Knight Errant?

Regarding Christopher Knight’s cranky review of Richard Diebenkorn’s retrospective at MOCA (“Park Places,” Sept. 13):

Chris, please. Stop whining about beautiful art somehow not being enough. When someone gives us beautiful, luminous pictures, even pictures that make us feel sad, how could it be “for nought”?

Diebenkorn’s paintings give us much more than just beauty or pathos. Instead of “a wall of canvas and paint,” they are eerily luminescent windows opening out onto the private expanse of one man’s uncanny imagination. Since when is that such a crime? And since when is it a crime to have a vision of the world that aspires to “a paradisal realm”?

Of all people, Knight should understand how difficult it is to make good art about anything, much less the sublime.

D. ROSS

Ocean Park