The driveway to Mr. Schjeldahl’s home for the party this year. (Photo courtesy Deborah Solomon)

The crowd at New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s Fourth of July fireworks display tends to be a little bohemian for the region. Dewy-eyed attendees from the art world who have trekked up to his 120-acre home in the Catskills describe the fireworks as “a volcano,” “elaborate choreography,” “magic,” “like watching a battle in the woods during the Revolutionary War,” “sublime,” “really dramatic,” “a rainstorm in reverse,” “like that scene in Apocalypse Now where they visit the U.S.O. show with the Playboy bunnies” and “spermlike.” (One year. Had to be there, apparently.)

“It’s basically like if you’re riding the Cyclone with somebody shooting fireworks at you,” Adam Horovitz told The Observer. “It’s just wild.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Horovitz, known to most as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys, began work on a documentary about the fireworks and plans to have a cut of the film ready in time for next year’s Fourth, with an eye toward an eventual wide release in theaters. The documentary marks his first foray into film and chronicles the fireworks show itself, as well as the mythos surrounding it.

The 22-year-old party in Bovina, N.Y., has attracted between 600 and 1,000 people in recent years, depending on the weather forecast. (Mr. Schjeldahl has never been deterred by rain.) Mr. Horovitz learned about the event from the writer Ada Calhoun, Mr. Schjeldahl’s daughter and a friend who plays on Mr. Horovitz’s softball team.

“It’s not a movie about fireworks because how much fireworks can you really watch, you know?” Mr. Horovitz said. “It’s about obsession, in a way.”

Though his own father, the playwright Israel Horovitz, ran in the same circles as Mr. Schjeldahl in the Greenwich Village of the 1970s, they apparently didn’t cross paths often. Still, Horovitz père would fit right in at the fireworks. The open invitation attracts the kind of crowd you might find at any downtown gallery opening, plus, in recent years, a slightly glitzier element. Artists like Yoko Ono, Brice Marden, Jim Torok and John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, have all been spotted there, as has Heather Hubbs, director of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and curator Ann Temkin of MoMA. There are always plenty of journalists—Roger Angell is a longtime attendee—and even celebrities, including Alan Cumming, Steve Martin and Ben Stiller.

“There were many faces that I recognized and many that I didn’t,” said Gary Tinterow, Nineteenth Century, Modern and Contemporary Curator at the Met, who attended the event for the first time this year. “Clearly there were people from the local community and that was marvelous, from fire captains to local residents to farmers and people engaged in regular country life, and the New York art-world-types, curators, critics, dealers and lots of young artists I presumed to be from Brooklyn because they had facial hair. It was great to see all these different aspects of Peter’s life represented in human form at his party.”

The carefully choreographed display begins with Mr. Schjeldahl only barely visible in the darkness at the front of the woods, as his basso friend Tom Groves leads the crowd in “The Star-Spangled Banner." Then, a handful of giant globular lanterns ignite and float into the sky, off into the Catskill Mountains. The show proper then erupts with three planes of fireworks, the first hand-fired by a group of volunteers stationed on one side of a stream. Beyond them, in a meadow on the other side of the stream, are clustered “cakes” of fireworks, now electronically wired and, just beyond that, bigger rockets launching from within the woods and from inside individual trees. It makes for an intense field of light and sound, exploding just above attendees’ heads.

“I think the first principal that I had very early on was to set off everything you’ve got as fast as you can,” Mr. Schjeldahl said on the phone from Bovina. “You cannot possibly go wrong if you do that.”

If pressed, Mr. Schjeldahl will describe his plane system as sculptural, a way to solve what he describes as the problem of the middle-ground, a difficulty in any landscape painting. But it’s not the first place he goes in a conversation about the fireworks. “I sort of purposely slap myself whenever I start thinking about it as an art,” Mr. Schjeldahl said. “I remember one very prominent art critic friend who first came out and afterwards was bubbling to me about Chinese scroll painting and various historical parallels and I had this flash of how artists feel when I talk to them about their work. I had two thoughts—one was I’m really glad she likes it, and the other was I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.”

