It’s a completely different experience from punching in the air
It’s not a good time to be an art critic. Much of what’s written is pale. It is weak and descriptive to no purpose. Or at the other extreme it is pure jargon, laughable if read aloud to the uninitiated. Junk. In fact, if art critics actually believed that anything we said or wrote mattered, we would probably be shooting ourselves in droves.
It is, however, a good time to be an artist. The heroic days of hard drinking at the Cedar and a fistfight with Jackson Pollock are over. But on the positive side of the ledger you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want and there’s someone out there fully prepared to take it seriously. Some lament this fact; they want a criterion back. I don’t. Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk. We don’t command and determine the facts, and never did. Merely do we pick at corpses, sorting a few things out, making explicit what was already there, etc., etc.
The 2008 Whitney Biennial is a feast and a free-for-all as far as the artists are concerned. You can make a realist painting (for God’s sake) or you can stick some poles and a stretch of metal fence into a block of cement. (…)
But it is very difficult to say what the work relates to or where it is coming from. Even a knowledge of art history antique and contemporary won’t help you much. These days art isn’t an insiders game so much as a contest in private languages. The artists are often working in their own heads and they don’t feel much compulsion to translate. This puts the critic and the curator in a hilarious position. Stripped of most of our authority, we fall back on tortured syntax and dubious vocabulary in order merely to say, in essence, that it is tough to talk about art these days. Here’s a typical sentence from the Biennial catalog: “Charles Long’s interest in opposing formal and metaphysical forces informs a complex sculptural lexicon marked by radical stylistic shifts that are difficult to categorize.”
The simple translation of this sentence: “Help, I don’t really know what Charles Long is doing or why.”
artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 | acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas }
