Joyce.

January stretches out before us like a desolate wilderness raging with inclement weather. What better way to fill the hours than filming your own adaptation of Ulysses and uploading it to the Internet? Other writers who died 70 years ago with works now in the public domain include Virginia Woolf, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson.

It doesn't mean you can record and sell your own audiobook of To the Lighthouse though -- you have to wait 95 years for work copyrighted in the United States after 1923.

A day when the drinks were on Mr. Joyce's tab.

Fans of James Joyce -- and fans of open bars -- flocked to Ulysses Folk House yesterday to celebrate Bloomsday with traditional Irish food, pints of Guinness, plenty of Jameson,  Irish dancing, readings from Ulysses and piles of oyster shooters served, for some reason, through an ice luge with a Guinness logo.

Bloomsday has always driven bibliophiles to drink excessively before the sun goes down. It celebrates June 16, 1904, which everyone knows is the day chronicled in Joyce’s most famous (and famously challenging) book, Ulysses. An extra reason to get drunk and ponder whether history is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake: like in 1904, June 16, 2011 happened to be on a Thursday. Another round of Guinness!

Outside of the tavern, on the hidden-away cobble-stoned section of Pearl Street, people dressed in period costumes and shirts recalling Bloomsdays past.

Christie Mannion, a woman that The Observer thought was dressed as Molly Bloom, turned out to be an upright bass player who dresses in Edwardian era outfits every day.  She ran from the West Village after hearing word of an open bar and the appropriateness of her outfit to the occasion. When tourists asked to take her picture, she very obligingly hid her cigarette.

"This is my casual wear," said Christie Mannion. "I just love the Edwardian era. Everything was  beautiful, it was decadent, it was rich. Women looked like women."

And what's with the pendant around your neck, Ms. Mannion? With the silhouette of a man's face? An important symbol from a long-lost past?

"Oh," she responded. "That's Tom Waits."

Not exactly Edwardian...

"You can't beat Tom Waits!"

A few feet over Michael Quinn stood polishing off the bloody mary shooter. His shirt was emblazoned with the iconic final words of Ulysses -- "Yes I said yes I will yes" -- and he announced that he teaches high school in Bay Ridge, but took the day off to stop by the Bloomsday festivities.

"I asked the head of the English Department if I could have a senior elective course, the whole year, for Ulysses," he said. "But there'd probably only be four kids who'd want to do it!"

Things were getting rowdy. Towards the end of the open bar, The Observer took a nearby seat at the center of the promenade, to enjoy a smoke and finish our Guinness. But the chairs belonged to another shop's owner, and he was none too pleased. After he kicked us out, a local Irishman, beer in hand, offered some friendly advice.

"Did that guy just take your chairs?" he bellowed over from a table, dog-eared copies of Ulysses nestled next to glassware licked with only a few specks of Guinness foam. "You shoulda put that cigarette out on his forehead and thrown the beer in his face!"

Tempting, but no thanks.

Of course, not everyone was taken with the literary spirit.

“What day?” asked a fresh-faced and fresh-suited J.P. Morgan trainee after The Observer asked if he was celebrating Bloomsday.

“Ulysses? So it’s the namesake of the bar and they are celebrating?” asked another flummoxed young banker.

With that the JP Morgan trainees went elsewhere. For some reason the lure of intelligent conversation on Joyce -- even if it came with free beer -- could not persuade them to stay.

Apparently, WBAI had concerns “about some of Joyce’s words and descriptions.” The novel is a bit risqué at times (Who can forget the chapter in which protagonist Leopald Bloom, for whom Bloomsday is named, masturbates as he watches a trio of young women playing on the beach?), and it was censored when first published in 1922.

“We decided at Symphony Space that we didn’t want to get involved in the hassle and anxiety of censorship,” Isaiah Sheffe, Symphony Space’s artistic director, told the Times. “Each year in the past few years there have been worries about a word or two.” He added that “some workers [at WBAI] seemed to be on edge about the possibility of broadcasting phrases that could draw the ire of federal regulators." WBAI producer Larry Josephson noted that there had never been any official complaints over Bloomsday, and that the racier material had traditionally been broadcast after 10 p.m.

“We’ve never cut anything,” he said. “I wouldn’t consider bleeping James Joyce. I think that would be an insult and an obscenity on its own.”

