I enjoyed reading the sentiments expressed in Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MOMA. For those not familiar with Sherman, for the past 30 years she has created photographic self-portraits dressed as someone else, for example, Queen Elizabeth or Marilyn Monroe.
The intellectual vogue is long over, though the pedantry lingers, presuming that the mysteries of Sherman's art – photographs that are like one-frame movies, which she directs and acts in – demand special explanation. (She is remarkably tolerant of interviewers who keep asking her what she means, as if, like any artist, she hadn't already answered in the only way possible for her: in the work.) But the mysteries are irreducible.
