I read with interest and amusement the recent anonymous denunciation of myself as some sort of scandalous figure who came to Bermuda to criticise its culture and create havoc in the arts (Volk Art Attack: Wouldn't it have been better if Partner Re had given money to parade instead?) May 24, 2004).

By the way, writing a letter of this sort denouncing me, under the cloak of anonymity, is an act of total cowardice. Actually, I didn't come to Bermuda to criticise anything. I came to see the Baccardi Limited Biennial, to deliver a lecture, to meet whatever artists wanted to meet me, and to learn about art in Bermuda.

Happily, I met quite a number of promising artists and saw interesting works at the Biennial, at painter Glen Wilks' wonderful hair salon/art gallery Kafu, and at the Bermuda Society of Arts with curator Peter Lapsley, who is also an accomplished painter.

While in Bermuda, I read Andrew Trimingham's several shrill condemnations of the Biennial, which very much seemed to me like the voice of an oftentimes older group of landscape painters ? Bermuda's old guard or traditionalist artists, so to speak ? defending their turf, asserting their claim to preeminence, and at times dismissing whole mediums other than representational painting and sculpture as unfit for the exalted title of "art".

I also got a sizable dose of the landscape artists Mr. Trimingham favours, and I found much of that art to be rather staid, conventional, and uninspired, certainly when compared to developments in painting elsewhere.

That is what I criticised: an extremely conservative approach to art, reinforced by a very opinionated critic, and I also offered some suggestions about how things could become more open and vibrant.

A major theme throughout Anonymous' letter is that I lack credentials and expertise as an art critic. For this I will offer no defence whatsoever, other than to turn to the record.

One of the great things about the Internet is that information, for instance about contemporary art, is much more readily available. Rather than routinely accepting what Anonymous has written, I would first counsel your interested readers to investigate my writings and activities and then judge for themselves.

On the website www.findarticles.com one can find free of charge everything written in the major US art publications over the past several years, including articles and reviews by me for Art in America. (This website, incidentally, is an invaluable resource for those interested in contemporary art, and especially for Bermuda's younger artists).

By running a Google search on myself, one can also find numerous other writings as well as information on exhibitions that I have curated. Should your readers engage in this research, I would suggest one additional step. Since my anonymous critic cannot have his or her own record examined, and since it is reasonable to assume that this critic is in the conservative camp of Mr. Trimingham, Google me, to see some measure of what I have been up to in the arts for the past 12 years, both in the United States and internationally, and then Google Andrew Trimingham to see what he has been up to.

After that, your readers should have a better opportunity to compare and contrast our bodies of work.

Another theme of Anonymous' article is that art should, and indeed must, be "timeless" for it to be it truly excellent, and he or she cites an example: Beethoven's Third Symphony (The Eroica.)

For a practicing art critic, this is a laughable proposition. No one, not even the most astute and informed observer of contemporary art, has the slightest idea what will ultimately reach timeless status, due to the simple fact that the necessary time has not occurred yet.

To be 'timeless', a work must generate interest and enthusiasm over decades and perhaps centuries, while, as Anonymous correctly points out, rising above its "specific conditions".

Ultimately, however, this will be something for future generations to work out, not ours, and if the past is any guide the future will be full of surprises.

Few of his contemporaries predicted the current status of scruffy and eccentric Vincent Van Gogh, and none of her contemporaries guessed that the reclusive Emily Dickinson was, in fact, one of the two greatest 19th century American poets, the other being Walt Whitman.

Therefore, rather than worrying about what is timeless, which we couldn't possibly know anyway unless we had crystal balls or other powers of divination, I would suggest a very different approach, which is far closer to how thoughtful critics actually operate throughout the world.

One should be alert to and informed about a broad range of contemporary art, and not just a local scene, or the art from one's own country, or the art with which one is already most familiar.

One should be enthusiastic when called for, sceptical when called for, one should be honest, and one should also be charitable, especially when it comes to the work of younger artists, few of whom begin their careers making masterpieces.

As one ages, one should take care that one's ideas don't become ossified. Mental ossification precludes openness to new developments, and younger artists are always finding new and novel methods of expression, which should be encouraged.

One should also be sceptical of oneself, I mean as a critic. For centuries impassioned critics have sometimes got things entirely wrong. They didn't recognise the excellent, they extolled the mediocre, and they promoted artists they were chummy with, even when the work of those artists was hardly distinguished.

Above all else, one should be fundamentally curious about art being made right now, and this involves travelling, seeing lots of shows, meeting artists, meeting other critics and curators, and really participating in the discourse.

Whether Anonymous meets all, or even any, of these criteria is anybody's guess, but I doubt it very much. When Anonymous cites Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Ashanti goldwork as examples of great timeless art, he or she gets no argument from me. When, citing Jean Cocteau's film 'Orpheus', Anonymous concludes that art should "astonish", and he or she also gets no argument from me.

However, when he or she finds few, if any, astonishing or potentially timeless works made in recent years, Anonymous gets a huge argument from me, for I could point to dozens and probably hundreds of works that do astonish and enthrall, and I am hardly alone in this opinion.

One need look no further than a brief list of artists who are widely acknowledged to be at the top of their profession by other artists, major museums, museum directors, curators, critics, and the public at large: German painters Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, American sculptor Richard Serra, Russian sculptor and installationist Ilya Kabakov, Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, French-born and US-based sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Yugoslavian sculptor and performer Marina Abramovic.

Therefore, let me make this proposition. The problem is not with contemporary art; it is with Anonymous himself or herself. He or she doesn't find worthwhile art out there either because he or she would not recognise it, or simply does not attempt to discover it.