What WBAI listeners will miss this year are readings by Stephen Colbert; The Brothers McCourt (Frank and Malachy both: they’re doing the “Ithaca” chapter toward the end of the book); a musical interlude by the soprano Judith Kellock; and a concluding reading by Fionnula Flanagan of the book’s stream-of-consciousness style final episode featuring the nighttime musings of Leopold’s wife, Molly. WBAI will broadcast its own reading of her monologue, read by Irish actress Caraid O’Brien.

In the meantime, Symphony Space’s readings will be streaming on its Web site. Both performances begin at 7 p.m.

Mr. Thirlwell writes that he sometimes thinks of The Delighted States as "an inside-out novel, with novelists as characters … about the art of the novel." It’s about style and translation and "a system of interlinked revisions and inspirations"—any cute connection between any avant-garde novel or novelist from the last 400 years that happens to have caught the eye of young Adam Thirwell, who was born in 1978; is the author of one novel, Politics (2003); and is a Fellow of All Souls College and Oxford (in other words, he’s clever). If you flip the book over, you get his translation of a Nabokov story called "Mademoiselle O," an item Nabokov wrote in French and rewrote in English (several times) and in Russian. (In one version, "Mademoiselle O" is chapter five of Speak, Memory.)

A trivial error troubled me, a paragraph that began, "Nearly thirty years after Flaubert’s death in 1880, on 14 August 1919. …" No literary critic needs to be good at math, but you want to be extra careful when the exact M. Flaubert is in your sentence—and sloppiness has a way of spreading. Luckily, Mr. Thirlwell, who has a habit of referring to his own book as though it were a force of nature somehow beyond his control, is a forgiving kind of guy: "The Delighted States, let’s remember, is written with a full acceptance of the mistake, the anachronism, the side effect."

And yet he’s plenty harsh on Samuel Beckett, who appears for an instant, has his wrist slapped for his "impossible" opinions about Joyce, then disappears entirely. How can a book about translation and international avant-garde style utterly disregard the work of a great Irish modernist who wrote in French and then translated himself back into English? I guess it’s Mr. Thirlwell’s playground, and he can invite who he likes.

I have my doubts, too, about Mr. Thirlwell’s talents as a translator. When he quotes Nabokov on the crucial topic of exile—"Je suis dépaysé partout et toujours"—he offers this translation: "I am adrift everywhere and always." I can’t say that "adrift" is entirely wrong, but it’s not what Nabokov meant.

Most of the critical commentary is sound, some of it ingenious, but when he gets around to Kafka, Mr. Thirlwell allows himself this howler: "The missing word in Kafka’s famous story ‘Metamorphosis’—where the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover he has been transformed into a beetle—is ‘dream’: if Gregor could only find his way to the word ‘dream,’ then he would be calmed." Surely, the horror of "Metamorphosis" is that it cannot be dismissed as a dream. There, there, Gregor, it’s all just in your head.

In the British press, a few of the reviews of The Delighted States were scorching, suffused with sadistic glee—the caning of a smarty-pants schoolboy. But A.S. Byatt, writing in the Financial Times, liked it a lot. I read it eagerly, with admiration for Adam Thirlwell’s daring; I was more often dazzled than dismayed.

"In using the myth," Eliot wrote, "in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him …. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art, towards … order and form."

Eliot didn't have the visual arts in mind when he wrote this, but his point about the use of myth in Joyce nonetheless exerted an influence in art circles. Years ago, there was a well-known art gallery in Provincetown called H.C.E. (for "Here Comes Everybody," in Joyce's Finnegans Wake) that specialized in Abstract Expressionism, and a good many of the first-generation Abstract Expressionist painters gave mythic titles to their work.

One of them was Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), whose exhibition Pictographs 1941-1951 is on view at the PaceWildenstein Gallery. Gottlieb was a New Yorker who, after an early expressionist period with a group called "The Ten" and work on the Federal Art Project, found inspiration in the work of the expatriate European Surrealists, who'd fled to New York to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris. Freudian psychoanalytic theory was a crucial component of the Surrealist sensibility, and it also enjoyed a huge following among New York intellectuals; for Gottlieb, an additional appeal was that Freudian theory was saturated with allusions to classical mythology-the most famous instance, of course, being Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.

