A Voyage Around Art Criticism (1996)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 29 September 2011
This text was previously published in Art Papers on the occasion of their 20th anniversary issue in November / December 1996.
My commission for this article was to address the question of how someone becomes an art critic. (What art criticism is is another question that we’ll have to deal with in due course.) The route to criticism is often, as it was in my own case, a series of accidents and wrong turns that, to follow the traffic metaphor to its absurd conclusion, is something like the scenario of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend: the film follows a French middle-class couple along a drive in the country— except that every other French couple has had the same idea, and the countryside has become a huge traffic jam, during which civilization crumbles into, first, brutality; then, philosophy; and finally anarchy and cannibalism. Where along that route art criticism lies, you will have to judge for yourself.
In any case, the final stage of my typically indirect route to criticism began when Alan Sondheim (a filmmaker, artist, and writer who spent a couple of years in Atlanta in the ’80s that were extremely productive for the Atlanta arts community) sat me down with Xenia Zed (then editor of Art Papers) and suggested we find something I could write about. I hadn’t written anything since graduate school and had only written about art for seminars on Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, but it happened that I was interested in Kathy Acker, whose work bridges the visual and literary arts in interesting ways. [1] Let’s see, I’ve kind of lost my thread during that footnote… I offered to write about Acker, which led to Xenia contacting the author, bringing her to Atlanta for a reading, publishing an excerpt of her upcoming novel, etc. And leading to me beginning to write art reviews and articles on contemporary art. [2]
The popular image of the art critic is pretty awful. A recent crime novel of some literary ambition is titled Killing Critics (by Carol O’Connell). Aside from the wish-fulfillment fantasy implied by the novel’s title (which got the novel featured in a prominent art site on the World Wide Web, artnet), critics are portrayed in the persona of a man with "a limited range of expression, devoid of emotion even when he smiled, only communicating cool indifference and élan." In or out of the art world, the critic’s image doesn’t get much better: Elizabeth Hess recently referred, in her Village Voice column, to a 1946 horror film with the unique premise that a deranged artist/serial killer is out to get the critics that have caused him to remain among the starving classes. Another thriller, the estimable Charles Willeford’s Burnt Orange Heresy, portrays a critic as ruthlessly ambitious, to the point of murder (and Willeford was a critic himself). Artists seem often to see critics simultaneously as a.) in existence to provide PR for them and their galleries; and b.) arrogant pests standing in their way.
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