Blithely dismissing just about all contemporary art produced anywhere, other than the representational painting in Bermuda that Anonymous apparently favours, on the grounds that it is all fads, fashions, and trends betrays a profound ignorance of that art and positions Anonymous as a cantankerous and ill-informed opponent of most things contemporary.

An example of something very similar can be culled from recent criticism in Bermuda. For Andrew Trimingham, video installations are not suitable for museums or galleries but instead for the cinema, as he wrote in one of his numerous scathing reviews of the Biennial, despite the fact that video art and video installations, in galleries and museums, have been important forces in contemporary art since the 1960s, leading back to pioneering figures such as Korean Nam June Paik, among many others.

This makes perfect sense. Art adapts, makes use of, and frequently influences changes in the world, and one of the greatest changes in the world during the last 100 years has been the advent of moving pictures in film, television, and now computers and the Internet.

Once upon a time, lots of painters and critics dismissed video as some sort of entertaining "non-art" but that was decades ago. Their battles have long since been lost, and it was quite surprising to me to find antique arguments elsewhere revisited as some sort of contemporary news in Bermuda, especially by an art critic who apparently fancies himself as arbiter of and gatekeeper for artistic matters in Bermuda.

Continuing, Anonymous cites Andy Warhol, of all artists, as a prime example of what's wrong with contemporary art and also insinuates that Warhol's work is a fad that has fallen by the wayside, which is flat out wrong.

Andy Warhol remains one of the two or three most influential artists since the 1960s and he is broadly recognised as such throughout the world. However, guess what? Andy Warhol died in 1987. That's seventeen years ago.

A lot has happened in the arts internationally in the last seventeen years, especially the rise of artists who come from places outside of Western Europe and the United States that have traditionally received scant art world attention. Among notable figures are Mexican sculptor Gabriel Orozco, Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto, Iranian videomaker and photographer Shirin Neshat, South African draftsman and videomaker William Kentridge, Canadian audio artist Janet Cardiff, Bahamian sculptor and conceptual artist Janine Antoni, Icelandic sculptor Olafur Eliasson, Korean sculptor and videomaker Kimsooja, Ethiopian painter Julie Mehretu, Chinese painter Yun-Fei Ji, and Palestinian sculptor Mona Hatoum, among many, many others.

Actually, one can make a good case that these are exciting times indeed, given this welcome internationalism, and another welcome development over the last several decades is the unprecedented rise of female artists who have dramatically influenced what art is these days.

Nothing in Anonymous' letter reveals the slightest knowledge of or interest in these developments other than to announce without evidence that they are all so very, very bad, and that is the height of pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

To be stridently critical is one thing. To be stridently critical without knowledge is another thing altogether, and a great deal more suspicious. To be stridently critical without knowledge, while skulking in anonymity, is both suspicious and creepy.

In any event, that kind of approach is not a serious response to art at all, but instead a willfully ignorant, resolutely local, and curmudgeonly dismissal of contemporary times and contemporary aesthetics.

Of everything said by me in the original interview with Laura Bell published in the Bermuda Sun, nothing has generated more criticism than my discussion of difficult content, including issues of race, gender, and economics. Here, however, is something else to consider.

Paintings are extremely interesting for what they contain, and they are also sometimes interesting for what they do not contain, or for what they exclude, whether consciously or not.

When I survey the great host of landscape and architecture paintings that I saw in Bermuda, including those by both older and younger artists, what I note are primarily pleasant, contained, and extremely safe scenes: harbours, shimmering waters, anchored boats, lovely houses, wonderful colours, and so forth.

These are paintings of calm and not storms, of harbours and not oceans, of tidiness and not wildness, of wealth and not relative poverty, of local flavour and not local conflict. The vision advanced is one of semi-tropical pleasantry, and it is not a stretch to perceive many of these works as a form of visual propaganda: come visit Bermuda where things are pleasant and interesting and nice.

When houses appear it is usually as fetching facades ? Bermuda's special architecture ? but over time I also found myself wondering who lives in those houses, what life is like inside, and I also noted that there are a great many other, unwealthy houses in Bermuda that rarely (if ever) make it into these painted scenes.

What I also rarely saw in such paintings are people, and people come with a range of difficult subject material: all their aspirations and longings, politics and eroticism, vitality and fragility. What I especially did not see very often is black people, and in a nation that is 63 percent black.

That's when all this talk of beauty, edification, tradition, and "timelessness" begins to sound a little suspicious to me; that's when it begins to hide things rather than reveal them.

In Anonymous' letter to the Editor there is a fascinating moment. He or she alleges that I have extolled artists dealing with "gritty" New York and then asks why shouldn't Bermudian artists also respond to their surroundings? The obvious answer is that artists should, if they wish, do precisely that, because artists should always be free to pursue their own inspiration.

However, another obvious question is which Bermuda, exactly, are they seeing and conveying? Are there no "gritty" aspects to life in Bermuda, for instance issues involving race, and if there are, why do they rarely make it into paintings made by white artists?

Far from being chastened by the flurry of letters, articles, and emails directed against me, I am delighted. If my little visit has had such a big impact it is obvious that some feathers needed to be ruffled and that some waters needed to be roiled.

In my opinion, while it is excellent to see the achievements and experimentation of younger artists as they attempt to break free from quite rigid and conservative definitions of art, further critical and artistic perestroika is called for.

The more Bermuda develops fresh and knowledgeable critical voices and artistic approaches, and the more open those voices and approaches are to the world outside of Bermuda, the better it will be for the arts situation there.