Gottlieb was fortunate in enjoying the friendship of two older painters, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, who served as mentors in his struggle to liberate his work from the conventions and sentimentalities of mainstream American painting. Gottlieb's account of this struggle is worth quoting at some length: "Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of the time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with and, around 1952, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology …. It seemed that if one wanted to get away from such things as the American scene or social realism and perhaps cubism, this offered a possibility of a way out, and the hope that given a subject matter that was different, perhaps some new approach to painting … might also develop."

What developed, in Gottlieb's art, was the pictograph, which divided the canvas surface into irregular grids containing a variety of signs, shapes and symbols purporting to harbor allusions to classical mythology. The first of these was called-what else?- Eyes of Oedipus (1941) and is frankly a rather lackluster composition, mainly of eyes and noses. Yet within a year or two, Gottlieb developed the pictograph into brilliant compositions of mask-like images and dazzling color that together recall us to the primitive rites and practices of the ancient world. In my judgment, certainly, the pictographs-with their highly accomplished synthesis of abstraction and representation-remain one of the high points of the Abstract Expressionist era.

Rothko opted for a very different development in his painting-a development that led to pure abstraction minus any visible trace of a representational image. This hasn't prevented certain critics from "discovering" images in Rothko's paintings, usually images related to Christian iconography. But these, in my judgment, are critical mirages. Why Rothko himself continued to declare that he was not an abstractionist remains a mystery-one that I'm happy to leave to the Freudians to explain.

My guess is that this new exhibition of Gottlieb's early work will do much to enhance a reputation that in recent years has been somewhat in the doldrums; for a younger generation, it's certain to be a revelation.

Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs 1941-1951 remains on view at PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, through Dec. 31, and is accompanied by an excellent, well-illustrated catalog.

Fertile Ground for Hucksters

Craigslist bills itself as an "online community." Unfortunately, online communities are apparently no less prone to crooks than their brick-and-mortar brethren, as nine apartment hunters who were bilked out of rent deposits by a smooth-talking con artist masquerading as a rental agent have all discovered in recent weeks.

The victims had been lured by listings on the Web site for affordable apartments at two Upper East Side addresses: 57 East 95th Street and 329 East 92nd Street. "They meet the person and give [him] a down payment," explained Inspector James Rogers, the 19th Precinct’s commanding officer. "There are nuances to the scenario, but that’s the gist of it. They don’t get the apartment, because the guy is not renting it. It emerged this week as a real problem."

In an incident that occurred on Aug. 10 (but wasn’t reported to the police until Sept. 3), a 24-year-old California woman said that she’d found the East 95th Street apartment while shopping on Craigslist. She sent the apartment’s alleged rental agent two unsigned $1,400 checks—one for the first month’s rent, the other for the security deposit.

Her understanding was that she’d sign the checks upon receiving the keys to the apartment. But the perp—described as approximately six feet tall and in his late 20’s—signed the checks himself and then cashed them. The victim was unable to reach him on his cell phone.

In an Aug. 31 incident, a suspect fitting a similar description did give a set of keys for an apartment at 329 East 92nd Street to a 25-year-old client in exchange for a $3,000 rent check. However, when the victim tried to move in on Sept. 1, he discovered that the keys didn’t open the door. He contacted the building’s management company, but the company informed him that it only rents out apartments after completing tenant-background checks.

That victim, an East Seventh Street resident, wasn’t the only person that the suspect had rented the apartment to for the month of September. A 21-year-old East 119th Street resident told the police that after she found the listing on Craigslist, the con man—whom she described as a 26-year-old, six-foot-tall male with a European accent—fraudulently represented himself as an authorized agent to rent the apartment. She, too, was left empty-handed after the con man cashed two of her checks, worth a total of $3,600.

The police said that the victims wrote the checks without actually ever setting foot in the apartments—victims apparently not only of the Craigslist crook, but of the urge to live in Manhattan. Why would anyone fork over several thousand dollars for an apartment sight unseen? "Because it sounds like a good deal," explained a police officer.

