9.1.10 — Between Art and Words
Somehow, it keeps coming down to words. Strange, no, when art is so rarely straight text—and, perhaps especially then, never just an argument.
Perhaps my most frustrating moment this year, although also a rewarding one, was speaking on a panel devoted to “the handmade.” Has anyone spent time with group shows and open studios filled with dreary, derivative painting? Is that seriously the answer to bloated, trashy exhibitions? And can anyone call the latter conceptual art, when it has hardly an idea in its head? My answer had three parts: celebrity drives those big shows, money drives celebrity, and it will take art rich in ideas and feeling alike to break their hold. 
Now it happens again. I contributed, this time to an online panel, on the subject of “complicity.” Is art trapped by a corrupt system, or can art and ideas break free? No, I answered, to both. Overt protest, formalism, and working within constraints—what I jokingly called explicit, implicit, and complicit art—all have their risks and all have their place. And, sure enough, the loudest reply changed topic entirely, to my use of critical theory for vocabulary.
This site often returns to why art takes words and why I write. Looking does not come naturally, especially after Modernism and as art history fades into memory. That is why museums may try to rig responses with wall labels and press releases. That is also why too much art aims for show, at the expense of felt ideas. And again, when the show starts to look hollow or corrupt, as with a private collection at the New Museum or Jeffrey Deitch moving from Soho dealer to museum director, one had better not point the finger at theory rather than money. But I have said all that, and I shall not try to do better right now.
Nor does it help to single out for blame the subset of ideas called critical theory. It covers too much to mean much as a handle, it has made its contribution to the debate, and it has inspired some decent art. Besides, if it has become stale, artists may deserve some of the blame—for not creating work that turns philosophy inside out once more. This is a great time for art, judged by the new hybrids of genres like photography, realism, and abstraction, but diversity means drift as well. And there, too, markets play a role. They intensify the “originality of the avant-garde” to a perpetual search for the latest thing.
No one should have to defend the propriety of philosophy, when it comes to art or to anything else. It hardly began with the 1970s. In fact, others had asked, fairly enough, why I did not lean more heavily on the Frankfurt school rather than Jacques Derrida and Hal Foster. One can argue with critics, just as one can argue with Plato, Kant, your friends, or me. However, that means no longer demonizing them. And, again as with Plato or your friends, you may lose.
Of course, academic discourse is stuck in its own rut. No one needs another student paper comparing the treatment of women in Henry James and Charles Dickens. Still, the discourse has some lasting gains. When artists like Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida open a window onto the art world, they follow the growth of entire disciplines like museum studies. Other fields have felt the same pressures, and a good thing, too. International relations, for one, must now consider constructivism, Marxism, and feminism alongside the old poles of liberalism and realism.
Theory sounds impressive, but the divide between scholarship and ordinary criticism has never been greater. And that divide has terrible consequences for art. Even just before October, artists turned avidly to writers like Robert Smithson, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Michael Fried, Arthur C. Danto, Tom Hess, Lucy Lippard, and a dozen others as distinguished and committed to the artists they loved. Now magazines look and read like advertising, and artists worry more about who gushes about what show on Facebook. One can blame the obscurity of theory for the divide, but then it gets hard to blame theory for art. Rather, again money talks, by demanding criticism focused on thumbs up or down.
I can only say again that this is why I write. I want to work in that gap between art and words, in a way that is accessible but informed. Maybe Thomas Hoving created the dilemma by his own demand to work in that gap. He showed that a museum that does not reach out fails as a public institution, while one that does risks commercialism. Then again, elitism and popularity both have their merits, and Picasso over time managed both. If it keeps coming back to words, at least art still gets people talking.
And with that, I leave you for a trip through much of Labor Day weekend. I have also made this part of a longer article and apology, as my latest upload. It includes a post that first appeared on this page in an earlier form, about the explosive growth of this site. It also wraps in notes from three years ago on the site’s evolving aims, in light of an exhibition of Joan Miró. That material had bloated and warped an earlier attempt of mine at a preface to Web criticism.
| Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site. |




