Historicization may be part of what we expect from art, but Fredrick Jameson’s recommendation that one “Always historicize” sounds like a rule. The problem, I think, is the word ‘“always.” It makes it sound as though historicism is always the same and always observed or digested in the same way. “Always” is an absolute, everything else other than absolutely nothing isn’t.

At some time in the ’80s I gave a lecture about American painting between the world wars at a space the Whitney Museum had on Wall Street, where they put on shows and had people come and give talks at lunchtime.

Awkward x 2 was formed in 2010 by Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe out of the desire to make works in which a painting isn’t finished until neither artist is sure who did what.

My mental snapshots of Michael Goldberg start circa 1968 on an Easthampton bay beach. It’s windy, early spring. Our party of daytime drinkers is crouched on the dunes, smoking Gauloises and pot. The one at the shore line pouring the Bloody Marys tells me Goldberg’s backstory: Back in the '50s, when he made his precocious reputation, he signed his paintings “Michael Stuart.”