"For Currin is quite simply on a no-lose ticket (a good hiding to everything): Bad Painting with quality technique. Keep the theorists chattering and the buyers salivating. Conceptually, he adds nothing to near-century old Dadaism. He is a fashionable footnote to Picabia. And technically? It is here that one has to despair, because of what the warped prevailing taste for Currin says about actual sensibility for painting of the past. If sub-Rockwellism actually looks to taste makers and key educators to be on some kind of parity with the art from the raided image-bank of history, if old-master technique is merely an abstraction to be referenced, like a brand or celebrity's name knowingly dropped, then we are in trouble."(artcritical.com > Curryin' Favor by David Cohen)
"If judgement is imagined as the hot faucet in a sink, then at the very least it will leak as soon as the cold is turned on (cold being the raw, primitive act of seeing). And, as the "institutional definition" would have it, it is the act of being looked at as art that makes art art. Actually, that very question, "Is it art?", ubiquitous in the experience of much innovative art of the last century, places ambiguity center-stage in the appreciation of modern and contemporary art."(Art and Cognition > interdisciplines > Ambiguity and intention by David Cohen)
Currin's "Thanksgiving" (2003), a comedy of manners, takes a satiric shot at all things American, depicting the national holiday of overfull plates and bellies as one of desperation.
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