PLACEBO

The upper part of Roxy Paine's Placebo on the lawn next to the art museum. It's stainless steel and stripped of foliage. This seems to be Paine's thing. I've seen other versions of this. I remember one in Union Square in New York.

There is a trend I notice in contemporary visual art and sometimes music that I don't like, even with artists I generally admire, They find one thing that gets popular attention and then beat it to death for years. Paine is an example, but think of Chuck Close's exquisite sorta-pointillist portraits from here to eternity; Philip Glass's death by arpeggio (although I think Satyagraha is the finest opera of the 20th Century); even though I adore her work, Jenny Holzer's unending streams of aphorisms; Botero's infinite parade of chubbies; Cindy Sherman's mercurial selfies. But then there are are those whose every major work tells us something new: Stravinsky, Shostakovitch, Bernstein, Sondheim, Arnold Newman, Ansel Adams, for example. So that's my occasional rant.