Morgan Meis reviews 1001 Paintings You Should See Before You Die in a piece entitled A Dilettante's Guide to Art.
"1001 Paintings You Should See Before You Die acknowledges the question "What is Painting?" The answer: "Who cares?""
What I found especially useful about the review is that it puts Modernism in perspective - not as the End of Art, but just as another phase in a long, ongoing story of "what painters do."
Here's a quote:
A weird thing happened to painting during the 20th century. In the eyes of many painters and critics, the little problems of painting became the big problem of “Painting” itself. People suddenly became motivated to paint by asking themselves, “What Is Painting?” The attitude of 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die is to collapse this problem back into the history of little problems, to flatten out 20th century artistic practice and put it back into the ongoing history of “things painters do.” The way our woman in black from Brown looks at it, Malevich is a worthy painter and we want to include his paintings in our book. But in doing so we are also implicitly if not explicitly punching a hole in the metaphysics that motivated him to paint as he painted. We're implicitly denying that there could have been a definitive final act in painting or that painting could ever have achieved its own end. We are rejecting the idea that painting was ever really in crisis at all. We are disproving Malevich even as we laud him.
An excellent essay. Read the whole thing.
Image: Kasimir Malevich's Black Circle