“I’ve discovered that there is no fuck-up that someone won’t regard as a stroke of genius,” he added. “‘That great pause in there!’ Well, I was up in the woods madly flipping a switch and nothing was happening.”

Mr. Schjeldahl’s fireworks are near and loud—very much in opposition to the manicured ones of Long Island’s Grucci company, known for putting on the Macy’s show—and there have been casualties. This year a tree was ignited, though there had been rain earlier so that didn’t become a problem. His first year attending the show, Neal Medlyn, Mr. Schjeldahl’s son-in-law, caught some sparks from a low-flier, and art critic Jerry Saltz is said to have lost what was described as his “only sweater from Barneys” to a stray rocket.

“In my plans, there is no chaos,” Mr. Schjeldahl said. “But as they say in war, no plan survives the first shot. No battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. A certain impression of chaos is part of the show that’s part of your responsibility as a performer.”

And in this sense of immediacy, the show has always stayed true to its origins. “What makes it a really non-Grucci, more intimate, if elaborate, show is that it has that kind of lo-fi quality,” said New York Times editor Gerald Marzorati. “You’re actually watching people light the stuff off, so I think that’s part of the charm”

Mr. Marzorati is one of the pyrotechnicians at the banks of the stream and has been spending his Fourths on the property from the early days in the 1980s. He met Mr. Schjeldahl when he was writing about art for The SoHo News, and Mr. Schjeldahl was at The Village Voice. When Mr. Marzorati began attending the annual show, there was no house on the property, just a trailer for Mr. Schjeldahl, his wife, Brooke Alderson, an actress who appeared in Urban Cowboy, and Ms. Calhoun. The party consisted of no more than a handful of friends drinking beers and firing bottle rockets.

Through the years, Mr. Marzorati has been a sounding board for Mr. Schjeldahl’s ideas during the planning stage, which begins in the winter. Some innovations work better than others.

“We’ve tried to float fireworks in the stream and also on the pond—he has a pond on his property,” Mr. Marzorati said. “That didn’t actually seem to work.”

Mr. Schjeldahl’s art world friends and colleagues have their theories about why he and his wife go through all the trouble every year.

“I think it must be a release,” said Martha Wilson, the artist and founder of Franklin Furnace, who’s attended the past few years. She’s known Mr. Schjeldahl for years but hadn’t heard of the show until recently visiting friends in the area. “In the same way that being an artist allows me to run an institution because I have that outlet of being an artist so I can sit at my desk and be an administrator. It’s like his Batman persona.”

Naturally, Mr. Horovitz also has some ideas. “I feel like in Peter’s writing the words and the certain phrases that he uses are little explosions,” said Mr. Horovitz. “They take you back for a second. They send you ducking for cover or going to a dictionary to figure out what the fuck he’s talking about. The parallel is Peter does these fireworks, and he’s crouched in the woods ducking for cover, it’s not like he’s standing on a platform, shouting at everybody. Writers are just kind of in a dark room. It’s an interesting parallel, in a way, that he’s secretly dropping these bombs, and that’s kind of what he’s doing with his writing.”

With the fireworks keeping Mr. Schjeldahl busy (“He’s very busy, very busy,” said the writer Deborah Solomon, who has an outstanding reservation “for the rest of [her] life,” at the nearby Mountainbrook Inn for the Fourth; “I never say anything to him in the course of the weekend. It’s kind of like the mother of the bride at the wedding—you hope for a hello and a goodbye”), his wife, Ms. Alderson, is the party’s actual host. Two years ago, for reasons unknown, attendance doubled in size. This was great for the food tables—everyone has to bring one dish, locals bring venison and bear meat, Manhattanites usually try to outdo each other with culinary flare—but was a logistical nightmare for Ms. Alderson. There are now 15-minute cleanup shifts.

