The Australian-born art critic has published his autobiography. A thumbs-up from the Washington Post:
Most important for the career that was to follow, he rejected "the idea that there was something inherently repressive about old art, as though the past were a dead weight that new art, young art, had to shake off." He learned that "the past is pervasive; it seeps into everything; it is the very air that artists and their public breathe," and he lost for good "a belief in the potency of the avant-garde."
He writes: "I have never regained it, and today, looking at the ever-more-feeble efforts on the part of the art world to designate its latest products as 'cutting-edge,' 'edgy,' 'radical,' etcetera, I am not in the least sorry to have lost it. Some new works of art have value of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value."