Roger Brown

In this painting, Roger Brown eviscerates art criticism, calling out "The Artless Critics' Formula" and “The Artless Critics’ Lexicon.” The critical "writing in the sky" is nonsensical and pretentious, pompously regurgitating similar words and phrases towards incomprehensible ends. The word “effusion,” meaning an escape of bodily liquid, is repeatedly used and highlighted in red, offering a taste of Brown’s renowned sense of humor. The word Chicago is also repeated in the text, suggesting this was not an abstract attack against all art critics necessarily, but something focused more sharply upon the local critics in the city where Brown lived and worked—critics who often did all they could to doom Brown to a reputation as a regionalist painter. Brown is renowned for using a pop aesthetic to investigate a range of socio-political issues. His trademark silhouettes and curvilinear landscapes depict what was topical at the time, and often what was considered uncomfortable. His work is still of startling contemporary relevance today, cleverly approaching many topics from the natural and built environment, disaster, religion, the art world, popular culture, art history, eroticism, and socio-political concerns from modern warfare to mortality during the HIV/AIDS pandemic.