Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart … that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge?
—I Kings 3:9
In an essay titled “A Quiet Crisis,” which appeared in a recent issue of
Art in America, the poet and critic Raphael Rubenstein deplored certain currents in contemporary art criticism. “Is there a serious breakdown in the dialogue around contemporary painting?” the subheading of his piece asks. “Should art critics get back into the business of making value judgments?” The second of these rhetorical questions is intended to explain the first: The breakdown consists in the fact that critics have gotten out of the business of making value judgments—judgments of good, better, and best—which means that they sit no longer as judges, figuratively charged with awarding blue, red, and yellow ribbons for best in the show and the runners-up. So what are art critics doing instead? Rubenstein cites a pioneer survey, sponsored by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, which attempted to discover how the 160 practicing art critics surveyed view their practice. He finds it startling that nearly 75 percent believe that “rendering a personal judgment is considered by art critics to be the least important factor in reviewing art,” while 91 percent feel it their main role to “educate the public about visual art and why it matters.” I not only associate myself with this view of the critic’s task but also was startled in turn to discover that, in Rubenstein’s view, I am in some large degree responsible for the crisis.
This has been a period of interpretation rather than judgment, which is no doubt why the philosophically inclined Arthur Danto has been the most widely read and cited critic of the last decade or so. As Danto says explicitly in the introduction to a recent collection of articles (which, significantly, is subtitled “Essays in a Pluralistic Art World”): “The freedom to choose my subjects makes it possible for me to select only those artists whose work already has quality sufficient enough so that nothing needs be said beyond explaining the way they embody their meanings.”
A
young correspondent asked how I determine “sufficient quality,” and the answer to this interesting question is that it is a fairly complex inference, based on a lot of data, much of it connected with institutional factors. Quality is not an aura around a work or body of work, and nimbuses in any case were shorthand for holiness, which refers a complex body of actions and certain relationships to invisible and perhaps unrepresentable forces. One primarily reviews exhibitions, and the fact that an artist’s work has been selected for a museum exhibition, for example, is evidence that a number of individuals, who have undergone training and acquired the experience that entitle them to make such decisions, have come to the shared conclusion that the work merits display and that the public will benefit in various ways by seeing the work in this format. The work will have made its way somehow into the consciousness of the art world, and a consensus will have emerged as to where it stands and what it does. The art world is defined by an ongoing conversation—a dialogue—among its members, who know something about the history of art and the present state of art, and the concept of quality is connected with the work having become part of this conversation. The latter will convey the reasons people are talking about it, and these in turn give the critic a reason for wanting to see the work and to enter the conversation through writing a review. The reasons vary from artist to artist and time to time. Sometimes they are aesthetic, sometimes they are ethical, sometimes there is just the issue of the work’s making a contribution to contemporary sensibility. In one of the more recent of the reviews collected here, the one on John Currin, there had been a lot of buzz, not all of it favorable, which laid an imperative on critics to address it as something people would want to know about and perhaps to see, and make their minds up. Nobody who is a critic lives in isolation from this framework. We are all part of a complex in which we depend upon one another a lot, in art as elsewhere.
Rubenstein commented on the passage he quoted by saying that “something more than explaining and advocacy is called for, that it’s not enough simply to present the things you like in isolation, that even in a radically multi-polar artistic environment, value judgments must somehow be made, and articulated.”
What then should I be doing differently? Let’s consider what Rubenstein, as a critic of critics, has in mind. “I’m talking,” he says, “about something on the order of looking at a painting made in 2002 by Brice Marden and asking how it stands up in terms of visual engagement against a canvas painted in 1956 by Joan Mitchell.” Half a century separates the two bodies of work, though both artists—Mitchell posthumously—were accorded exhibitions in 2002, hers a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum, his a show of recent paintings at a major New York gallery, Matthew Marks. Both shows turned up in one or another of the “Top Ten Exhibitions of the Year,” to which ArtForum invites a number of art writers to contribute. I’m not particularly fond of the format, but I have contributed my lists whenever the publication asks me to, and had I been asked in 2002, Mitchell’s show would have been close to my top choice, and Marden’s, though it appeared in more than one top-ten list and thus had its admirers among presumed experts, might not have been on mine at all, and certainly not on Rubenstein’s. Marden has, he writes, “a dead hand and a cautious esthetic,” though “he is supposed by many to be our best abstract painter.”
