Marilyn Minter monograph delights

I've written about Marilyn Minter's recent work a good bit here over the last couple years. I'm seduced by its decadence, a dirty flashiness which seems just about right for W's America.

So I've enjoyed perusing a new monograph about Minter from Gregory R. Miller & Co. Most interesting by far are the plates of Minter's work and a couple of different kinds of interviews with the artist. (Least interesting -- also by far -- is an essay by Johanna Burton, a meandering, look-at-me bit of blather that wouldn't have made it past my freshman English teaching assistant. It opens: "Marilyn Minter is hard-core. At least that's what I've decided today." Or this bizarre footnote on the next page: "As a female critic writing about a female artist, I like the way it sounds to use the artist's initials, instead of her full name. It sounds like something a hard-core male critic would do for a hard-core male artist." That's being a critic? That's scholarship?)

The best part of the monograph is watching Minter go from being a Rosenquistian in the late 1960s, to a Celminsian in the 1970s to a Polkeian in the 1980s, to a Salleian in the 1990s and then to emerge into making paintings that are immediately recognizable as Marilyn Minters in the early 2000s. It's the kind of journey that the who just finished what at Columbia? art world seldom stops to appreciate and consider, a reminder that an artist's best work can take 30 years to happen.

Or, to put it another way, to make paintings that brilliantly capture the early 21st-century American zeitgeist, maybe you have to first synthesize 30 years of the zeitgeist as interpreted by others. (In Minter's case the path was unusually clear: commercialism, realism, pop, the subconscious.) If I taught at an art school I'd make sure my students spent some time with this book. It would help them realize that artists aren't made at a graduation ceremony.

Related: Amp Power on Madison Ave. borrowing from Minter.