Franklin, you are not an art nerd. You are an artist who is interested, as an artist certainly should be, in knowing as much as possible about the long historical continuum of art, since art is not contingent on when or where it was made but on how well--on how good its maker was as an artist. If you were not what you call an art nerd, I would have serious reservations about you as an artist.
And I wouldn't call Holland Cotter (who might as well be named Holland Tunnel) a silly critic. I see him as a would-be critic of art he's not fit to address publicly from a position of putative authority.
Franklin, you are not an art nerd. You are an artist who is interested, as an artist certainly should be, in knowing as much as possible about the long historical continuum of art, since art is not contingent on when or where it was made but on how well--on how good its maker was as an artist. If you were not what you call an art nerd, I would have serious reservations about you as an artist.
And I wouldn't call Holland Cotter (who might as well be named Holland Tunnel) a silly critic. I see him as a would-be critic of art he's not fit to address publicly from a position of putative authority.