It was a mistake for NYT to package it this way, and a mistake for the curators to allow their choices to be promoted this way. (The artists, I'll cut a little

It was a mistake for NYT to package it this way, and a mistake for the curators to allow their choices to be promoted this way. (The artists, I'll cut a little slack, because curation like this is not their business.) It's the ideas of 2 particular curators and 3 artists, and identifying "canonical" pieces of contemporary art is just not something even the best curators with a lot of prep time are able to do well - it seems like they had mostly "a recent afternoon in June". The NYT magazine tends toward clicky, buzzy stuff for people to talk about at Sunday brunch, and they have definitely done that.