There is a classical purity about the spareness and simplicity of Christoper Wool's black on white lettering and the resonant but ultimately meaningless messaging of the big clean cut shapes and the short, repetitive or partial wording, somehow demonstrating that it retains meaning even at the limit of reduction. But whether his many small photographs of the wasteland which serves as an urban neighborhood amount to anything more than a grim and sterile record of an artistic and social vacuum seems questionable, and the similar arbitrary and random grey blotches and streaks which make up much of the rest of the show seem equally void of direct or associative meaning, yet, in the context of the Guggenheim's hallowed walls, it seemed charged with something - but what?

The critic for the New Yorker thought he saw it - he called Wool the finest contemporary artist at work in America today, or words to that effect. And Wool collected three million dollars as a fee for allowing the museum to show his work.