By Steve Mumford . The tyranny of all that boring, pedantic, aesthetically vacuous installation art has finally ended, we are told, thanks in part to Wall Street s continuing bullishness and the young collectors' need for displayable, aesthetically pleasing objets.
Painting is the healthier for having taken something of a back seat for the last ten years.
Luckily the art world is large enough to provide alternatives. Amidst all this boosterism for painting there will continue to be plenty of reminders of the diversity of mediums which form the bedrock of this city s artistic strength. Riding the crest of the recent wave of publicity around painting is the young Damien Loeb, freshly inducted into Mary Boone s stable for his solo debut. Loeb makes paintings based on photographs clipped from magazines. As a result, although widely seen in the pages of Flash Art, the paintings themselves remained unshown, thus making Loeb s work perhaps the most well-known unseen painting in New York.