kimmelman on serra

[richard] serra remembers bringing his students from the school of visual arts to the met in the late sixties and early seventies ... "here you're supposed to discriminate but the museum is actually working against this. it dissipates the amount of attention you give to any one object unless you really come with a directed idea and say, 'i want to focus on this painting and really see it.' so you have to find a way of isolating yourself to make value judgments ... it's like going from the art museum to the kmart when you move from the pollock to the tomlin. the pattern in the tomlin is so flatfooted and sterile. it's decorative. decorativeness is a tradition in american painting, and it has produced mediocre art and also great art. joseph cornell used a certain decoration to pull of his fantasies. jasper johns's terrific flag paintings are, in some ways, decorative. decoration means pattern, geometry, and repetition as the content of the work. pollock's intention wasn’t to decorate, to pattern, to use a repetitive model" ... he compares one richter image of a dead gang member to goya, then to late rembrandt: "at the end, rembrandt painted himself as meat. it was about him confronting his own mortality, and the paintings became smelly and foul and really great."