Art: The Reluctant Tastemaker

In company with Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio and other worthies, Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred H.

Barr Jr. sat for an Esquire Magazine photograph last summer of New York's "Decisive Dozen"—tastemakers who "make decisions which affect the lives of at least the articulate members of the national community." Now he is not so sure how he feels about the honor.

Paying homage to Tastemaker Barr, Esquire gushed that he "commands what could be called a beautiful speaking voice. He constructs sentences of an almost eighteenth-century complexity without pausing to...

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