For far too long, John McLaughlin’s superbly austere paintings have been reduced by being contextualized within the narrow frame of Asian art history, particularly fifteenth-century Japanese brush painting. Favoring only one part of McLaughlin’s biography—his passion far all things Eastern, from his love of Asian antiquities, which for part of his professional life he dealt, to the several years he spent in Japan and his fluency in Japanese—disregards most of his work’s radical innovations by exoticizing them. While that tradition certainly played a formative role in the development of his severe

Ken Price’s high-polish, bold-color, lumpy organic forms are often discussed in one of two ways. The first involves how his work straddles the categories of art and craft—a conundrum that should remain mostly of interest to librarians who have to decide where to shelve his catalogues. The other goes something along the lines of “I like it, but I don’t know why,” usually uttered with a hint of naughtiness—the critical equivalent of sneaking a cigarette at a health spa.

If Price’s recent works do anything for the art-versus-craft discussion, I hope it will be to put one more nail in its coffin, as

Recently a friend of mine showed me the tiny silvery chip he’d pulled out of his brand new Ericsson cell phone. He had purchased it in New York, and although it was alleged to have global reach, for some reason it didn’t work in Europe. The delicate little object—expensive, futuristic—reminded me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what, until I opened the envelope of Peter Halley transparencies I’d picked up after viewing his recent paintings in New York. Seen in the spacious Manhattan gallery, Halley’s new works pack quite a visual punch; reduced to a few inches and carried across