From a Modern Painters article by Jerry Saltz called "Ups and Downs: The Good, the Bad and the Very Bad", about what was new in Chelsea galleries for September:
"[Steve] Mumford, who calls himself a 'war artist', was embedded with the Army's Third Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. Yet... there's little of what Susan Sontag, referring to photojournalism's relationship to war, called 'the photography of conscious'. There's no Goya, nothing wrenching, ravishing or searching. Mumford obviously cares about the troops but his drawings have an academic, bleached-out detachment. The work is attentive but not insightful, detailed but not affecting. You never get the feeling he's examined the moral ambiguity of war, the guilt, adrenaline rush, deprivation or self-gratification of it. The pictures are proficient but impersonal. To me they're examples of our sleepwalking America."*****
"The rub is that right now there's too much 'political art' around that is political in name only. Too many artists deal with Nixon but not Bush, Vietnam but not Iraq. Doing this places absolutely nothing at risk. It's true that the present is bewildering, and that the 1960s seems more romantic and its clothes so cool, but [artist Sam] Durant - like an army of artists these days - needs to find a way to kill his parents rather than revisitng or continually deconstructing them."
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