Who+Gets+to+Call+it+Art?+Reviews

As the curator of contemporary art at New York's Metropolitan Museum in the nineteen-sixties, the drolly rambunctious Henry Geldzahler was a key player in the city's exuberant modern-art scene. Andy Warhol's confidant, David Hockney's longtime friend, and a habitué of countless studios, openings, bars, and happenings, Geldzahler (who died in 1994) organized a legendary 1970 exhibit of four hundred works from the previous thirty years of New York art, and time has borne out the power of his exacting taste. Peter Rosen's engaging documentary about the late connoisseur is over-edited to a music-video rush, but evocative archival footage and trenchant interviews with artists arouse nostalgia for the converging postwar currents that made New York the capital of artistic originality, for the cheap housing that afforded artists the time to achieve it, and for a bygone age of lower image saturation, when the romantic craft of painting was a crucial source of news from the outer and inner world. Copyright © 2006 [|//The New Yorker//]
 * From [|//The New Yorker//]**

//Who Gets to Call it Art?// is a wild ride through the fascinating 1960s New York art world, seen through the eyes of first "contemporary art" curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry Geldzahler. Never-before-seen footage of artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein as well as exclusive interviews with artists Frank Stella, David Hockney, and James Rosenquist provide a vibrant and entertaining look at ten amazing years when American artists challenged everything and forever changed the world of art.
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