“I’ve always just regarded it as a privilege,” said Ms. Alderson, who used to have a general store called Brooke’s Variety in a nearby village, where she’d often extend fireworks invitations to strangers. “It’s a wonderful community thing, everybody gets to see each other, and one day a year at least we’re all in agreement that we really are happy to be Americans.”

“It concludes with a big bonfire and one year we had an artist friend paint a huge Union Jack, which we put on top of the bonfire,” Mr. Schjeldahl said. “There were some English guests at the party who got squirmy about it and I tried to explain that there were no hard feelings.”

Whatever keeps the party growing year after year, either the fireworks themselves or the social event, the patriotism on display from those who show up from the city, and who might be presumed to be too aloof for such an outpouring, is always mentioned as a sight to behold.

“What impressed me so much is that all these downtown avant-garde people are standing there lustily singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and cheering, really cheering, for the values that the country was built on,” said Ms. Wilson.

dduray@observer.com

Update 9/8: Amended to give proper credit for the National Anthem's bass.

Journalists have been heralding the rise of the graphic novel for decades. Ever since Will Eisner published A Contract with God in 1978, the adult comic book has hovered on the scene, always imminent, occasionally praised as a serious art form—as in the case of Art Spiegelman’s best-selling Maus (1986)—but mostly confined to the margins. Recently, it seems, the genre has once again reached that critical-mass, any-day-now moment.

“Graphic novels come of age,” Peter Schjeldahl boasts in the Oct. 17 issue of The New Yorker. His essay describes the genre as “unexpectedly complex and fertile,” an avant-garde artistic breakthrough. (Curiously, he also calls it “a young person’s art” and refers to the “taxing” challenge it poses for the consumer: the demands of both reading and looking at a story.) Mr. Schjeldahl trots over much the same territory (and touts the same handful of artists) covered last year by Charles McGrath, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, who waxed on in a Times Magazine cover story about the “newfound respectability” of graphic novels as a “vernacular form with mass appeal.”

Filmmakers are plundering graphic novels for source material—witness David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and Frank Miller’s Sin City. (This is hardly a shocking development: Graphic novels do tend to read like storyboards.) And in the Times Magazine we now have “The Strip,” a one-page, serialized comic created by “stars of the graphic novel.” Chris Ware, who produced Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)—which Mr. Schjeldahl called “the first formal masterpiece of a medium”—is behind the inaugural series.

But try actually buying a graphic novel and you may wonder what coming of age amounts to. At a local Barnes & Noble, I found all the comic books cluttered on a few meager shelves in a dark corner, dwarfed by the yards of manga comics nearby. Comic-book stores are still dominated by colorful juvenilia, with so many heroes on so many shelves. A trip to St. Mark’s Comics—one of the city’s main vendors—feels like a tour of a young boy’s fantasy closet. The “novels” are in back, past the supermen and buxom women; on a recent visit, I overheard one shopper ask a salesman whether adding fur to a Star Wars figurine would reduce its value.

Though Mr. Schjeldahl assures us that graphic novels are currently enjoying “a certain theoretical frenzy”—not unlike “the debates about painting that roiled Renaissance Italy”—I still experience a distinct sense of embarrassment when reading one in public. Whipping out a picture book on the subway feels weird, despite the nouveau literary credibility of such practitioners as Daniel Clowes and Marjane Satrapi. This is especially true if the book includes violence and nudity, both of which pervade Black Hole, by Charles Burns—a striking new graphic novel that Mr. Schjeldahl doesn’t mention in his essay.

A decade in the making, Black Hole is a dark, apocalyptic story about a strange, sexually transmitted disease that only seems to affect teenagers. Set in the Seattle suburbs in the 1970’s, most of Black Hole’s action takes place in the typical hangouts of adolescence—cars, the woods, basements—and unfolds in the patois of affectless youth. “Acid? I tried it once, but it was way too freaky,” says one peripheral character. “You know what I like? ’Ludes. They’re the perfect buzz. You just sit there and you don’t give a shit about nothin’.”

