The following painting is here because I happened to come across a copy of American Art Review I had gotten free as a trial offer with it on the cover of the magazine, and I thought I could use it to make make (again) one of my standard points, the fact that an artwork may be extremely well-done and enjoyable but not important.  I extremely like this one (painted around a hundred years ago):

I’d be very happy to have the original on one of my walls.  But there must be hundreds of paintings of winter streams in a forest as well-executed as this, and a million photographs as visually effective albeit lacking in what paint does aside from contribution shape and color to a painting–and the evidence of human skill, which is–properly–one source of one’s appreciation of a painting.  But it provides no new angle on reality.  And that, for me, is the only culturateurically important thing any artwork can do.  Qualitative increase versus quantitative increase of the known world.  Continuing a tradition well is a fine thing, but starting a fresh one is superior to it, even starting it poorly.  Hence, I subscribe to ARTnews, not American Art Review, because ARTnews continues much more recently-born traditions, and sometimes hints of ones now being born.

I wonder why there are no poetry magazines as good for poetry as ARTnews is for visimagery (i.e., visual art).  Or do I over-rate ARTnews because I’m not as knowledgeable about visimagery as I am about poetry?  Or because poetry is still evolving whereas visimagery, having achieved non-representationality, has nowhere left to evolve.  But there is no magazine of wide circulation devoted only to poetry except, perhaps, Poetry, and it is many more years behind the times than ARTnews is–or American Art Review.

Still, as a Connecticut boy stuck in Florida for almost thirty years after fifteen in Southern California, I must say I really do like “February’s Sun.”

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