Jed Perl was born in New York City in 1951 and has a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia College and a master of fine arts degree from Brooklyn College. He writes regularly on contem¬porary art for The New Criterion, and has also written far Arts Magazine, Art in America, Aperture, The New Republic, and Vogue. He is currently at work on a study of French art since World War I, to be published by North Point Press in Berkeley, California. He lives in New York.

For the artist and the critic, a sense of value, though ultimately based on something like instinct, is shaped by a multitude of encounters with works of art and ideas about art. The experience of older and newer images and ideas, good and bad, and of other people’s reactions to them: all these—together, of course, with one’s reactions to one’s own work and other people’s reactions to it—form a constant, day-by-day accretion of minute judgments that build toward a view, a taste. The difference between the culture of the capital and that of the provinces—between high taste and provincial taste—is that in the capital one’s experience of the best and the worst and everything in between is more complete than in the provinces. One is challenged in a greater variety of ways, and thus has the possibility of developing a sense of value that goes deeper and nourishes, finally, a more complex sense of culture. In