Booing Baldessari

Re “The Resurrection of John Baldessari” by Christopher Knight, March 18: When I read Knight’s words that “a painting is but a piece of dirty cloth,” I asked myself how can anyone take such dribble seriously? Can anyone visiting the Francis Bacon retrospective (now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) stand in front of any of the masterpieces in that show and sum them up as “a dirty piece of cloth”?

As for Mr. Baldessari’s sanctimonious “ritual enactment of artistic death and resurrection,” which consisted of burning a lot of his work, may I respectfully remind Mr. Knight that many artists have destroyed large bodies of their work. For sake of brevity, I mention only Giacometti, and his was not a pedantic self-promotion stunt but rather the expression of extreme humility and despair at the inability to give adequate form to those interior inclinations that gave meaning to his life.

I would like to know why Conceptual art is never permitted to stand on its own merits. Why is it that Conceptual artists and their enthusiastic promoters feel an obligation to justify themselves by attacking a tradition they voluntarily abandoned?

TOM WUDL

Los Angeles

Knight’s full sentence was: “Looked at coldly, as if seen by some extraterrestrial who had never encountered one before, a painting is but a piece of dirty cloth that, for a host of ideological reasons peculiar to our earthly Western culture, we fervently revere.”