And, if you think Pop Art is bad...

On the fifth floor of SFMOMA was an exhibit of works from the 1990's from the Logan collection. Most of it was standard issue trendoid art junk: cow's head in fluid, kitschy paintings with "subversive" elements, etc.

They say that if you give a man enough rope... well, the arts establishment has a veritable Rube Goldberg contraption for its gallows. These works, from all over the world, show Western art in a terrible state of crisis, which brings to mind Bishop Wang's homily on the Easter Vigil.

His Excellency pointed out that the word for crisis in Chinese has the same root as the word for opportunity. I don't think that artists have ever had such an opportunity to rebuild art as in the last 30 years. There are a few brave souls making interesting paintings, but for the most part the mainstream art scene has put itself (not painted itself, because much of this crap is in assemblage and photography and whatnot) into a corner. There is no way out in the current direction. When these folks say that "painting is dead" what they mean is that painting as dictated by theoreticians for the past 40 years is dead. It was dead on arrival, actually, but the last gasps of the dinosaur prove how dead it is.