a confidential sale of a Marlene Dumas painting, which landed the collector on the artist’s blacklist, which Zwirner said he’d fix and didn’t, and that Robins could choose some Dumases from the current show, which he couldn’t.]
I’ve got no horse in this race, and I’m not a fan of Marlene Dumas’s work. [Though I admit it’s hard to consider it separate from the uncritical adulation that accompanied the outsized market hype of the last few years. And I did find some of these new paintings–including the three Robins said he wanted to choose from–admirably Tuyman-esque.]
What I am is fascinated by the language and the assumptions of collecting [and buying and selling] art that underpin it. The overly precise, legalistic argumentation of the filings reveals just how dependent many of the art world’s core interactions are on elision, subjectivity, and intentional ambiguity.
First, from the amended/updated version of Robins’ original complaint:

10. Thereafter in early 2005, defendants [i.e., Zwirner] breached Agreement I [i.e., the confidential sale a couple of months earlier in October 2004] by disclosing to MD that plaintiff [Robins] had in fact sold “Reinhardt’s Daughter,” [right] which defendants ultimate, apologetically and unequivocally admitted when plaintiff called defendants out on the issue. MD then immediately placed plaintiff on her personal “blacklist”, i.e., that plaintiff would not be able to buy any MD artwork in the Primary Market. Plaintiff’s placement on MD’s blacklist was and is a direct result of defendants breach of the confidentiality of Agreement I. [p.4, emphasis added to signal points of amusement]

This is clearly, awesomely Dumas herself. Zwirner had no need to “call Robins out” on the sale; he was a party to it. So at some point, within weeks or months of the deal, Dumas confronted Robins about secretly selling her work. His unequivocal apologies notwithstanding, he landed himself on “her” blacklist.
But Dumas is not actually named in the lawsuit, only Zwirner [and his galleries/legal entities.] So the artist herself is not a “defendant,” but the language of the complaint seems to indicate that at one point, Robins considered making her one. So while he sold work secretly through another dealer not the artist’s, and then abjectly–and, it turns out, unsuccessfully–apologized when she called him out, at some point in the last few weeks between drafting his lawsuit and filing it, Robins came to appreciate that suing an artist for blacklisting him was probably not the most effective way to get off her blacklist. I would count this as progress.

Continue reading “The Name Is Dumas“

OG: Ono Grapefruit

Cross a first edition of Yoko Ono’s 1964 “event score”/instruction-based art book Grapefruit off my Ones I’ve Let Get Away list. Turns out it’s not just me:

There are no copies of the first (limited) edition of Grapefruit currently being offered in the marketplace. ABPC reports no copies at auction within the last thirty-five years. OCLC/KVK report only four copies in institutional holdings worldwide: At MOMA, U.C. – San Diego, Northwestern University, and the Library of Congress. What this tells us that all remaining copies are being closely held by private collectors. The book is exceedingly scarce in the marketplace.

Yeah, but. I’d also suspect a fair number of them didn’t survive long enough to be closely held. And she printed it in Tokyo, so I suspect there are a few in Japan that don’t show up in “the marketplace.”
Yoko Ono collects rare books [bookpatrol.net]
Grapefruit (book) [wikipedia]
The 1970 reissue of Grapefruit is pretty plentiful and cheap [amazon]
selected instruction pieces by Yoko Ono [a-i-u.net]

Finally, Primary Information’s Facsimile of Avalanche

You could argue that Primary Information’s facsimile editions of Avalanche, the awesome artist-run journal published in the mid-1970s by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, are only the 3rd and 4th greatest editions of Avalanche, after Wade Guyton &co’s bootleg photocopied version from a few years ago [#2] and a complete set of the originals [#1, obviously].
But as a haggle-weary collector and scourer of vintage Avalanches over the years, I would argue that the greatest version of Avalanche is the one you can actually get.
So for the moment, that is the 100 limited edition, boxed sets of all 13 issues, which come with certificates signed by both Bear and Sharp [signed, obviously, before Sharp died in 2008]. Did I say 100? It’s only been a couple of days and the first 40 are already gone.

