George,

Leo Daugherty's piece is so hackneyed and pedantic, it could be from the pen of virtually every negative art critic throughout history ... the common denominator being the unsophisticated criticism of that which was "different" "new" or outside the banal tastes of the critic.

History is rife with tastemakers who saw nothing but junk in the works of, for example,Van Gogh, Manet, Picasso. The list of, for example, artists, architects, composers who came in for adverse criticism from their contemporaries is endless.

In Nazi Germany, much of the great expressionists' work was considered, by the critics, to be decadent and it was destroyed. Little effort was made by those same critics of the Third Reich to try to understand what the artist was expressing. No, it was "decadent" and that was that! They couldn't define bad, but like pornography, they knew it when they saw it.

It is laughable that any individual would self-annoint him or herself to be the end-all in judging what is "good art' or, for that matter, "good junk".

Senator Jesse Helms revisited!

Harry Tenney (electronic mail, February 14, 2002)