Baldessari's effort is a valuable lesson in the relative nature of quality - anything can look good or at least interesting in the right company - and in the importance of visual surprise, especially through the use of forgotten, resonant works. The show also underscores the importance of a museum's permanent collection as a learning tool: When museums underutilize their holdings - which most do - they shortchange the growth of their curators as well as the public.
The attraction to art other than one's own can be so overwhelming that the need to continue making art evaporates. Early Work, the White Columns show, presents six examples and suggests that former artists may have a propensity for becoming art dealers. It allows them to remain close to the origin of new art, and to use their ability to understand, work with and, let's face it, have sustained contact with artists.
Minter, who collaborated on this show with the independent curator Fabienne Stephan and the White Columns staff, said their aim was to choose "good dealers who were also good artists." The works on view date from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Konrad Lueg (1939-96), who gained fame as the Duesseldorf art dealer Konrad Fischer, is represented by a cheerfully patterned Pop-inspired abstract painting from 1966. In 1973 Maureen Paley, whose gallery, Interim Art, later helped jump-start the London art scene as we now know it, was in the swim of Post-Minimalism, documenting ephemeral installations by Polaroid.
Cheese Nips (Pathmark) - chain-store display as art - by Jeffrey Deitch, of Deitch Projects in SoHo, may qualify as Neo-Geo before the fact. A 1977 work recreated for this show, it dovetails with Deitch's admiration for artists like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach.
From Janice Guy, now a partner in the Chelsea gallery Murray Guy, we have images from around 1979 in which she aims a camera at a mirror while lying nude on a bed, a rudimentary reversal of the gaze. From about the same time are bondage videotapes starring Pat Hearn (1955-2000), a prominent New York dealer who began her art career as a flamboyant performance artist in Boston. Finally, Gavin Brown, whose gallery has been a fixture on the New York scene since 1994, made 7B/5E, five sweetly Conceptual pairings of photographs of similar rooms in two apartments in one building.
Although this work is no weaker than much of what routinely appears in gallery group shows devoted to young artists, it doesn't emit much heat. Perhaps the lesson is that anyone lucky enough to have a life centered on art should also have the courage to follow where art leads, even (or especially) if that is away from making the stuff. If you feel the love, the first responsibility is to spread it.
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