There's plenty of different conclusions one could draw when trying to absorb artist Eric Wesley's takeover of an abandoned Taco Bell in Cahokia, Illinois.
But the past two decades of art criticism have not been kind to formal mastery: it has been considered something inherently suspicious, a message sometimes too swiftly absorbed by artists themselves.
And if one quarrel has absorbed American artists and thinkers more than any other, it has been that one between the values of a mass, democratic, popular culture and those of a refined elite culture accessible only to the few the quarrel between "low" and "high".
Can one artist's approach absorb another artist's approach and everyone walk away as friends?
Tony Feher Like Gagosian, PaceWildenstein has the deep pockets and gallery acreage to absorb new artists almost effortlessly.
The name GALA fused the abbreviations for Georgia and Los Angeles, but eventually the committee absorbed dozens of artists around the country.
Here's another: starting with Cubism, artists absorbed, from science, the romance of pure research and, from engineering, the spirit of problem-solving.
Another dealer, André Emmerich, absorbed the Greenbergian artists, marking a historic fissure in the avant-garde, which soon fragmented beyond Castelli's power to unite it under his hallmark.
And self-absorbed artists swagger like rock stars.
Brett Gorvy, who runs Christie's postwar and contemporary-art department worldwide, said Klein's early sponges — in which the porous surface is absorbed in the artist's signature ultramarine blue — are "becoming rarer and rarer".
By the 19th century, Western-style perspective techniques ceased to be a novelty and had been absorbed into Japanese artistic culture, deployed by such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige, two artists best remembered for their landscapes, a genre Toyoharu pioneered.
