No comments about Depression Pottery.

No comments about Wedgwood and Bentley Pottery from the Kadison Collection.

No comments about Over.

No comments about Images of Paradise in Islamic Art.

No comments about Royal Doulton Figurines (3rd Edition) - The Charlton Standard Catalogue.

No comments about Easy Onglaze Techniques: For China Painters and Potters.

1 comments about Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life.

1. While doing research for an essay on the "Search for Postmodernism in a Modernist World," I purchased Ms Rowell's book, curiously titled Objects of Desire. At the very least, it was a questionable investment. However, it is indicative of what is wrong with the world of modern art [or even postmodern art] where pretentious jargon takes the place of actual description, reason or discussion as an excuse for art works that in the end are just boring.
   
   At the time of the book's publication, Ms Rowell was allegedly a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her explanation of Postmodernism gets at the heart of the matter in such a way that I am compelled to quote her at length, in particular her explanation regarding the bridge between pastiche and schizophrenia:
   
   "The possibility of pastiche -- its neutrality and blankness - presupposes that individualism is dead. The copy is impersonal; the model is either indifferent, forgotten, or never existed. High modernism, however, was "predicated on the invention of a personal private style... This means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world, and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style." Yet today, scientists, social scientists, and cultural critics are "exploring the notion that that [sic] kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is `dead'; and that one might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological." Thus the old models of modernism are no longer viable. As we know, schizophrenia is defined as a basic breakdown of relationships - because objects in a perceptual field, for example and between words and their meaning or content, or between words and each other as a continuous fabric of meaning in a linguistic system. As a result, the schizophrenic has no concept of time as linear, interconnected, and sequential, and none either of personal identity as a selection and interrelation of certain specific human potentials at the expense of others. Conversely, because the schizophrenic does not (indeed cannot) search for meaning behind the object, behind the word, or within the unhierarchical unfolding of the field of experience, he or she has an experience of the present and of its objects that is "overwhelmingly vital and `material'... ever more material - or better still, literal - ever more vivid in sensory ways." ... Pashtiching the objects of desire of our traditional landscape, they set a film of meaning (or nonmeaning) between themselves and ourselves. In their deliberate displacement and disconnection from familiar circuits of meaning - whether aesthetic or real - these surrogates or simulacra embody another register of experience, that of the signs and systems of the postmodern world." [Rowell, 194-195]
   
   Is there anything more that can be added after such an erudite analysis? Perhaps there is. However, the analysis does cause one to ask a number of questions. Did anyone buy this book for anything other than the pictures? How does one get a job as a curator in a major museum? And more to the point, was there an editor, or was the editor on vacation when page after page of turgid, incoherent and virtually incomprehensible pseudo-intellectualism made its way to print? Or perhaps this presentation is meant to be a literary representation of Postmodernism, most likely a parody of postmodern Deconstructionist style. One can only hope that this is satire - the world of Dilbert in the "artplace." Dramatic readings of her text have provided considerable entertainment for my friends and family, who found it quite amusing.

No comments about Maurizio Pellegrin.

No comments about Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: United States of America Fascicule 25, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Fascicule 2: Molly and Walter Bareiss Collection: Attic ... skyphoi, cup-skyphos, cups (Fascicule, 2).

No comments about Nick Crowe: Commemorative Glass.