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What is left of a Mertz painting? Blue+red's arbitrary constant - chosen for its particular ugliness - leaves what? Puzzled faces, squares. Ryman or Buren and it's easy to say what we are looking at - everything but the color, everything but the stripes. Mertz it's hard to say. Its programmatic abundance of variables adds up to a wonderful arbitrariness, a sort of magical nothingness, a caffeine-free sugarless Coke.