Stolen Classics

The works of John Steinbeck are making a comeback, if a recent incident is any indication. In a July 19 crime that was reported to the police on Sept. 9, a male entered Ursus Books and Prints Ltd. at 981 Madison Avenue and removed an autographed first edition of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, valued at $3,500. He then sold it to another rare book dealer in Boston; that dealer informed Ursus, which subsequently recovered the property. As despicable as the crime was, the thief apparently didn’t play favorites: He also stole a rare book by James Joyce, valued at $2,250, from the Boston book dealer and sold it to Ursus.

The suspect, described as a six-foot, 175-pound, 50-year-old male, was subsequently arrested by the Boston Police Department.

Paging Seymour Hersh

In another literary-related theft—or, more precisely, a case of literary identity theft—a 91-year-old East 88th Street resident issued a complaint to police on Sept. 11 that somebody had been swiping his subscription to The New Yorker.

The victim informed the cops that he was a devoted New Yorker reader—not one of those parvenus who only read the cartoons—whose subscription spanned the William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown and David Remnick eras (even though he couldn’t remember the magazine under Harold Ross’ sharpened pencil).

He added that after not receiving his favorite read for two or three months, he called the magazine’s 1-800 number and was told that the subscription’s address had been changed to 201 East 28th Street.

The nonagenarian assured the cops that he hadn’t moved, nor had he requested the change of address. Adding insult to injury, he’d been paying for his subscription while it was being shipped to a part of town that is, well, not quite New Yorker country.

Reading Glasses Amiss

Be it James Joyce or Art Spiegelman, those of a certain age will tell you that it all looks like gibberish if you’ve misplaced your reading glasses or, worse, had them stolen.

That’s the predicament a 58-year-old East 82nd Street resident found herself in at a Barnes & Noble on Sept. 2. The victim had placed her glasses on a table at the store’s 240 East 86th Street location as she momentarily stepped away to retrieve another book; she apparently made the mistake that many customers do, mistaking Barnes & Noble for her rec room.

When she returned, her spectacles were gone. And these weren’t any old generic over-the-counter reading glasses, but a pair of posh black Armani eyewear valued at $388.

Ralph Gardner can be reached at RGard135@aol.com.

This is one reason why the exhibition called Ear's Eye for James Joyce , which brings together a selection of paintings, drawings, collages and constructions by the American painter Susan Weil, all based on Joyce's writings, is something of an event. Another reason is that the exhibition itself is a sheer delight, so teeming with wit, invention and pictorial virtuosity that it's bound to be engaging even for viewers who've never read a line of Joyce. And as each work in the exhibition is accompanied by an excerpt from the text on which it's based, the show may also serve as a salutary introduction. For anyone even slightly acquainted with Joyce's oeuvre the show is a must.

Don't be surprised if you've never heard of either the the artist or her work. Although Susan Weil has devoted nearly two decades to the Joyce project and has meanwhile produced a number of limited-edition art books on the subject, the show at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery is the first American survey of her Joyce paintings. Her work is actually better known in Sweden than in the United States, where she was a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. In 1997, the National Museum in Stockholm organized an exhibition of her work that was accompanied by a catalog in English and Swedish. But as far as I know, no American museum has taken any notice of her work.

Don't expect to see anything resembling conventional literary illustration in this exhibition. Just as Joyce's writing evolved into a synthesis of realism and symbolism and a language rich in puns and other varieties of wordplay, at once earthy, elegant and often very comical, so the forms as well as the content of Ms. Weil's pictures and constructions mix portraiture, abstraction and disjunctive images in an attempt to create the visual equivalent of the rhythms of Joyce's prose. Attentive to the lilting musicality of his sentences, Ms. Weil's imagery traces a syncopated rhythm of its own that owes something to Cubism, something to Futurism and a lot to the freewheeling inventions of Dada. Yet the result resembles nothing we've seen in those earlier styles, for hers remains sharply focused on the Joycean scenarios she has taken as her guide.

Thus James Joyce II (2003), the work that dominates the exhibition, is divided into a dozen or so separate "portraits" of the writer-his face, his hands, even the soles of his shoes-that all but dance a kind of cinematic jig. In the big rectangular picture called Irish Stew (1995), on the other hand, Joyce's face is almost the last thing we notice in the lower left-hand corner of a composition crowded with more animated symbols. Joyce made a specialty of combining accounts of the most commonplace, even vulgar experiences with allusions to mythic archetypes, and Ms. Weil succeeds in evoking similar incongruities in the very format of her collage-constructions.

