PROFILE of John Baldessari. Andy Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations with his contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. In L.A., he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. (via John Baldessari, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art : The New Yorker)