(p. A26) Suzi Gablik, an art critic, author and theorist who once championed modernism — and was once an artist of that persuasion — but found fame when she turned against it, died on May 7 [2022] at her home in Blacksburg, Va.
. . .
At the invitation of the United States government, she began to lecture about American art around the world, an experience that altered her thinking about contemporary art. It was not just daunting but embarrassing, as she wrote later, to try to describe “some of the aggressively absurd forms of art that dominated the decade of the 1970s in America: Vito Acconci putting a match to his breast and burning the hair of his chest; Chris Burden crawling half-naked across broken glass.”
She began to feel that modernism — her religion — had reached its limits. Its provocations were no longer transgressive but silly, elitist and even venal, having been co-opted by corporate sponsors and the growing art market. Her salvo of a book, “Has Modernism Failed?,” arrived with a bang in 1984, and all of a sudden she was a sought-after speaker in her own country, a dissident voice pilloried by some critics but welcomed by others.
. . .
Decrying the pointlessness and commercialism of contemporary art was hardly a new position — Tom Wolfe had gleefully staked it out in “The Painted Word,” in 1975 — but Ms. Gablik’s book nonetheless struck a chord.
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 20, 2022, and has the title “Suzi Gablik, Art Critic Who Took Modernism to Task, Dies at 87.”)
Gablik’s “salvo” against modern art is:
Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? Revised 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004 [1984].
As a student, I greatly annoyed one of my philosophy professors when I favorably quoted:
Wolfe, Tom. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1975.