Peter Shelton and the peanut gallery

Don't listen to Beth, Regina. I love your running commentary on the state of newspapers.

Three cheers for Steve Lopez* and Chief Bratton! Their remarks make more sense than all the savvy comments by critics (above and linked to) and by “sculptor” Peter Shelton combined. Bratton may not know “zilch” about so-called contemporary art, as Christopher Knight quips, may not be an “art expert” as Shelton has snidely observed, but that's to his advantage.

Bratton’s statement that he likes the orange grove etching -- http://tinyurl.com/GhostGrove -- in the auditorium of the new Police Department headquarters better than Shelton’s work outside it because “it has some semblance of what it's supposed to be---trees and leaves” alludes to the defining principle that all art is mimetic. That’s why Bratton says that he hasn’t “the faintest idea what the two tallest things are on either side” (at both ends) of Shelton’s six black forms. Compare this to Knight’s take on these two “headless creatures atop tall, spindly legs.” He doesn’t quite know what to make of them either, but that doesn’t stop him from observing that they are “presumably derived from the monkeys mentioned in the title.”

Knight is an art critic, and critics interpret, no matter what, so he conjures up the idea that these headless creatures -- http://tinyurl.com/HeadlessCreatures -- “twist in space as if scanning their surroundings with bodily sensors rather than eyes.” “These animated forms,” he adds, “begin and end the procession with an image of movement into the central city.” Now why didn’t poor Bratton think of all that!

* (For Lopez’s column, click on the link “an eye-catching headline” in the quote from Christopher Knight’s piece.)

Louis Torres, Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts)

Nailed it. Best thing I've read about Peter Shelton. I wish you'd stop writing about newspapers, though. This is an art blog. Readers don't care about newspapers.