“Postcards from Nowhere,” which appears in this week’s New Repub­lic, is Jed Perl’s latest poison-​tipped volley against the ruling elite of con­tem­po­rary art. Some sample copy:

For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-​Qiang, having a ret­ro­spec­tive at the Guggen­heim is like being a Visig­oth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggen­heim, the staff no longer curates exhi­bi­tions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.

And, dis­cussing the Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum and the New Museum:

Dis­cussing such muse­ums in archi­tec­tural terms is like dis­cussing a sculp­ture by Jeff Koons in com­po­si­tional terms. You would be kid­ding your­self. These muse­ums are only brands designed to con­tain brands.

I’ve been struck favor­ably by some of the art that Perl hates. Whichever of Damien Hirst’s mir­rored med­i­cine cab­i­nets was hang­ing in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 2006 was impres­sive enough to steal my breath for more than a few seconds.

But far and away the best things at the Grassi were the very uncon­tem­po­rary Rothkos hang­ing in a second-​story alcove. And so, having found myself almost com­pletely bored by the Whit­ney Bien­nial a few weeks back–only Leslie Hewitt’s lean­ing paint­ings held my atten­tion for more than a few min­utes there–I have to count myself gen­er­ally sym­pa­thetic to Perl’s spite.

That said, I thought it inter­est­ing to see how dif­fi­cult Perl found it to explain what exactly it was that gets under his skin about the Matthew Bar­neys and Richard Princes of the world. In one para­graph, it’s the fact that

all these artists, in one way or another, are at war with the idea that a work of art estab­lishes a free­stand­ing uni­verse. While their lines of attack are more or less subtle, the result is ulti­mately the same: they replace the there that con­sti­tutes a work of art with a nowhere.

In another para­graph, Perl com­plains that “Koons and his kind have never been inter­ested in the old avant-​garde idea of out­rag­ing the bour­geoisie, of shak­ing up expectations.”

In still another, he works to defend Mondrian’s style against the accu­sa­tion that his “primary colors and right angles are no less a look, a logo, than Koons’s shiny chromium sur­faces and cur­va­ceous forms.” The dif­fer­ence, Perl asserts, “is that for Mon­drian a style is a dynamic prin­ci­ple, not a fixed attitude.”

In sum, three very dif­fer­ent kinds of argu­ments–meta­phys­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and styl­is­tic–for what con­sti­tutes the orig­i­nal sin of con­tem­po­rary art.

But what struck me most about Perl’s attack was how closely it hov­ered near the ter­ri­tory of Michael Fried’s sem­i­nal essay “Art and Objecthood.” Perl sees muse­ums stacked with objects (”The generic spaces cre­ated to dis­play con­tem­po­rary art…are basi­cally big-​box stores: cubic footage to be filled with stuff”) when what he wants to see is art (”Whatever hap­pened to the belief that a museum ought to be a unique space that con­tains unique objects?”).

What makes art art and not an object? For Fried it was the “mutual inflec­tion of one ele­ment [of the work] by another.” To put it in more simply (as Fried also does) art has a syntax, objects do not. (For Fried syntax is the con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity of meaning.)

Syntax, in Fried’s sense, is the con­cep­tual nub that Perl seems to circle through­out his essay, though he never really touches down on it. Con­trary to what he sug­gests, the dif­fer­ence between Koons and Mon­drian doesn’t really make sense at the level of style. There is such thing as dynamic style, but that isn’t what sep­a­rates Mon­drian from Koons. What does sep­a­rate them is syntax: Mon­drian has it, Koons doesn’t. And that makes all the difference.