Live Breaking News & Updates on Three American Painters

Stay updated with breaking news from Three american painters. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.

The Value of Didactic Art - Artforum International


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, lig ....

United States , Lazlo Moholy Nagy , Carl Andre , Robert Morris , Barnett Newman , Clement Greenberg , Willard Huntington Wright , Dan Flavin , Margit Rowell , Marcel Duchamp , Andrew Wyeth , Andy Warhol , Ortegay Gasset , Douanier Rousseau , Iris Clert , Richard Pettibone , Friedel Dzubas , Barbara Rose , Jean Jacques Lebel , Michael Fried , Jasper Johns , George Brecht , Fogg Art Museum , Lloyd Wise , Didactic Art , John Cage ,