Art: It Must Be Bad

"If more than 10% of the population likes a picture," George Bernard Shaw once remarked, "it should be burned, for it must be bad." On this theory—which most art critics are too polite to concur with, out loud—Indiana's 31-year-old John Rogers Cox might as well burn his studio down. Last week he walked off again with the Carnegie Annual's $200 popularity prize.

Carnegie's judges had voted $1,000 first prize to Cape Cod Abstractionist Karl Knaths for a knotty grey-green what-is-it entitled Gear (TIME, Oct. 21). But when the gallerygoers' ballots were all in, they had voted, as they did in 1944, for...