…the Course of Art Betters With Age
For John Baldessari, however, a satiated palate seemed continually thwarted. The Chardonnays of his oil painting days seemd fruitless, lexical Carbernet Sauvignons savored of the wrong fermentation, and the piquancy of photo montage Merlots lacked the sweet of ‘bittersweet.’ Yet the wines of his trials appear to have appropriately matured into ambrosia for his exclusive exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty. The show speaks to several aspects of the artist’s career and life. From early on, 
Baldessari met the state of art with dissatification and aimed for a literal verisimilitude of how people relate to art. “I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks” was one of various sentiments that inspired pieces such as “What This Painting Aims to Do” and “Space.” “With the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is,” he went on to experiment with photographic pieces of intentionally less-than-amateur quality. He remained, despite the mileage he made in his personal investigations, on the fringe of Conceptualism: “The conceptualists thought I was just doing joke art.” With this reputation circulating, he became more recognized for his (non)teaching methods than for his art; the harbored acclaim of students such as Cindy Sherman, Barabara Kruger, and Davis Salle over their instructor further subverted that art practice that reinforced his 
teaching. The moral of the story, though, may be that persistence pays off. With global recognition and this solo exhibition at the MET, John Baldessari’s inseparable art and living finally relish of their latent flavor. Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker gives this artist a five-star review:
“Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations with his contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. In L.A., he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Most of the early works at LACMA are dated 1966-68, and some combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful.”
View images of the pieces on show from October 20, 2010 through January 9, 2011 here.
John Baldessari exchanges his thoughts on art in an interview about his work:
