Like a shout across a body of water, we cannot trace these echoes back to their source, nor would we really want to. Maybe it is enough to suggest that the three [John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Jane Freilicher] shared a taste, a gentle desire for very similar kinds of art, as well as for a gracious existence composed of the pleasures of the good life: beautiful things, fine food, excellent company. […] In a way, [their] uncritical pursuit of the ornamental, their time spent touring historic sites, sitting in restaurants, and discussing surprisingly inevitable romantic matches, is a kind of aesthetic bloodletting, a warding off of inconsequentiality by fully engaging in it. It takes some nerve to engage so faithfully with this kind of beauty, especially when the art world around you is set on dismantling the relevance of a bourgeois sensibility in art.

Jenni Quilter, “Explicit as a Star”