I make art, I buy art, and I sell art. I've been doing all three for forty years. The standard for all of it is the same: the work has to be new and it has to be beautiful — and those aren't two separate things.
Dave Hickey wrote that beauty is radical in its power to violate expectations and expand our sense of the possible. That's what I mean by new and beautiful. Not new plus beautiful. Not decoration with a twist. One thing — work where the newness and the beauty can't be pulled apart. You don't recognize it at first. It doesn't look like what you already know. Then it becomes the thing you can't stop looking at. Then it becomes iconic.
I learned that at California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s, studying with John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow, and Nam June Paik. I learned it from Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Johns, Dumas, and Ray Johnson. Every one of them made work that didn't look like beauty until it did — and then you couldn't see the world without it.
That's what I look for and that's what I make. In my studio, at my desk, on this site.
I ran Michael Rosenthal Contemporary Art as a brick-and-mortar gallery for five years and have operated online since 2015. The collection leans toward painting, works on paper, and prints, with deep roots in the California landscape tradition and the painters of the Society of Six. Every piece here carries a personal connection and a memory. When I look at them, they tell the story back.