Lisa Phillips has promoted the kind of work that the people outside say has supplanted them. We don’t have quotas for media and we don’t have quotas for style.”So what about the appointment of Lisa Phillips as curator of the 1997 biennial, won’t that exacerbate this row? Holmes shrugs “It’s too early to tell. “Here we have a huge exhibition devoted to Hopper’s paintings. We’re inside the museum, standing in front of Edward Hopper’s Carolina Morning, a painting and a Realist masterpiece The chants can still be heard, faintly.

Despite the resurgence of painting, especially in Realist forms, 1997 will be a re-run of 1995.”"It’s ironic, isn’t it?” says the Whitney’s deputy director Willard Holmes. None of the many fine young painters working today were displayed,” says Perlis “It was a triumph of politics over aesthetics. Lisa Phillips is well known for her antagonism towards painting. According to the Whitney, the biennial is “the premier showcase for the most important developments in recent American art”.

Perlis complains that the past three biennials have failed to deliver that brief because they excluded painting and particularly what he calls “Post-Modern Realism”.”The 1995 biennial had hardly any painting at all, and what the Whitney did exhibit was work by artists who are dead or no longer painting. “The Whitney has dedicated itself to keeping the dead body warm – they are the necrophiliacs of art.”Perlis is especially angry about the 1995 Whitney biennial and its recent choice of the museum’s director Lisa Phillips, as the curator for 1997. His next big show will open at the prominent Sindin Gallery next week. It’s just across the street from the despised museum that has never exhibited his work.

“Modernism is dead,” he shouts to the adoring crowd of angry young painters. The demonstration is the latest skirmish in an international battle between Post-Modernism and Realism or figurative art.
The loudspeaker has just been handed to the Realist painter Don Perlis. Most of them are artists who practise Realism and many are painters, although a few Realist authors and composers have dropped by to offer moral support. They claim that the Whitney, one of America’s leading museums of modern art, has deliberately excluded painting, drawing and sculpture in favour of more “contemporary” media like photography, video and installation art. Assembled on Madison Avenue last Friday, their anger is impressive. The target of this splenetic crowd is the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Painting!” Painting? That seems a rather weak battle cry alongside “world peace” or “jobs”, but New York’s intellectuals take art seriously.

“What do we want?” Like all demonstrators, the crowd bellows back an answer. Your homepage will be held in a folder on the service provider’s computer, and if you want to add images it is best to dump them in that folder too, where they are easily and quickly accessible by your homepage.. Cityscape, for example, charges pounds 60 per annum per megabyte, but if you are a member they offer 500K space free, which is room enough to set up a simple homepage with a couple of small pictures. Demon, the biggest server provider on the Net, charges pounds 25 per month per 10 megabytes, which would be preferable if you had, say, a business catalogue to put online or a very large ego to advertise.Having signed up with a service provider, you send your homepage document to them as a “file transfer protocol” file (again, standard Net software does this for you), and away you go.You will be allocated a password to allow you – and no one else – to update it. It seems that it will charge for this (see the Netscape Web page at http:// www.mcom ).Once you have your homepage written, you get it on to the Web by renting time on a server, a computer that is permanently linked to the Internet. Any Internet service provider will sell space, but rates differ.