ekibastos…

We can all spend our time like Fredric Jameson, wandering around in the shopping mall and trying to remember where we parked our cars. His image of the mists of postmodernism, in which we wait for the new worker to emerge, is a striking one.

From the view of his airplane window, Carlos Basualdo wishes that we could see beyond the poplars and the mists to the mountain view beyond them - this would be the curator’s “highly differentiated form of knowledge.” He writes: “One gets the impression, for example, that many critics respond indignantly to any suggestion of subordinating the individual works to an overly complex thematic frame- as if the primary function of these shows were to free art from its intellectual overdeterminations. In other cases, it is the absence of theme itself, or its frequent extra-artistic ramifications, given serious consideration - in spite of the fact that, quite often, these side-programs are structurally constitutive elements in the explicit goals of the organizers.” (“The Unstable Institution”, What Makes a Great Exhibition, Paula Marincola, ed., Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, c. 2006, p. 53.)

Like Perl’s nostalgia for an earlier model bound to place, isn’t Basualdo’s accusation limiting the field in his desire for a totalizing view - the “theme”, summed up in the form of the curator? This feels very much to me like the desire to jog emerging forms of criticism back into a form of all-encompassing knowledge generated by the figure of Alfred Barr in his new formation. Hardly a challenge to the mountains of Modernism.

I was actually rather unconvinced by Basualdo’s assertion of widespread lacking on the part of the specialized press (he criticizes, for example, critics’ “numerous errors and omissions” while at the same time acknowledging that “many of these events are simply not designed to be seen in their totality” [leaving the question: then why are you criticizing critics for omissions?]).

Then again, if Perl is going to imply, through the volume of exhibitions he’s citing to make his case, that he’s surpassed mere anecdote and is now discussing data, he does deserve to have his analysis examined in that context in my opinion.

I completely agree that neither the opinions of one cantakerous contemporary art hater (we have one here in London too, his name’s Brian Sewell) nor the clamouring voices of any number of the scene’s boosters make for the clear-eyed balance we all seek. We need the middle, Third Way – by which I don’t mean namby-pamby fence-sitting – but sceptical, engaged commentary and some good old-fashioned long, hard looks. That’s all.

Lauding a urinal for its formal beauty will get you laughed out of most reputable organs of art criticism (except, perhaps, if it’s the New Criterion). The Matthew Brannon curated show, ‘Not So Subtle Subtitle’, at Casey Kaplan at the moment is a an object lesson (pun intended) in art that requires critics to bring to bear upon the work so much more than that which can be found within the work itself.

Which is to say that much of this work, and this kind of show, can be extremely frustrating, but it’s the job of the critic to take this as a challenge to his intellectual creativity rather than as an exercise in refining his normative judgments.

I don’t want to know that a work or a show is (no) good; I want to know why it’s (no) good, and that often requires that the critic lay out for the reader her rationale or method, be it contextual, historical, socio-economic, psychological, political, or what have you. And I think this is exactly the kind of thing one should get in a review (and it’s one of the reasons I like neither Perl’s criticism nor that of the so-called “progressive” critics named in this thread).

As I tried to indicate in my previous comment Jed Perl is a pundit not a critic. His readers don’t want analysis, free from contradictions and logical fallacies. His readers want him to attack contemporary art and the contemporary art scene and he gives them what they want every time. But even they are not satisfied with this meager gruel. He is more like a stand up comic than a critic and his humor is aimed at a very specific audience that is mostly comprised of disgruntled artists. It should be noted that some readers of Perl that I have encountered on the Internet have said that they get frustrated with his writing because Perl can’t do much else besides provide these diatribes. Artists who read him, and who usually dislike almost all contemporary art that gets exhibited, regret the fact that he provides them with very little constructive and positive criticism. He exists to launch spitballs at art world icons, contemporary artists who are being exhibited and feted by the big name institutions. What else does he have to offer?

