Don’t Learn About Art THIS Way!

Art
david-low-cartoon-9

DRAWING BY DAVID LOW
Heavy-handed enough to have done an ad for Conjecturism.

None too subtle was Theodore Shaw, the inventor of Conjecturism, a theory of art criticism that he invented, and continued to peddle via double-truck ads in newspaper supplements and various sectarian-intellectual journals of the 1940s-60s (Commonweal, Commentary, Partisan Review). Many people heard of Conjecturism the first time when someone at the National Lampoon (Sean Kelly? Henry Beard?) did a full-page parody of the ads. This would have been about 1973, by which time the train had left the station. “Don’t Learn About Art This Way!” The visual was an extremely heavy-handed cartoon in the charcoal-and-crayon style of the 1930s. That’s all I can tell you.

Originally published December 28, 2014. Updated February 27, 2016.

Author: Penny Pringlebury

Penny Pringlebury is the mother of two grown children, both of them twins.