CINCINNATI American Painting: The Eighties Revisited, Cincinnati Art Museum’s exhibition reconstructing the evocative paintings that sparked an art world controversy in the late 1970s, .
Victorville Daily Press
On Nov. 3, 2020, as much of America watched the presidential election play out, I focused on a local race that piqued my interest due to its potential to dramatically alter the makeup of one High Desert council and the direction of a city.
In the end, voters did dramatically alter the makeup of the Barstow City Council, ousting two-term Mayor Julie Hackbarth-McIntyre and two-term District 4 Councilwoman Carmen Hernandez in favor of Paul Courtney and Marilyn Dyer-Kruse, respectively.
District 3 voters, meanwhile, elected Barbara Rose, who filled the seat vacated by Rich Harpole in December 2019.
The results equaled what journalists like to call a “seismic shift” on the dais. Courtney, Dyer-Kruse and Rose each backed by the Barstow Professional Firefighters IAFF Local 2325 suddenly comprised the City Council majority. Their colleagues, Tim Silva and James Noble, were all but relegated to the sidelines.
The Value of Didactic Art
This week, executive editor Lloyd Wise looks back at April 1967’s “The Value of Didactic Art,” one of the many benchmark essays written for
Artforum in its early years by the critic, curator, and art historian Barbara Rose (1936–2020). Rose is celebrated and remembered by her friend and colleague Margit Rowell in our April issue.
To read Barbara Rose is to partake in her “immense excitement and pleasure,” writes Rowell. Nowhere is this in better evidence than in Rose’s 1967 essay “The Value of Didactic Art,” in which the critic unspools, with wit and meticulously reasoned brilliance, a nascent category of art she defines as “illustrations of theoretical esthetic positions condensed into a single object.” Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, especially Andy Warhol: In such figures, Rose finds qualities of “argumentation” and “dialogue” that, while betraying formalist criticism’s obsolescence, light up novel