5.1.25 — The End of Theory
To pick up from last time on the future of HaberArts, had I introduced myself around, I might be better known today, like many a political blogger from those days, but I did not. I looked into submitting work to print magazines, too, but they demanded no more than four or five hundred words, and I wanted room to learn and to see.
They also demanded that writers pitch shows before they opened, so that the magazine could stay current. But then I would have to commit to art before I knew whether it was worth the attention—and whether I had anything to say. This was not what criticism should be. I still took the Internet as a game, but I had found my medium. 
What, then, should criticism be? Naturally I had to discover that over time, too. My preface to criticism itself came years after I had begun, and it needed a fresh look years after that. Yet it still comes down to telling a story, through theory, description, interpretation, and judgment. But then every theory, description, or interpretation is a judgment, and every judgment is an interpretation. Think of them as four ways of answering, what is art?
I hate reviews that stop at “best of” lists and the bottom line—and that is just where memes and mass media are heading. Criticism can settle for picking winners, or it can invite you into strange and wonderful ideas and art. That includes my favorite artists along with newcomers who will soon be favorites, and I hesitate to tell you who that may be. Suffice it to say that that, too, keeps changing. When I started, it would have included Caravaggio, David Smith, and Jackson Pollock but would it have included their female counterparts in Artemisia Gentileschi, Dorothy Dehner, and Lee Krasner or Janet Sobel? It would surely have included Diego Velázquez, but would it stop to mention his black slave who became one of Madrid’s leading artists, Juan de Pareja?
I like to think so, but you can fairly ask me to prove it, and I think that over the years I have. When I started, though, I had been nursing some favorites for years, and the Web gave me the chance to linger over a painting by Giovanni Bellini in my favorite corner of New York, the Frick. (Hey, I, too, had my theories.) A book review allowed me to take my time with maybe the best of all, a double portrait redoubled in a mirror by Jan van Eyck, to whom I have returned again and again. Everyone has a theory about that one, and it got me into my longest review to date sorting them out. I doubt that I could write like that now.
It came at the end, as it turned out, of a wave of theory—the peculiar challenge of Postmodernism. I had my theory about that, too, and had to get it off my chest. Over time I got to respond to most of my favorite historians and critics, including Lucy Lippard, Rosalind E. Krauss, Hal Foster, Joseph Mascheck, Michael Fried, Peter Schjeldahl, Arthur C. Danto, and a distinguished student of his, Barbara Savedoff. I can only hope that they took disagreement as a mark of respect. Or maybe not, but then artists, too, can be gracious at criticism or angry at praise. When I marveled at a black artist and (quoting William Butler Yeats) his “terrible beauty,” his dealer (who may not know the poem) called me a racist.
That long review of van Eyck got me playing at deconstruction, for once, as just part of the game. I imagined entering a chain that ran from Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, through Meyer Schapiro, the finest critic and historian of all, and Jacques Derrida. Had Vincent van Gogh painted a menial worker’s boots or his own, and what counts as an artist’s own anyway? It comes down to yet another mystery, of who lies behind art’s images, and I made that a theme of this Web site as well. You can browse the entire site by theme here. Or browse by period in time and by artist—and I wrap up next time with where I am today.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.