The plague swiftly spreads among the bored and otherwise unremarkable suburbanite teens, transforming each of them differently, often in grotesque ways. The mutated victims, who grow tails or webbed fingers or second mouths on their necks (if they’re lucky enough not to become complete monsters), live in tents in the forest and feel wistful for their former lives. They become shunned outsiders, cowed by the stigma of their own condition. Their first experimental forays into adulthood have left them scarred, cursed and dirty.

A compilation of 12 previously released episodes, the book is beautiful to look at. Unlike the scratchy cross-hatching of drawings by Robert Crumb, Mr. Burns’ work is known for its cleanliness, elegant inking and careful compositions. He first appeared on the underground-comics scene in the early 1980’s as a contributor to the pages of RAW magazine, a comics anthology edited by Mr. Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. With comics like Big Baby and El Borbah, he borrowed the distinctive style of pulpy romance and the crime comics of the 1950’s and made them creepier, darker and more twisted. Those who don’t keep tabs on avant-garde comics may recognize his drawings from album covers and The Believer magazine.

Black Hole is drawn in stark black-and-white, a cartoonish chiaroscuro. His pages often follow a straightforward format of boxes moving from left to right (with wiggly borders for dream sequences), and his characters have a familiar, iconic quality, with facial features that can seem generic. Mr. Burns’ comics can be understood as affectionate parodies of earlier genre comics, at once melodramatic and knowing, conventional-looking and stylized. Some panels recall the ironic jab of Roy Lichtenstein, but handled with greater skill and tenderness.

I found many of the drawings arresting. Some of them look like woodcuts; others cite trippy rock posters from the era. Each chapter opens with an intricately drawn object set against blackness, an effect that haunts even the most banal items (an orange, a yearbook photo).

Black Hole has an eerie quality, with most pages soaked in portentous darkness. It moves along with a sense of foreboding, as Mr. Burns nudges an ordinary coming-of-age story into the realm of nightmare. He captures the self-consciousness and anxiety of adolescence (“What did I do? What the hell were they all staring at?” asks one woman at a party), and turns natural feelings of alienation into something physical, literal and grotesque.

The writing is rarely poignant or memorable—the line between genre parody and improbably earnest dialogue can get blurry. But Mr. Burns does have an ear for teen angst: “He was all I wanted,” explains Chris, an important female character in the book, who ends up contracting the bug. “We were sitting in a big, dark graveyard, surrounded by a million dead bodies … but we were alive … we were so alive and that’s all that mattered.”

When a graphic novel is good, the artwork is powerful to look at, almost cinematic; it’s there to complete the author’s aesthetic vision, not merely to supplant a reader’s imagination. And images can evoke a powerful visceral response. Mr. Burns has painstakingly created a self-contained world, full of plaintive voices and real dread, and it’s pretty amazing to look at, too.

But there’s a reason why articles about graphic novels tend to mention the same names: Only a handful of artists are creating impressive work. The artwork is too frequently pragmatic and disposable, slapped onto the page to move the story forward. It’s a rare trick to combine words and pictures in a way that looks original, essential to the story and not childish.

Black Hole often looks exotic and even urgent. But like many a fine graphic novel, it can sometimes feel a little immature—a sophisticated way to regress.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

As a result, the people who make the magazine have spent generations veiled by the fictitious persona of mascot Eustace Tilley-and the quasi-fictitious non-personae of the legendary editors, Mr. Ross and Mr. Shawn. They emerge from the shadows only for obituaries.

The writers at least have bylines-and since the editorship of Tina Brown, some have also had their professional credentials briefly sketched on a weekly contributors' page. But above them in the editors' offices, and below them in the research and fact-checking realms, anonymity reigns.

