Insufficient art history? Or just another arbitrary show of contemporary art? LACMA's 'Woven Histories' is the most disappointing major art museum show I saw in 2023.
Given my interest in painting, I found myself going to Milwaukee to see an exhibition that promised to be taking the pulse of contemporary American painting—all the works in it had been made in the last five years. A show of fifty paintings by fifty different painters who the curators claimed were defining the field of contemporary painting seemed a bold move, amidst the general confusion that has been generated by AI, market manipulation, auction house publicity, critical pronouncements, and a general cultural malaise that has lingered since the 1990s.
A visitor to Valerie Jaudon’s stunning show at DC Moore, made up of sixteen oils produced between 2006 and 2023, might justifiably wonder just what it is she is trying to express. This imaginary visitor might know nothing of her participation in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s or of the fact that she coined the term “conceptual abstraction” to describe her own work and that of others.