Post from Franklin Einspruch
I ascribe John Currin’s success to the fact that he uses traditional painting methods to make bitter statements about the tradition of painting. At last, the ruling party in the art world, which equates the subversion of art with its progress, can have its cake and eat it too.
I tried to give Currin a shot as a satirist along the lines of Paul Cadmus, an underrated painter who skewed all kinds of human foibles while producing some of the best figure drawings of the 20th Century. (image is Cadmus’s “The Fleet’s In!” from 1934)
Currin is a wooden draughtsman by comparison and since his target is art, his art is about art. That is very definition of academic, and I find both his work and his popularity to be a cynical exercise.
— artist Franklin Einspruch writes and produces artblog.net
