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At any rate, between Contemporary Art of the last thirty, forty years and Dutch Golden Age painting say, I would say one looks like more of a joke than the other. ___________________________________
Well, yeah, in terms of craft, there's no question. But in terms of the political issues Chuck raised, I'm not so sure.
Vermeer and his contemporaries painted interiors, sometimes ironic, sometimes not using the iconography of a previous age as the underlying base line. I would say their colonial ravages did somewhat figure in some of the corners of some of the paintings as muted, nearly invisible questions. But the focus was squarely on the virtues of the rising merchant class.
Joanna