The opening of Julie Belcove’s Financial Times article about the contrarian conceptualist John Baldessari, who is trying, in his own way, to undo what the art world has done:

“In an age when contemporary art is very big business, and works by even living artists can command eight-figure prices at auction, John Baldessari is unafraid to poke a little fun at the art-industrial complex. The California-based conceptual master’s most recently completed body of work – a send-up of art history’s canon – takes a jab at the art world’s appetite for household names and easily identifiable visuals.

There is, for instance, an image of a soup can, a classic Warhol motif, but done in blue instead of Campbell’s red, without the label’s familiar logo, emphasising instead the can’s clean, minimalist, geometric shapes favoured by Sol LeWitt, whose name is printed underneath. Another piece takes a detail of a Jackson Pollock gestural abstraction but renders it in Matisse’s trademark yellow and blue and labels it with the latter artist’s name.

‘I was getting mildly irritated by artists getting branded – ‘This is a Warhol,’ ‘This is a de Kooning’ – and you don’t even look. It just has to look like a brand,’ says Baldessari, in fine fettle at 82 years old, on a warm summer afternoon at Marian Goodman Gallery, his New York dealer. ‘And I said, I wonder if I can slow that down.'”

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“A Brief History of John Baldessari,” narrated by Tom Waits:

“1970: Baldessari destroying his paintings”: