The trouble with the book? Simply that it’s awfully big: 17 by 11 inches by a full 3 inches thick and just short of 20 pounds. It’s impossible to hold it upright to keep the text perpendicular to your line of sight. One of these days, you think, with 500 gigabytes of computer memory and big high-definition monitors available, books like this will be published first and foremost online.

In his 1999 biography, Diego Rivera, New York newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote that the muralist “had done something that few artists have ever done: He’d given a nation an identity. ...Rivera put his stamp on Mexico the way Bernini placed his on Rome. It is impossible to think of Mexico today without also seeing the images of Diego Rivera.” In other words, Rivera is a giant. To get an idea of how picayune so much art has become—owing in part to the fact that, as Hamill says, “the political passions that drove so much of [Rivera’s] public art are now dead”—think of Rivera’s collaborative enterprise devolving into a bunch of art students executing Sol LeWitt wall drawings in Tribeca condo lobbies. Worse, consider Rivera’s heroic agitprop figures shrinking down to R. Crumb’s pen-and-ink confessionals in the New Yorker. Pity.

"Myth Understood" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.