Nevertheless, the magazine does have a full staff-a large one, even-and the staffers do have both names and job titles. There are, in other words, all the components necessary to make a masthead. Gathering and assembling those components is another matter. Working from a variety of sources-including interviews, the News Media Yellow Book, an in-house phone list and back issues of the magazine-it was possible to pull together a piecemeal approximation of some portion of the masthead. But even the most straightforward-seeming business, that of the writers, got tricky. The contributors' notes, studied in series, raise almost as many questions as they answer: Does it matter whether Peter Schjeldahl is tagged "the magazine's art critic," or someone who simply "writes about the art world for the magazine"? Does Lillian Ross have a title other than "a longtime staff member"? Is Roger Angell a writer or "a fiction editor," as he's sometimes identified? Answers: not exactly, yes and formally neither one. The New Yorker declined to supply the names of any of its staff, but a spokesperson agreed to confirm names and to provide missing titles. The result is almost certainly approximate and incomplete. Still, it exists.

Mr. Portnoy had the idea-if I may be permitted to use the word "idea" as loosely as this curator uses the word "grist"-of inviting nearly 20 artists, or would-be artists, to create works of art, so to speak, that would "define and create the meaning of critics and criticism." In principle, this is not an altogether uninteresting agenda for an exhibition. Artists as different as Daumier and Arthur Dove succeeded brilliantly in satirizing the critics of their time, and more recently Benny Andrews produced an entire exhibition devoted to the subject.

In practice, however, the gaggle of aspiring talents that Mr. Portnoy has assembled for this show isn't-with a single exception-up to the challenge. And this single exception-a painting on canvas by Peter Saul called Art Critics' Suicide (1996)-was well-known and talked-about in certain quarters of the art world several years before Mr. Portnoy undertook to organize the debacle currently on view at the White Box.

It may also convey something of the character of the Critic as Grist show to know that in addition to Mr. Portnoy's services as curator, the exhibition lists Marianne Vitale as its "curatorial engineer." This is a job description that is new to me. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to assess Ms. Vitale's contribution to the show, for on the day that I saw the exhibition not all of its engineering feats were functioning. Some of the television monitors weren't working, not all of the sound systems were audible, and some of the slide shows were not projected. Ah, the hazards of technology! It was owing to such technological failure that I did not get to see or hear Claude Wampler's video, Interview with Peter Plagens at His House . I regret missing this, for Mr. Plagens can usually be counted upon for his intelligence and wit, and this is a show that desperately needs every scrap of intelligence and wit it can muster.

I did get to see and hear the work that Paul D. Miller devoted to the criticism of Lucy Lippard. This is something called Glitch Music , which consists of abstract computer images on a screen accompanied by a sound track that combines a Philip Glass–type endless hum and what may or may not be the noise of fingernails scratching on a blackboard. I've certainly had my differences with Ms. Lippard's criticism over the years, but she has never been guilty of producing anything as mindless as Glitch Music.

Arthur Danto doesn't fare much better in Xar Taplik's mixed-media installation of a steel table, a water tank, a computer screen, and a variety of words and numbers; and Robert Hughes fares a good deal worse in Fairsbie Tabs' installation of what looks like an overlighted corner of an abandoned cellar. What any of this has to do with the content of criticism is anyone's guess.

By a process of elimination, then, Peter Saul's painting Art Critics' Suicide has become the show's primary attraction. It could be that I am prejudiced, of course, because I am one of the picture's two principal subjects. The other is Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic of The New Yorker . Exactly why we should be linked for the honor of serving as Mr. Saul's principal villains is a matter I can only guess at. Mr. Schjeldahl's critical views on most things are very different from my own. About the only thing we have in common as critics is that we both write moderately readable prose, which so many other critics on the current scene do not. And in my own case, to be sure, I have at times written very unfavorably about Mr. Saul's work. I cannot recall whether Mr. Schjeldahl has also been disobliging about the artist's accomplishments. Is it possible that Mr. Saul objects to readable prose?

