Over the years, with a few exceptions, Steven Paine and Graham Gund, or more recently, Kenneth Freed, there have been few significant collectors. The galleries, while relatively strong and committed, have promoted art as a commodity. There are too few alternative spaces. The Gallery at Green Street, located in a subway station, is a singular effort with real imagination and creativity. And the state of arts criticism, again with a couple of exceptions, is rather pathetic.
Reviews tend to be bland and descriptive.
That runs two ways with writers that lack insight or nerve, and publishers who worry about offending advertisers. Not a healthy situation. Having launched into all this predictable and deplorable negativity, which may already have you turned off and pushing that all powerful delete button, let us now applaud the De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, out there in posh Lincoln, which has produced the first of three exhibitions that will attempt to focus on the history of recent Boston art. The first in the series, which will remain on view through January, surveys the medium of photography. It is accompanied by a formidable, hard cover catalogue from MIT Press.