Which means that in a couple of weeks, at the latest, the greatest version will be either the trade edition, set to drop later this year, or the few signed versions which will immediately pop up on the bookflipping market. So plan accordingly.
Avalanche Limited Edition, now $450-750 plus shipping [specificobject.com]

Who Knew There Was Writing Inside Those Aspen Magazines?

Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, “Configurations of the New World,”, papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as presented at the Aspen Design Conference. Here are a couple of quotes that caught my eye.
From “The Victory of Technique over Content,” a rumination/condemnation of the 1964 New York World’s Fair by architect and editor of Progressive Architecture, Jan C. Rowan:

The New York World’s Fair, in its planning, and its buildings, and its exhibits, shows us only what we already know: That we are creating very fast an ugly, inconvenient, depressing environment–full of gadgetry–that can occasionally hypnotize us through its razzle-dazzle and glitter, but, lacking any significant content, leaves us, in the long run, nervous, uneasy, and empty.

And from the late Interior Secretary and ur-environmentalist Stewart Udall’s optimistically titled essay, “The New Conservation Can Work,” comes this:

If we have reached the point where good design means efficiency, where investing in a good design or in a scheme of beauty is the best investment a businessman can make, we may have reached the point that Walter Gropius speculated on a few years ago when he said we wouldn’t really begin to build with greatness in this country until we had the right combination of politicians, artists, scientists, and enlightened businessmen. Maybe this is coming about.

Aspen 1, remember, was published in 1965, while the body of Park Avenue was still warm, with Gropius’s gargantuan urban disaster, the Pan Am Building, stuck in its heart. So maybe not.

Have You Seen Me?

Maybe that should be, “Hast du mich gesehen?”
Do you have Andrea Fraser’s Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:

I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER’S Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 soon after it was published in 1983. At the time, it was the most expensive book I had ever bought. I read it from cover to cover and made lots of notes in the margins. It had a profound influence on my development as an artist. Ten years later, I included my copy in Services, a project I organized with Helmut Draxler in Germany examining the social and economic conditions of post-studio art. It was stolen from the show. If whoever took the book is reading this now, I beg you to return it to me. It is something I treasured, and the loss of it still makes me sad.

Fraser doesn’t specify where her book was stolen. According to her writeup for the show, hosted at ada’web [whoa, blast from the past], the project originated in “Kunstraum der Universitat Luneburg, January 29 – February 20, 1994. It toured to Stuttgart, Munich, Geneva, Vienna, and Hasselt, Belgium.” According to Fraser’s post-exhibition assessment of the project [sic], the first stop was a seminar format, so I imagine the book was taken from one of the later, less populated venues.
In place of your stolen version, perhaps you would consider downloading a PDF of Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 from the other awesomely palindromic art website, Ubu? It doesn’t have Fraser’s marginalia, of course, but perhaps if you return it, she’d consider making a copy?
update: Wow, Fraser’s entire Artforum article on Asher is a great read. She makes a strong case for his comprehensive reimagining of artistic production outside the commodity-centered market model; she implicates art critics’ ignoring of economic aspects of artmaking and presentation as complicity with the market-centric system; and she delivers a thorough refutation of Benjamin Buchloh, a too-rare treat.

Waiting For Gopnik

Hello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art?
Never mind, Blake Gopnik is here to correct this unforgivable travesty of public relations and/or poor Nexis searching skillz:

It has been two decades since Remy’s stunning debut, and this article is the first one in the English-speaking world to try to take his measure.
“We are walking a line: ‘Is it art or design?’ ” Remy says. And they are walking it almost alone.

Yes, alone except for the designer of every single item between Milan, Miami, and Moss–and half the people who passed through Utrecht in the last twenty years! But please continue, o design historian!

Even most avant-garde designers have come up with new models for comfort and ease — turning away from Victorian velvet-on-oak, for instance, to embrace Bauhaus, then Danish modern. What few designers have done is work to abolish comfort itself as a design principle, in favor of objects that disconcert. That’s the Remy and Veenhuizen model.
…
You can still order one of Remy’s drawer-piles from the Dutch distributor Droog, which sponsored some of his early work and has become much better known than Remy himself.

