Barbara Rose was born in Washington in 1938 and studied at Smith College, Barnard College, and the Sorbonne. She received a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College, and Yale Unviersity, and has served as senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Among her many books are American Art Since 1900 and monographs on Claes Oldenburg, Patrick Henry Bruce, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Alexander Liberman. She is currently at work on a study of Jasper Johns to be called Souvenir, and is also organizing exhibitions for cultural exchange programs with Spain. She makes documentary films on American artists and writes for several New York publications. She divides her time between New York and Camerata di Todi, Italy.

In the first place, I take issue with your thesis that New York continues “in all questions having to do with high culture . . . to occupy a place of unequalled leadership.” Although it is surely true that style and fashion, in ideas as in art, are certified if not fabricated in Manhattan, I sincerely doubt claims regarding the pre-eminence of New York as a center of creation or criticism. The atmosphere of the city has been so radically altered by real-estate speculation and the influx of fugitive capital of unsavory origin, especially from Europe and Central and South America, that the survival of the arts, and certainly that of artists, is threatened by inflated rents, prohibitive production costs,