Posing as a serious summary of modern art, ART UNTIL NOW is anything but. LOOK FIRST, LAUGH LATER would be a title more fitting to its mean spirit. I guarantee nobody will dare but laugh. Yet, this is not really all that amusing. In the end it is simply dismaying and disheartening.

Only the total ignorant would be taken in by the racism of these bogus African masks, i.e., Dogon rococo; the contempt for women in a piece like "Eve" (sweater form and douche-bag); or in the celebration of war in "War Games"…press the knob and experience the thrill of it!

What does any of this have to do with the twentieth century anyway?

This exhibit only glorifies the destructive gesture, those hostile ideas that kill art. Standing on the promontory of this century, what good is there in looking back if we have to bash in the doors of our glories. The function of art should not be to remind us of its deterioration, but to counter it.

Point counterpoint: O.K. Harris and a cemetery have become identical in their sinister contact of bodies that do not know themselves. Gallows humor and the pall of death are everywhere here.

The exhibit’s so-called "manifesto" is less a letter-of-purpose, even less a post-script to Post-Modernism, than a post-mortem declaring itself: DOA.

"We must have the freedom and the will to understand a new language," Cesar Marzetti, its author, says with a straight face. But is there anything "new" here? And what "language" are we speaking? Someone please let me know and I’ll be the first in line to buy my Berlitz tapes.

ART UNTIL NOW would have us believe in the bankruptcy of today’s art, its inability to shake off its past and to push forward.

Can there be any future for art without a past?

Exactly what has made our culture grand has been its increasing inability to create the new. The evolution of humanity has gone hand and hand with the object’s moving away from embellishment. After all a non-tattooed face is more beautiful that a tattooed one, even if the tattoo were done by Monet.