“Distributor”? “sponsored”? Droog began as a design collective, with Remy as one of its early members. His drawer-piles [sic], aka the You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory bundled bureau, dated 1991 and exhibited in Droog’s Milan debut in 1993, was the collective’s signature design.
I don’t begrudge Remy or any early Droog participants for seeking to build their own brands outside the increasingly corporatized Droog umbrella. In the last several years, Remy’s been using language to distance Droog from his design and process, by saying they “commissioned” the dresser. Now it’s “sponsored.” But only someone completely ignorant of the history of design generally–and of Dutch design and Droog specifically–could write something as wrong as this.
Dutch design team Tejo Remy and Ren & [sic] Veenhuizen mount first U.S. ‘solo’ show [washpost]
image and completely contradictory explanation of Droog and Remy via moma.org

‘Marina Abramovic Is A Total Stone Cold Diva.’

Ivan Lozano’s post about Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, and the conservation of performance art is absolutely fantastic. [It’s built off the Performance Workshop Klaus Biesenbach held a couple of weeks ago, which was written up by Carol Kino in the NY Times.]
The idea of a single orthodox means of retroactively preserving or documenting or re-performing or whatever early performance art strikes me as unreasonable; I like the idea that artists can decide if and how they want their work to live on, whether if it’s as a score, video documentation, ephemera, or in Seghal’s case, unwritten verbal transmission.
Lozano hits the nail on the head with his awesome characterization of Abramovic [above]. And kudos to her for making a strong play for preserving her own work and for influencing the present and future of the medium. But one thing about her stone cold divadom that he doesn’t mention that came immediately to mind was her establishment of the Marina Abramovic Institute, which is charged with the preservation of performance art.
It reminds me of the Eric Carle Musem of Children’s Book Illustration, another ostensibly comprehensive history-writing institution which was founded by a practitioner–who wasn’t waiting for history to decide his place in the history books.

And Who Was Writing Those Ian Wilson Invoices?

I’m slightly fascinated with the talk-based artwork of Ian Wilson. The last couple of weeks, I’d been working on a Conceptualism-related proposal, and so I had out my catalogue for Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer’s awesome, formative [for me, anyway] 1995 MoCA show, Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975.
Fifteen years, and I think I’d never read the entry on Ian Wilson. Maybe it’s info fatigue by the time I’d get to the W’s, or maybe the blank page where the images usually go just registered as a section divider?
Anyway, Rorimer discusses Wilson’s “search for an art in which no evidence of physicality would intrude.” His work evolved from the instigation of casual conversations about “time” to a less subject-centered, “Oral Communication.”

Whereas his Time work stemmed from his understanding that a word might represent a concept, Oral Communication grew out of his realization that the Time project principally concerned the process of communication. The designation Oral Communication, he decided, more pertinent served to characterize an endeavor whose ultimate subject and object, he once stated, “is speech itself,” or “art spoken.”

Maybe it’s the institutional vs commercial context, but while Rorimer mentions Wilson’s dutiful contributions to checklists and catalogues for shows he was invited to participate in–even the invitation card for a newly configured work for a group, a 1972 Discussion at John Weber Gallery–there is no acknowledgment of the other, seemingly crucial evidence/remnant/ instantiation of Wilson’s work: his invoices and receipts.
And Andrew Russeth just emailed me this awesome anecdote he reported from a Performa 09 panel discussion last fall:

No matter how difficult or intangible the work, of course, most agreed that artists or their dealers will eventually find a way to sell it, leaving the museum to work out some of the details later. [Soon-to-be-announced incoming MoCA director Jeffrey] Deitch recounted that, as a gallery assistant at John Weber Gallery in the mid-1970s, he once typed the words “There was a discussion” on a piece of paper as a record that collector Count Giuseppe Panza had talked to artist Ian Wilson, who abandoned sculpture to make art only by talking. He then made out an invoice for $1,000.