Almost as impressive as the pictorial invention Ms. Weil has brought to the Joyce paintings and constructions is her mastery of Joyce's often difficult writings. Even as great an admirer of Joyce as Edmund Wilson once wrote, "I do not deny that [Joyce] is tedious at times: I am bored by the relentless longueurs of some of the middle chapters of Finnegans Wake just as I am bored by those in the latter part of Ulysses ." I myself have never found it possible to read Finnegans Wake through to the end and, like Edmund Wilson, "I have found it puts me straight to sleep to try to follow" some of the academic explications of Joyce's later writings. Yet Ms. Weil appears to have taken such difficulties in stride, and has paid Joyce the great compliment of devoting some 18 years to the study of and visual interpretation of his literary achievement. I repeat: Ear's Eye for James Joyce is an event.

The exhibition remains on view at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 137 Greene Street, through Sept. 28.

Whether or not this is one of the reasons why large-scale exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance tapestries have been a rarity for as long as anyone can now remember-well, that's a question we can only speculate about. What is certain is that the greatest of these tapestries are indeed art on an epic scale, and major exhibitions of them remain a rarity. Even at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there hasn't been an exhibition of such tapestries since the 1974 show devoted to Masterpieces of Tapestry from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century , which, among its 97 tapestries, included two complete Unicorn series, both The Lady with the Unicorn from the Cluny Museum in Paris and The Hunt of the Unicorn from the Cloisters in New York.

Now, with the exhibition the Met has mounted in Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence , the museum has returned to the subject with a somewhat smaller but no less magnificent survey of these rarely seen masterworks. In the art world, it has unfortunately become commonplace to speak of this or that work of art or even entire exhibitions as "magnificent" when we may only mean that we have seen something rather striking or unusually interesting. But on this occasion, it isn't mere hyperbole for the museum to make a claim for magnificence in the very title of the exhibition. With its 41 tapestries, some of enormous size, from 33 collections in 12 countries, Tapestry in the Renaissance is itself an exhibition on an epic scale.

The focus is on the period 1420-1560 in the Netherlands, Italy and France, when the churches and royal courts of Western Europe were in a position to devote a considerable portion of their great wealth to an art that was deemed to be one of the essential measures of their authority and power. It was rarely, if ever, an art addressed to the masses. It was thus not, in our sense of the term, a public art. As the museum is at some pains to remind us, Renaissance tapestry was "the art form of kings" and their vast retinues of courtiers and dependents. It is only in modern times-and even then infrequently-that, owing to the emergence of the art museum as an institution of public culture, our own democratized societies have been given large-scale access to an art theretofore reserved for what we should now describe as a social and political elite.

With our entry into the very first room of this huge exhibition, we are confronted with a dauntingly unfamiliar spectacle: The Death of Troilus, Achilles and Paris , a late-15th-century tapestry measuring nearly 16 feet in height and 31 feet in width, and depicting a battle scene of almost unimaginable violence and complexity. Woven of wool and silk in the Netherlands circa 1475-1495, it encompasses such a multitude of individual figures, horses, flashing swords, flying banners and inscriptions in French and Latin verse-all embel-lished with brilliant color-that it takes a while even for an assiduous eye to identify the fallen heroes whose tragic fate gives this teeming narrative composition its principal themes. Even by Renaissance standards, The Death of Troilus, Achilles and Paris is an amazing feat of pictorial invention, and it is said to be but one example of what was originally a series of 11 tapestries depicting the story of the Trojan War.

More familiar to us is a single example from the Unicorn tapestries- The Unicorn Defends Itself , from the Met's own permanent collection. Although the Unicorn tapestries have a certain fairy-tale quality, the series was actually conceived as an allegory of the Passion of Christ, and this one fits into the current Met exhibition quite nicely, as the bulk of the tapestries selected for this show are indeed devoted to religious subjects.

