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Cool School

I went to see The Cool School a few days ago, here in New York. I found it fairly interesting. In some ways it is very much like the documentary Dogtown, in that it deals with a specific scene, in this case Ferus Gallery, and doesn’t really contextualize the situations. In fairness, I don’t know the timelines of events well enough in either film to know what was excluded or what was ignored. The context in both films seemed to be there wasn’t anything else of any interest or importance happening.

They did mention the blackballing of certain artists—specifically Richard Diebenkorn for making figurative paintings. I was wondering how they were going to deal with people like Lynn Foulkes. They showed a still of him painting and that was about it. He was apparently blackballed though like Diebenkorn he didn’t seem particularly damaged by it. The filmmakers used John Baldessari as a counterpoint, though I think some of his comments were about LA in general and not exclusive to Ferus artists. Overall, I think it was worth seeing.

from my phone