The artist as con man

"Untitled" (2007) has a monumental scale of gesture and sense of vigour that can hardly be found in the silkscreens. Soft enamel washes create a unique effect like misty celluloid or the ghostly forms of X-ray photography: smooth, faded, translucent. It has a kind of weightlessness, perhaps the mark of all truly abstract painting, defined not by the absence of recognisable things but of natural forces, principally the one that keeps us grounded and defines our shape." (At the Guggenheim, London Review of Books, on Christopher Wool)

"Unique effect"? Looks like a good old traditional smear to me. It's "weightless" in the sense of the title Robert Hughes gave to his essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat: Requiem for a Featherweight.

At the end of an essay taking this kind of crap seriously, the writer finally asks the important question, which he answers with flab-gab:

Is Wool’s work any good? Is this some joyless endgame of painting, or are these elegant, intellectually challenging images? Either way they seem to capture the hard, unsentimental energy of New York, with its ecstatic highs and suicidal lows. And that isn’t bad going.

No, it's just a very successful con job, since Wool sold one of his "paintings" for more than $26 million.