All That's Wrong With American Culture..

I was riding the subway today, and for the third or fourth time saw an ad for Norman Rockwell and his photography at the Brooklyn Museum. The ad shows a photo of a sailor getting tattooed and the subsequent painting Rockwell vomited forth. Everything that's wrong with American Culture is distilled in Rockwell's nauseous output.

His work is a staggering, highly skilled, manipulative sham. representing an America that never existed.

Jingoistic, racist, hideously condescending to both subject and viewer, it makes Socialist Realism seem as fresh as an iced glass of sparkling water. Smarmy, mean spirited, coy, commercial, reeking of falsity from it's very bones, easy to swallow and impossible to digest, his work should be consigned to the toxic waste dump history, perhaps to be studied as a something to avoid at all costs...

To show his work in a major museum is an abomination - and cloaking it as an examination of the connection between the camera and painting is a joke.
Actually, it's a money maker, a revenue generator, and panders to a false nostalgia hiding under the guise of intellectualism. Which was something that neither Norman Rockwell or The Saturday Evening Post were examples of.