Artblog.net

In case someone did not take the click on to read your essay, here are two lines that should not be missed:

Every so often an excitable critic dubs someone the finest artist of his or her generation, in derisive imitation of the one critic who got away with that in 1945. It never sticks.

I feel the one "sort-of" exception is Clem's statement that David Smith was the best sculptor of his generation. But most such statements lead to exclusionary dead ends, or less politely, BS. BS just is not the real business of criticism though it is the most frequent.