But whether one has a dislike for contemporary art or not is independent of whether one’s logic should hold up. I would have a lot more respect for Perl’s opinions, even though we disagree about most contemporary art, if he wasn’t so sloppy about offering them. Faulting the Whitney Biennial for its installation design is one thing, but to conclude that that one exhibition is evidence of a prevailing installation cluelessness brought on by decades of disdain for aesthetic contemplation, especially in the light of easily available examples that contradict that assertion (at the same institutions, no less) is simply shoddy analysis.

The people who watch the 24/7 news channels on television or listen to talk radio programming are thoroughly catered to. Their prejudices and ill-formed opinions and judgments get are celebrated and confirmed every day of the week.

Partisanship has not only dumbed down political discourse. In the art world there are conservative critics, Jed Perl, a number of writers at the New York Sun, and Robert Hughes among others, and there are progressive critics such as Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, who would never dismiss contemporary work simply because it is new and who have trouble finding a contemporary artist they don’t like, or at the very least, feel ambivalent about.

There are plenty of critics who are situated somewhere in the middle. The conservative critics mentioned above do or did write for fairly centrist publications, Time magazine, The New Republic, the New York Observer, and the New York Sun, which is conservative and not centrist. Readers have choices. They can read whoever they want to. Who in the art world doesn’t know what kind of intellectual product Jed Perl is serving up at this point? It might be a fun exercise in textual analysis, to pick apart Perl’s reviews, but it is like shooting very large fish in a barrel.

What I find interesting is the way art critics bring other subject matter into their alleged reviews of art exhibitions. Making generalizations about the contemporary art world usually leads to sloppy thinking whether it is done by a conservative critic like Perl or a progressive critic like Saltz. What I would like to know is why can’t art critics, whose specific task is to write about specific works of art they spent time with in real time, can’t spend an entire review focusing on the work at hand, the content they are presumably looking at, hearing, smelling, touching, whatever. It would be refreshing if every insight the art critic had related solely to the art they were writing about.

If critics want to write about the scene, or the socio-economic-political climate of the art world, or to contextualize it, or historicize it, I wish they would do so within the confines of a separate essay, so that they can really focus on things, rather than run roughshod over various big topics, and inevitably embarrass themselves by providing scattershot commentary that comes off as silly or obvious when viewed in retrospect.

That is exactly the problem I have with almost all reviews of these big international shows. The art critics reviewing them more often than not provide no insights or interesting analysis of the works of art included in them. They offer readers basic and usually snarky descriptions of the woks of art and a huge helping of snarky comments about the current state of the art world. If an art critic’s responsibility is the add something worthwhile and substantial to the experience of seeing specific works of art than many living art critics would receive an F or a D at best on their report cards.

But jeremiads are not all the same. I would distinguish two kinds. The first, the Jerry Saltz variety, could be called a “jeremiad from within.” It consists, as the Hungarian saying goes, of “spitting in one’s own soup” (most Hungarian aphorisms involve food or barnyard animals). It is the exasperation of the parent, not of the scolding teacher. Our deepest wells of anger are reserved for those who are most dear to us. Who else could merit such emotional exertion?

Jed Perl has given us a “Jeremiad from without” — his words ring with a hollow and detached abhorrence of his subject. You can almost see him wincing, like a tourist eyeing a plate of fried insects. Nothing could bridge the gulf between him and the art of the last half-century. This detachment may be intellectually honest, but it is emotionally simplistic and devoid of empathy.

It also, as Steven implies, makes him a favorite in-house critic of a certain Upper West Side literary media establishment. In my many years of observing this coterie, I have come to believe that they are, on the whole, distrustful of visual art. Art isn’t literal enough: it is vague and messy and slippery, and this makes those who are committed to “objectivity” uncomfortable.

To generalize further, the positions of power in our media establishment are filled, for the most part, by men (mostly men) who relate to words and narratives, not visuality. You can strike up a conversation about a book or a play with a typical newspaper editor, but raise the subject of art at your own risk. For these people Jed Perl delivers a soothing validation of visual illiteracy.