Krauss on Fried on Stella

One day while the show, "Three American Painters" was hanging at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, Michel Fried and I were standing in one of the galleries. To our right was a copper painting by Frank Stella, its surface burnished by the light which flooded the room. A Harvard student who had entered the gallery approached us. With his left arm raised and his finger pointing to the Stella, he confronted Michael Fried. "What's so good about that?" he demanded. Fried looked back at him. "Look," he said slowly, "there are days when Stella goes to the Metropolitan Museum. And he sits for hours looking at the Velázquez, utterly knocked out by them and then he goes back to his studio. What he would like more than anything else is to paint like Velázquez. But what he knows is that that is an option that is not open to him. So he paints stripes." Fried's voice had risen. "He wants to be like Velázquez so he paints stripes."

- Rosalind Krauss, "A View of Modernism," Artforum Vol. 11, No. 1 (April 1972), p. 48-51.