According to the legend inserted into the upper left-hand corner of the painting, Mr. Saul seems to be under the impression that both Mr. Schjeldahl and I are "TOO STUPID TO LOOK AT PICTURES THEY THINK ABOUT ART." I cannot speak for Mr. Schjeldahl, of course, but I will confess that I do not spend a great deal of my time thinking about art, especially when I am looking at specific examples of it. I can well understand why this annoys Mr. Saul, for his own pictures do not bear much thinking about. They always introduce an element of sordid violence that is far in excess of what is appropriate to his subject, and the same goes for all the gun play in Art Critics' Suicide .

This penchant for sordid violence is something that Mr. Saul seized upon in the days of the Vietnam War, and in one way or another he has gone on re-fighting that war no matter what his current subject may be. For this artist, apparently, art criticism is war by other means. He doesn't really have another subject, and that is something that is more to be pitied than objected to.

Still, compared to the claptrap in the rest of Critic as Grist , Mr. Saul's picture at least gives us something to look at. But it is only in such dismal company that he can be mistaken for a serious artist.

Critic as Grist remains on view at the White Box, 525 West 26th Street, through Oct. 17.

And, face it: We live, work and acculturate in real time. In an existential framework, that is to say, in which only the present matters because, notwithstanding what Einstein may have postulated and Warren Buffett's long-termish investment philosophy seems to have demonstrated, in the American cosmology, what really matters about time is that it is money. In a worldview in which every second has its price, time is always a-wastin', and the moment must be seized and squeezed for the last groat.

We are plungers, momentum investors, ceaselessly in pursuit of the new new thing, to use Michael Lewis' happy phrase. It may be off-putting, but it is also our greatness as a culture. When the party or royal audience is over, and the time has come to leave, we turn around and go, often at flank speed; we do not exit backward, bowing, nor do we, like the French, say, pause to admire the patination at such length that we fail to notice that the lights have been turned off.

All of which is scant comfort to those of us old enough to have been lumbered with a historical education in which too much time has been spent in dead and dusty centuries past, in time frames of no conceivable utility when it comes to day trading. Twelve years of having one's mind marinated in the notion that this very instant may be causally conjoined to some perhaps consequential future moment-which is what history is about-leaves one with a tendency to investigate the present for what it may tell us about the future, by which is meant a point in time more distant than the next 10 basis points on the upside.

It's also fun just to know stuff, but that's an argument I've now lost so often in this space that my reiteration of the pleasures of knowledge must by now sound as mustily unconvincing as Al Gore's iteration of his alpha malehood. Speaking of which, if Mr. Blackwell is preparing his list of 1999 fashion victims, I would hope that Mr. Gore's new earth-tone suits will receive the attention they merit (and let me also put in a strong word for the wholly unbecoming long, electric-blue evening dress sported-both at poolside and in the pool-by Martha Stewart in a Kmart commercial.)

Anyway, the bottom line is, people like me just can't help looking at the present for indicators, portents, signs of what is to come. Usually, we're wrong-and even if we're right, it doesn't matter. Still, about five years ago, I concluded, on the basis of what I saw about me, both in terms of the artistic and ethical norms of our society, that Norman Rockwell's day was coming. Since prophecy is also a form of advocacy, I backed this up by using every means at my disposal, short of compromising glossy photographs, to persuade my colleagues on a foundation board on which I have the honor of serving to make a meaningful subvention to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.

