Between Art and Words

Fifteen Years of haberarts.com

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.

I shall ask what went wrong. In the process, I want for a change to defend other critics and other practices. I cannot help, though, putting in a word for my own. After more than fifteen years, this site is huge. To show how it grows, I also add a look at a single exhibition, to suggest my evolving goals. Related articles laid out a first "preface to criticism" at the start and what my own retinal surgery taught me about art and vision.

Working in the gap

This site often returns to why art takes words. 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—and why history matters to art and criticism today. 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.

Me and Joan Miró

After all these years, I still like to say that I do not blog: I write about art. When I started this site, it did not even look like a blog. In fact, I had not even heard the term blog. It took eight years before I added a home page for shorter, frequently changing items.

I still try not to write impulsively, but only after I have had time for an exhibition to settle in my head. I want an outline to sort itself out—and some of the words to emerge as well. I would rather write longer than more often, and I would rather keep myself out of it. I put finished items aside, sometimes for months, before looking at them again, revising them, and rolling them out here. If I do not end up writing soon about some of the shows I have enjoyed most, because I have run out of things to say about them, the world will survive just fine.

When it comes down to it, I hate blogs filled with photos of exhibitions at the expense of insights. I hate the videos that begin with the blogger finding his way to the gallery, like the guy on the cell phone next to you making you listen to his progress toward the office. When I started, who knew that art would become this popular? Who knew that everyone would carry a camera everywhere to see it?

This once, though, let me describe how another review came about. Take an article near the close of 2008, about Joan Miró. I feel self-indulgent. I understand the hypocrisy of talking about myself in order to say why I do not talk about myself. It sounds like boasting. Maybe, though, it will continue an argument about what a webzine can contribute.

I left the exhibition happy. Gee, I thought, modern art really was lively back then. It was still an experiment in progress.

I knew Miró's work mostly from the Modern's permanent collection, including two works in the show—Dutch Interior, a fave, and Still Life with Shoe, far less so. I knew the later, postwar work, of open fields of color soaked into canvas. And for all their cuteness I had found the parallels to Abstract Expressionism striking. Gee, I thought, now I can see how it all fits together. This is what great exhibitions do: they get you excited about an artist, because they show you something that you had never seen before.

How critics provide context

I wanted to explain what I had seen to others. In other words, I had ideas in my head, and I wanted to share them. I did not need to share that I liked the show, as if my taste matters more than yours. I did not need to share that I like Miró, as if textbooks and museums need my approval to go on treating him as a major artist.

Judgment can still emerge implicitly, from the explanation. In fact, it can then be a lot more convincing. That is basically why art takes words. It is why anyone studies art and its history—because facts, interpretation, and explanation all broaden one's judgment.

I had also read two reviews that left me demanding more, very much as Michael Kimmelman had so many years before, when I read his review of a show at the Brooklyn Museum. It got me to define my purposes and the purposes of this site more than fifteen years ago. This time, Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker dismissed the show. He found its shocks pale compared to those of the 1990s, and he complained that it would take an act of the imagination to feel the impact that Miró once had.

I think that a critic's job is exactly that act of imagination. With it, the work he made his reputation supporting might actually start to lose its shock. Conversely, that context can make recent art more interesting, by giving it a history and a connection to culture now. One can see the shocks from older art and mass culture that it is recycling. I may or may not love this or that aspect of Miró, Dada, or German Expressionism, but I have no trouble seeing them all as ruder than Neo-Expressionism or the Young British Artists.

In The New York Times, Holland Cotter supplied just that act of imagination. He had a fine description of Miró's dissatisfaction with painting. He took pains to follow its twelve twists and turns along the way. Yet Cotter made the common mistake of operating entirely within the terms of the curators and the press release. He thus lifted the decade out of context in another way—the context of the avant-garde before it and the artist's recovery of painting after it.

A better review could offer a critique of what Cotter so readily accepted. It could draw on a wider history and the methods of critical theory. And the exhibition could get more exciting that way. Critics I like most, from journalists to scholars, can take that route. If a Web site has the freedom to operate in the space between them, however, maybe that can make it worth your while.

This site is huge

With luck, too, that explains something personal: this site is huge (and explosive). Not that it has the most readers of any art blog, although it has its share. I mean that it has art. It now reviews over a thousand artists and critics, in depth—with briefer notes on countless more.

While my tally of a thousand is totally arbitrary, it still felt like a landmark when I passed it on the 2010 Fourth of July weekend. I want you, too, to feel that you have a place on the Web to turn, not just for opinions, but as a real resource on contemporary art and art history. I search it myself all the time to remind myself who artists are. (Yes, that is every bit as embarrassing an admission as it sounds.) I am trying in the near future actually to write about fewer. But let me explain the counting part.

This site began in 1994, as the steadily expanding set of "static" Web pages that still forms its core. Eight years later, I added shorter items to the home page as a blog. I use blog posts as teasers for the longer reviews, and I take them down after two months. The blog includes (at right) a free Google applet, which will search the site for anything. However, the design also has two-line listings for all articles, arranged alphabetically by artist or critic under discussion, so that you can browse. And the list of names, as you can see, is itself searchable.

This home-grown search engine is restricted for convenience to last names. (I also index the names of selected group shows.) A search will take you to the artist listing, and I can now say that the javascript contains more than a thousand names. In indexing, I simply made a judgment call as to the chief subjects of an article, and again articles mention at least as many more. And many of those thousand names in the index are the subject of several articles. Some artists, like it or not, will just not go away.

I always imagined this as a place to take time with art and ideas, beyond the word counts and puffery requirements of most magazines, but while reaching people who get their art news from the papers rather than journals. I want my opinions to emerge from description and interpretation, rather than form a gateway to art. I try to add background, rather than parrot the limited theory and history of artspeak and "martspeak." I think that is what art criticism and arts education should do—and too often fails to do. You can also browse by period in time, for links to the same names—and articles now have nearly twenty-five thousand links between one another. Articles end with links to a separate listing for galleries and museums, with hours and Web sites as up-to-date as possible.

The site has huge gaps. It is a one-person operation, reflecting the limits of my knowledge and tastes (especially in non-Western art)—and of what gets exhibited (although I do have some book reviews and extended essays on theories, themes, and trends). It also has the strengths and weaknesses of premeditation. I see a show early in a run, try not to write until I have thought it through, try not to write anything at all unless I have something to contribute, and then set most things aside for weeks before hitting publish. I surely would have more fans if I had made the site more impulsive, as well as more respect if I had made it more scholarly in tone. But it is huge all the same.

jhaber@haberarts.com