Goodbye to All That
Who Cares?
What Knowledge is being produced here?
Such were the first two lines of inquiry posited to me during graduate school and thus dutifully scrawled atop the distinctly Marxist syllabus I recently unearthed while sorting through the endless dump of books, notebooks, papers, folders, and other printed ephemera that I can’t quite seem to shred into oblivion, no matter how many years and thousands of miles we’ve managed to traverse together. Perhaps even more helpful, if no less kind, were the preemptive remarks delivered by another professor during those first weeks: “Nobody is going to care about the work you produce here. It will sit in the library; no one will read it, ever.” As an ardent realist, her words didn’t put me off. Others, however, were mortified. (That was years, mind you, before our student loans matriculated. Also: I haven’t so much as glanced at my thesis since I submitted it for publication in the Spring of 2007. Not once.)
I was reminded of these little truisms from my past earlier today, as Rob Storr’s final column for Frieze magazine made its way around the Internet. In a reflection on his own relevance, as well as that of art writing in general, Storr tells it like it is, as he sometimes does: “[In] the hierarchies of power, critics – like squid – are agile bottom feeders. Predictably many of my academically accredited colleagues will recoil at that statement but it is the cruel, Darwinian truth and neither high-flown rhetoric nor exalted teaching posts can save us from it. … And we write in order to exert that most elusive and ephemeral of things: influence. Being part of the dialogue is what drives us; figuring out how to give our ideas weight and our words bounce is the political, intellectual and literary challenge confronting us whenever we set to work.”
As someone who truly despises reading art reviews as much as I do writing them—there, I said it—I’m deeply appreciative of those who call the practice into question. A while back, I was briefly enamored with James Elkins’s What Happened to Art Criticism (2003, Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago), which preceded The State Of Art Criticism (2008, Routledge). There are writers and thinkers outside the field, of course, whose work performs an active critique of art criticism through its very form. Zadie Smith’s recent piece on Christian Maclay’s “The Clock,” published in the New York Review of Books is a distinctly literary example of writing about art wherein the author actually writes around the work, suggesting a critical path that the reader must forge for his or her own self. It’s a slower, more circumspect form—not criticism in the traditional sense by any means, but perhaps equally incisive.
Other examples? I can think of a few, including an essay by Rebecca Solnit on Ann Hamilton whose name I—nor any of my GChat contacts who are online at this given, including the person who first introduced me to it—absolutely cannot recall. (It is not São Paulo, Seattle : a document of two installations. That, we are collectively sure of.)
Anyone else?