It wasn't easy. Rockwell was a hard sell, difficult to be persuasive about in the art-historical and art-critical conventions of modernism and after. But my unashamedly expert and experienced eye had long convinced me that Rockwell was the real thing, not an empty suit like Andrew Wyeth. As Peter Schjeldahl put it in the Nov. 22 issue of The New Yorker : "Rockwell is some kind of great artist … This is no mere adjustment of a reputation, but a deep shift in how we identify and value visual art. Rockwell's greatness is of a kind that hides in plain sight." Incidentally, I recommend Mr. Schjeldahl's piece as a model of art-writing: full of big insights into the work specifically under scrutiny as well as replete with more modestly voiced, useful truths about art in general.

Anyway, we made the subvention, grudgingly, and Rockwell's time seems to have come around. This time, the contrarian view, expressed as prophecy, worked out.

Oddly, at a recent meeting of the same foundation, I felt similar contrarian pangs, this time in connection with matters perhaps less elevated but certainly more significant in the great scheme of things. We were considering our investments. Our advisers enumerated a series of dots which they connected up to what they felt was a fairly convincing outline of an animal resembling a bear. Certainly the "dots" were of the sort that causes anxious chin-stroking and grunts of apprehension among fiduciaries. Glum indeed were the faces around the table, except for one: yours truly, Alfred E. Neuman.

Here are the "dots." See what you make of them:

· Just four issues accounted for more than half the performance of the Standard & Poor's 500 through the first three quarters, while 11 stocks account for 100 percent of the market's rise;

· Those 11 stocks are Microsoft, Cisco Systems, General Electric, I.B.M., Sun, Intel, Citigroup, Nortel, Wal-Mart, TI and EMC. All stocks that owe their luster in some way to technology-either because they manufacture it, deliver it or (as with Wal-Mart) use it to manage with exceptional astuteness.

· Without technology stocks, the S&P 500 would have declined 1 percent year-to-date and been nearly flat for the last two years.

· The price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is currently 22.2 times forward earnings projections, while the technology sector trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 37.0.

· Over all, the market hasn't been this narrow since 1990, and this pricy in investor memory (at least since before 1900).

"Aha!" we exclaim. Concentration, high multiples: a sure recipe for big trouble. But what I see when I connect these dots looks more like a herbivore with horns- not a great, rampaging, deep-chested beast capable of carrying an entire economy up the slopes of Everest, but an animal more like Munro Leaf's flower-smelling Ferdinand, or the gentle garlanded animal that carries off Titian's Europa.

My reasoning is thus: I think we're looking at a "Microsoft 2000 market." Just as Windows is merely a shell wrapped around and pasted over the hoary MS-DOS operating system, so is the 11,000 Dow and its S.&P. equivalent a gaudy shell for a broad market in the equities of make-and-do-and-sell companies that has basically gone nowhere. One that is selling at around 17 times earnings, which is well within Graham & Dodd parameters. There is a point at which a bearish tendency becomes so extremely concentrated that it can be read as bullish.

The bear market, I fear, is the one we had from 1974 to 1981, one in which people bail out of stocks, period and across the board, either because earnings aren't there or there are no solid values to be had for ready money or simply because the cow or lemming just ahead seems to be running for its life. I don't see that here.

I have no doubt that gales of Schumpeterian "creative destruction" are out there, and will blow out the windows of the dot-com house of dreams (or cards, whichever you prefer), and Amazon.com Inc. will ultimately be wrecked by its lethal fundamental arithmetic-which is that of $10-an-hour people taking books out of one box and putting them in another. But the broad industrial heartland of equities looks O.K. to me, and ready to receive the funds that will rush out of the high-fliers when the lead herd animal is spooked and the stampede is on.

I'm seldom a contrarian bull-on anything. Maybe it's a consequence of taking up residence in a new life. But right now I find comfort in the narrowness of the market. And unless memory serves me wrong, I'm under the impression that although there may have been better opportunities to buy stocks since the last time the market was this narrow, namely 1990, I can't recall when they were.