Maybe if MoCA ever reissues the Reconsidering The Object catalogue, they will add a correction.
Deitch Defends Dakis Joannou Show at the New Museum [artinfo]

What Is Progress, And The Paper [Of] Record

Can I just suggest that, when you buy an article from the New York Times Archive, you go ahead and buy a 10-pack? In addition to supporting your local paper in their time of financial distress and dire need [ahem], you can use the other nine articles for exploring whatever random people, thing, or history crosses your mind?
Which is how I found Roy Bongartz’ Sunday arts feature from August 11, 1974: “Question: How Do You Buy A Work of Art Like This?/ Answer: With A Check”
The piece could’ve been read straight in one of Powhida and Dalton’s #class sessions. Burden, Beuys, LeWitt, Acconci, de Maria, Bochner, Ray Johnson, Ian Wilson:

…these artists, all of them young “conceptualists,” had decided to lift their work clear out of the category of investment property. By shifting the emphasis of their work to the pure thought and by refusing to offer any saleable object, they were mounting a deliberate attack on the traditional business of art. The artists’ intention was to leave the dealer with nothing to sell, the collector with nothing to buy, and the museum with nothing to squirrel away.
[turn page, see continuing headline, “Buying Conceptual Art – Photos, Sets of Directions, Receipts”]
…The secret is that there is always something to sell.

Artists need to eat. Collectors want to buy. Ronald Feldman “authenticates” Burden’s gunshot wound with a check. And voila! These rebels’ most cunning attempts to escape or destroy the art market have been thwarted before brunch. We can now move on to the crossword.
But beyond the apparent news-worthy novelty of certificates, documentation, and instruction-based work, and the vastly divergent view now of some of the namechecked artists–Ryman and Sandback have a conceptualist collectible object problem?–you know what the funniest thing about the past is? It’s the little differences:
That as long as the instructions [which sell “for as much as $8,000”] are followed, “it doesn’t matter at all whether it’s you, Sol LeWitt or your Uncle Elmer who does the marking.”
That dealer/wife Mrs. John (Susan) Gibson is aghast at an invitation “from a Washington DC gallery” to show Robert Cumming’s text & photo-based work–wait for it!

–in the photography section! Mrs. Gibson insisted Cumming’s work go into the fine arts section because he was not showing photographs, but conceptual art. The reply was, well, we hope this is what photography will become. “Too late,” said Mrs. Gibson. “This is what fine art has become.” It was a standoff–no show for Cumming.

And then there’s the eerie familiarity of Ian Wilson, “a kind of extremist even in SoHo, [who] simply comes in and talks. This is all that he does, and he’s made a career of it.”
The quote is from Sonnabend director Ealan Wingate:

“Here the art becomes so abstracted there is no object whatever. Yet in a way there is always an object because an idea can be a subject. [hey, wait– -ed.] There is, also, always the piece of paper, the bill of sale, which says you bought it.”

And then comes Bongartz’ explanation of the paper gauntlet Wilson threw down across the ages to Tino Seghal:

You can commission Wilson to do a piece; for example, he may come to your house and talk with you about Plato for a while. The two of you might discuss, say, the subject of unreality, and that would be it–and you’d get your receipt.

For all the fun of digging through the Times’ archive on my own coin, it’s not all eye-opening, perspective-correcting or knee-slapping blog fodder. Even at $1.50, you sometimes click through to a dud, but overall, it still feels like money well spent. And not just because seeing vintage discussion of an under-remembered predecessor should at least cast a critical shadow on the current hype over Seghal’s artistic innovations.
There’s an extra, bonus level of irony, though, in paying to read a 36-year-old Times article about artists successfully selling nothing–and then in worrying that I’m quoting and recapping it too much, thereby damaging the damaged Times’ economic position, or at least earning me the wrath of the copytheft maximalists.
But, oh, look, here’s the whole article for free online. Apparently, the Times repackaged a bunch of arts coverage in 1978 as a topic-based anthology. Which was scanned into Google Books. Of course, it’s formatted differently, probably from a different edition of the paper. So it doesn’t have the $1.50 PDF version’s awesome illustration of Wilson’s work:

The secret is that there is always something to sell.