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Excerpts from the 'American Renaissance' exhibition Archives of the Brooklyn Museum of Art 10/13/1979 - 12/30/1979 "I'm down (I'm really down) I'm down (down on the ground) I'm down (I'm really down) How can you laugh when you know I'm down." 11/11/1979 "It's about time that a museum is exhibiting the American Impressionists." Evy Mayer 11/11/1979 "I beg to differ with the comments above. These are not American Impressionist paintings but rather the inspired works of a noble few gripped by visions of the empyreal sphere of the Italian Renaissance. I didn't become a colonel in the British armed forces to have my aesthetic sensibilities and critical judgment offended by Philistine scribblings such as these." - Colonel David Johnson Deceased (a.k.a. Mt. Kavon) 11/11/1979 "Balderdash. The colonel is a pretentious sciolist. I am an art historian and I know what art is. Art is my bread and butter. And this exhibition is not art - after all where are the Monets?" - Sir Cecil Bernstein III 11/18/1979 "Can there be more shows like this? The modernist junk is basically hogwash and a cop-out excuse for art. More classical-style sculpture please! There is a need for a revival! Beautiful! Exquisite! Thank you." 11/23/1979 "Very appropriate to mount an exhibition filled with nostalgia for the epoch of the American imperium just at the moment when the last vestiges of the imperialist myth are being torn to shreds in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. The fantasies and ideologies of the rich and powerful, presented here with all their fatuousness intact, ignores a great deal, not only technology and other artistic movements (impressionism, photography, etc.) but all the sweat and toil, pain, hardship and struggle, that allowed a privileged few, the members of Veblen's leisure class, to spend a life fantasizing the triumph of "civilization." Too bad so many exhibitions only allow for a do-it-yourself social history." - Herb Schwarz
