Picasso's Progeny

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The Whitney show proceeds as far as Jasper Johns, but younger living artists don't turn up. Why would they? Picasso's innovations, which were largely in the realm of space and form, hardly apply to things like installation work, conceptual art or videos, the practices that so many artists are caught up in now. But it's also because Picasso's great discoveries have become the universally understood possibilities of the canvas. Artists long ago stopped thinking of themselves as operating in space that Picasso made possible. So did the rest of us. It's just space, like something God made. Picasso, who liked to see himself as the ultimate creator, would have been fine with that.