Art critics divided after World Surf League releases bizarre image honoring 11x champion Kelly Slater on his 50th birthday: “The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper!”

Knives drawn.

Amidst much controversy, the World Surf League released an image honoring Kelly Slater on his 50th birthday that is very much polarizing art critics and lay persons alike.

Harold Rosenberg of ARTnews declared:

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

Thomas McEvilley of MoMA countered:

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Knives drawn.

What do you feel?

Where do you go when you gaze into the void?

Describe.