Some of these, too, are of such a size and complexity that they can scarcely be seen in their entirety on a single viewing. When we revisit them, there are always new discoveries to be made. Take, for example, The Triumph of Lust , which exceeds 27 feet in width. It was designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, circa 1532-33, and woven in Brussels a decade later. It is so crowded with dramatic action, arcane symbolism, fantastic invention and decorative embellishment that the eye soon despairs at the task of encompassing more than a fraction of its teeming narrative. Basically a tableau of unfettered debauchery set in a more or less pastoral landscape, even the moral of this admonitory composition is not easily fathomed, for most of the many lovers depicted in this overscale picture appear to be having a very good time and not to be especially concerned about the punishments that await them in the next world.

Since this tapestry was part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, there can be no doubt about its didactic intention, and its very subject-the eternal conflict between the Vices and the Virtues-was an established convention in Christian art and literature long before the Renaissance. Yet to the modern eye, anyway, the pleasures to be derived from the triumph of lust are certainly given their due in this composition, and one cannot help but further wonder if their depiction on this scale may not have served as a further incitement for some of the sinners to which it was originally addressed. I mean no disrespect in observing that it's a very entertaining picture.

Moreover, one of the most interesting things about this Tapestry in the Renaissance exhibition is the public's response. On the first morning that I spent in the exhibition, visitors seemed absolutely transfixed by what they were seeing in the first two or three rooms of the show, and maintained a slow, thoughtful pace through the remainder of its 10 rooms. The study gallery, where visitors can sit down and consult the voluminous catalog of the show, was more crowded than I had ever before seen at the Met. They weren't just resting, either. They were reading, comparing notes, and clearly in a state of high excitement. It was all new to them, and they were enthusiastic-maybe a little bewildered, too. This was not something they had encountered in Art History 101; it was like nothing they had ever seen before. I felt pretty much the same way myself.

The only downside of the exhibition is that when you leave it and make your way down that long second-floor corridor adorned with a great many familiar 19th-century European paintings and sculptures, everything suddenly looks rather timid and paltry, in size and style as well as subject matter. We are plunged smack back into the unheroic era of bourgeois art, and the sense of loss-the loss of intensity, scale and grandeur-is deeply felt. It was like attempting to read prose after a protracted immersion in the poetry of Dante and Shakespeare.

Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence was organized by Thomas Campbell, associate curator in the Met's department of European sculpture and decorative arts and supervising curator of its Antonio Ratti Textile Center. Mr. Campbell is also the editor and principal author of the show's excellent catalog, which runs over 600 pages. Among much else, Tapestry in the Renaissance is an extraordinary curatorial and scholarly achievement, and it's a show I expect to return to many times before it closes at the Met on June 19.

Yet, however foolish the question may be, when a writer in The New York Times confidently announces that today's "contemporary art" dates precisely from the year 1970, attention must be paid. You or I may not be taken in by such obvious nonsense, but we both know that there are still a great many people around–some of them quite grown-up–who tend to believe what they read in The Times , especially on subjects they know nothing about.

The dubious distinction of having made this pronouncement about the year 1970 belongs to Deborah Solomon, who, in the course of an interview with Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Sunday Times of Jan. 9, boldly declared that contemporary art began in 1970–in the period, she avowed, "that follows modern art." I have to confess that when I read this astonishing statement the other day, the first thing I thought of was that wonderful first stanza in Philip Larkin's poem, "Annus Mirabilis," that goes:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)–

Between the end of the

Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

For just as there are a great many grown-up people today who believe that nobody had a good sex life before the 1960's, there are apparently a lot of deluded folks on the art scene who believe that "contemporary art" didn't really get going in this country until–well, whatever year it was that they began to pay attention to it. For people of this myopic persuasion, the beginning of contemporary art and–who knows?–maybe all of art history dates from the day they arrived in Manhattan and saw their first exhibitions at Leo Castelli's or Mary Boone's.

But this, of course, is to confuse personal experience with the history of the world–a not uncommon problem with certain critics and museum curators of Ms. Solomon's generation. Yet Ms. Solomon herself can scarcely be said to belong to the ranks of these esthetic innocents. She has written biographies of Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell, who were once themselves–need we be reminded?–contemporary artists of some notoriety in the period that she has now consigned to pre-1970 antiquity. Add to this the fact that Ms. Solomon's parents are art dealers who specialize in the kind of blue-chip modern art that was once itself in the forefront of the contemporary art scene, as even I can remember. So how are we to account for an assertion of such stunning–what shall we call it?–simplicity. Sheer ignorance, though never to be wholly discounted, is not a sufficient

explanation.