The early adverse judgments on the show were no botheration to the folks at the Whitney who are primarily concerned to count box-office receipts. For in that respect, The American Century, Part I , nicely timed to coincide with the peak tourist season in New York, was a smashing success. But the criticism was a vexation for Barbara Haskell, the principal curator of the show and the principal author of its catalogue. She therefore arranged to be interviewed on the subject in The Wall Street Journal in an article that appeared on May 24 and used the occasion to strike back at her critics-primarily, as it turned out, Peter Schjeldahl, who now writes for The New Yorker , and myself.

I have to confess that it was a piquant experience to find myself bracketed on this occasion with Mr. Schjeldahl, with whose judgments on art-or, for that matter, anything else-I have seldom, if ever, been in agreement. I don't imagine this bizarre linkage gave Mr. Schjeldahl much comfort, either. For the fact is, our criticisms of The American Century, Part I were very different. My principal complaint about this mammoth exhibition was, as I wrote, that it was "only marginally concerned to concentrate on high artistic achievement." It was Mr. Schjeldahl's view, however, that in the period under review in the exhibition there was scarcely any achievement by American artists worth the fuss. There were certainly more than a few rooms in The American Century, Part I to support such a mistaken view, but that was precisely one of the things that made the exhibition such a shambles-its refusal to apply a coherent standard of quality. In lieu of such a standard, Ms. Haskell instead adopted the procedures appropriate to a social documentary, in which standards of esthetic quality no longer apply.

In her Wall Street Journal interview, Ms. Haskell more or less conceded the point by acknowledging, "Early on, I rejected doing an exhibition about art history," which, as she also said, "seemed a dry way of approaching the material." If her statement means anything, it means that she was to some degree in agreement with Mr. Schjeldahl about the paucity of American achievement in this period. Ms. Haskell's blather about art being "more than just abstract form and color relationships"-an obvious dig at art critic Clement Greenberg-was simply contemptible. So was her contention that "it's as if somehow we're still in 1910 and European art is still the symbol of quality." For no one knows better than Ms. Haskell that for many of the finest talents in American art in the first half of the 20th century European art was in fact not the "symbol" but the standard of quality they set out to meet in their own work. That she chose to ignore this fundamental datum of art history in order to produce a crowd-pleasing entertainment that would have what she calls a "cinematic flow" is only another measure of the exhibition's failure to do justice to the real achievements of American art. For what does creating "cinematic flow" mean in this context if not pandering to an audience's abridged attention span?

One of the best critical accounts of The American Century, Part I has come from a surprising quarter: the Art Students League of New York. In the summer issue of the League's journal, Linea , Ronnie Landfield has written an essay on the exhibition that speaks for the way many artists-painters and sculptors, that is-feel about this debacle. This is one of the key passages: "At first view the exhibition seems complete and it takes a while to realize that the Whitney Museum continues its long-term policy of undermining American painting and sculpture in subtle ways and in some not so subtle ways. This is about slick, sociological chicanery and not about great art. Like a wolf in sheep's clothing this exhibition pretends to be about art while it undermines American painting and sculpture. The works in this exhibition depend upon literal content not quality. Mass culture, glam, kitsch, commercial art, and Hollywood are glorified and revered, photography is exalted, and with a few exceptions, American painters and sculptors are showcased in a poor light. Dozens of important American painters and sculptors, some still living and some dead, are left out. Marcel Duchamp is represented by two facsimile pieces from 1964, in spite of his spending most of his professional career in Europe and not in America while Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hans Hofmann, and Milton Avery are left out altogether. The seeds of Pop and Conceptual Art have been carefully sown in part one. The thoughtful viewer's logical conclusions about what is to come in The American Century, Part II would be the new academy, cool art, the new salon of Post-Dada, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Pop, Video, and Post-Modern kitsch."

With the second installment of The American Century , with Lisa Phillips as principal curator, opening on Sept. 26, we shall soon see if this is an accurate prediction of what awaits us. My own guess is that, with Ms. Phillips in charge, Mr. Landfield's prediction may be unduly optimistic.