David Lee
September/October 2020
A watershed moment in the official story of art has been reached. Unlike in the first decades of the last century, when experimental isms followed one another annually, the first decades of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been living through a period of dreary status quo.
My lifetime has witnessed few moments of paradigm shift. Pop and Op were the first I was aware of. They were part of the same liberating ethos of the ’60s as The Beatles, Emma Peel and drugs. I became aware of the new visual age at boarding school when, in 1964, our dorm curtains were swapped from drab to a bright pattern of pastel bubbles, like