My own guess is that Ms. Solomon's assignment in conducting the Times interview was to expose Mr. de Montebello as some sort of reactionary or hypocrite in art matters because of his public criticism of both the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Kiki Smith sculpture of a defecating nude female figure in the Whitney Museum's American Century show. It is in the very nature of high-profile media interviews today to aim for embarrassing or befuddling their subjects and thereby exposing the institutions they represent to public ridicule. Ms. Solomon's specific target in the interview was the Met's record in the field of–what else?–"contemporary art."

If that was indeed the point of the interview, then it must be said to have conspicuously failed in its purpose. For Mr. De Montebello responded to Ms. Solomon's ill-formulated questions with an engaging combination of firm conviction and intellectual courtesy. In regard to her amazing claim that modern art had ended in 1970, Mr. de Montebello reminded Ms. Solomon, "In this department, we're dealing with a period of just 100 years, so we don't need to break it up into modern and contemporary." And implicit in that statement is an assumption, or so it seemed to me anyway, that works of contemporary art are still expected to meet the same standards of quality that apply to the acquisition of works of art from earlier periods.

That, in any case, is what I take to be the policy or theory governing the acquisition of new art at the Met. In actual practice, however, the museum is rarely in a position to abide by such rigorous standards of quality, for there is very little new art on the scene today that can meet standards of that sort. As a consequence, the new art–or the recently new–that we see in the Met's galleries tends for the most part to be the usual hodgepodge of overpublicized contemporary reputations. I frankly do not see how it could be otherwise. Time is always a factor in the codification of esthetic standards, and neither record-breaking auction prices nor well-oiled publicity machines are adequate substitutes for the perspective of history.

It is worth recalling, in this regard, that many of the modern masterpieces we admire in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art today weren't all that new when Alfred Barr was acquiring them for MoMA in the 1930's. Most of them dated from the earlier decades of the century, and some from the last years of the 19th century. The first work of art that MoMA acquired for its permanent collection, moreover, wasn't a Fauvist painting by Matisse or a Cubist painting by Picasso but a Realist painting by Edward Hopper. We may have a high regard for Hopper–I do myself–but he could hardly be said to represent the highest achievement of modernism in the 1930's. Time was an important factor in judging art then, and it remains an important factor today.

In the absence of historical perspective, we are all to some degree hostage to the winds of fashion and publicity. Take the case of the Irish-born American painter Sean Scully, whose works on paper are currently the subject of a small exhibition in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing at the Met. Hardly a week seems to pass without some announcement of a Sean Scully exhibition or publication arriving in the mail, either at home or at my office. Mr. Scully is clearly an energetic traveler, and so these announcements come from various points of the globe, yet the look of the work that is reproduced on these announcements remains the same. It is the work of a highly accomplished pictorial technician whose signature style of painterly stripes and rectangles is yet another example of what is best described as tasteful modernism.

In the current show at the Met, Sean Scully on Paper , there are pastels, watercolors, etchings and photographs, and in an adjoining gallery there are two oil paintings, Red on Cream (1976) and Molloy (1984). A preliminary watercolor study for Molloy , based of course on the novel by Samuel Beckett, is included in the show itself, which also features suites of etchings said to be inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach . I must confess to a certain skepticism about the relation, if any, which these paintings and etchings bear to their ostensible literary subject. Joseph Conrad and James Joyce are writers who deal with very different realms of experience, yet in Mr. Scully's work they are both reduced to the tasteful modernism of the artist's abstract repertory of stripes and rectangles.

What saves Mr. Scully's work from being utterly contemptible is his technical mastery of the various media he employs. Yet by associating this technical virtuosity with writers who had something profound to tell us about the nature of modern experience, he inevitably reminds us that his own art is conspicuously lacking in depth. The more one sees of the work, the more it looks like a certain mode of modernist abstraction at the end of its tether.

Alas, the Met has not yet solved the problem of encompassing new art in ways that meet high artistic standards. But then, none of our other museums has, either. Perhaps it is not a problem susceptible to a solution in a period as creatively fallow as our own.

Sean Scully on Paper remains on view at the Met though March 12.