Looking Anew

It wasn’t until I came to the penultimate page in Michael Findlay’s book Seeing Slowly that I understood why reading it made me uncomfortable. Featuring a photograph of James Rosenquist’s massive painting, Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Eleanor Roosevelt (1998), these last pages recount the story of the work, which had been destroyed by a studio fire in 2009, but before that—and notably for the very first and last time ever—it had been shown at Acquavella’s booth at Art Basel in 2006. Up until that very moment, I, along with the book, had been treading water in a time warp back in the Modernist era. But in these final pages, I awoke in 2018.

I find many similarities between Findlay, his 233-page book, and myself. We appear to be locked in an art-world foxtrot that reached its climax in the 1960s and ’70s, when he (born 1945) and I (born seems to linger on the modern classics, including art created during the era of Pop, Op and Abstract Expressionism, with nary a glance to the more challenging contemporary, conceptual art that came into being in the 1960s and beyond.