In that show, as I saw it, Marden had thrown aesthetic caution to the winds. Since about 1990, he had been practicing a kind of abstract calligraphy, painting, to use Hegel’s poetic phrase, “gray in gray,” in the spirit of a certain genre of Chinese watercolor dedicated to conveying the feeling of watery landscapes—Mountains Viewed Through Spring Rain, to fabricate a generic title. For perhaps twenty years before that, Marden favored monochrome painting in muted values, until he felt he had exhausted that option. On the verge of giving up painting altogether, he saw a show of Asian calligraphy, which he adapted in a body of work he called
Cold Mountain. In the new show he had broken away from his characteristic palette into loose tangles of nearly saturated reds, changing the mood entirely, or trying to. It reminded me of an anecdote I learned from my Chinese friend Chiang Yee, who told of a great painter of bamboos pestered for a picture by a collector. The painter finally yielded but used as his medium the red ink ordinarily reserved for artists’ seals. The collector was happy to have the work but wondered where the artist had ever seen red bamboos. The artist responded by asking the collector where he had seen
black bamboos. Red or gray, the show had not excited me, and though Marden is important enough as a painter for me to have devoted an essay to his work, I was not certain enough of where he was heading to write one. Had I written about it, though, it would never have occurred to me to compare his work with Mitchell’s, whose work, especially her masterpieces of the early fifties, I had always loved.
If asked to juxtapose for purposes of evaluation a work like Mitchell’s 1956
Hemlock with any painting I might choose for the exercise from Marden’s 2002 show, I would have to beg off: I would have said that there was no comparison. You can only really compare like with like.
The New York Times has a column called “Wines of the Times,” in which experts report on a tasting. A recent issue was titled “From the Loire, Whites with Bite,” and it canvassed two sets of sauvignon blancs, Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. “Sancerre is the best of the lot,” the reporter observes, “with Pouilly-Fumé a close second.” Local experts have difficulty telling them apart, though some experts say “the Fumés are a bit fuller bodied and richer.” “Fuller bodied and richer” is not the criterion implied in ranking Sancerres ahead of the Fumés. So if someone demands that the best of the Sancerres be compared with a sauternes like Château d’Yquem, one would have to say there is no comparison, or that any comparison is a forced one, based on the coincidence that both are French white wines. I could say a great deal more, of course. Château d’Yquem is a great and powerful wine, whereas Sancerre is, if the best of the sauvignon blancs from the Loire region, in another class altogether. It has a wonderful flinty taste and goes perfectly with
crottin, a cheese from its region, and I would not consider it a favor if a waiter said that they were out of the Sancerre and offered me Château d’Yquem instead. It is a wholly different kind of wine, no substitute at all. Connoisseurs recommend that one drink it with fois gras: It is luxurious and it needs the context of opulent flavors. It is a memorable experience, like conversation with a brilliant wit like Isaiah Berlin, rather than a quiet talk with someone one enjoys being with. The two wines define different scenarios, and if you are, as they say, into wines, each is wonderful in its own way.
I have the most vivid memory of having been knocked off my horse by Mitchell’s Hemlock when I first saw it in the late fifties. Marden would not have had that impact on me at any stage of my life. His is a quieter, more ruminative form of achievement. But that is a contrast, not a comparison. Hemlock overwhelmed me in a way that had to do with who I was when I came upon it in Martha Jackson’s gallery. I cannot remember when I first saw Brice Marden’s work, but I was by then a very different person, and I wonder what would have had to be different about me to have been overwhelmed by it the way I had been by Hemlock maybe twenty years later. To compare the two paintings would in effect be to compare two stages of my life.
Squabbling in the Cedar Tavern over who was greater, Bill or Jackson, was part of living in the art world in the fifties, but I’m not sure, apart from the undoubted fact that Pollock had made the great liberating breakthrough, that the quarrels were very different from those of Sancerre over Pouilly-Fumé. At best they might serve the purpose of what the literary critic Paul de Man called “close reading,” but they were essentially irresoluble. Asked to compare either of them with Franz Kline or Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, my sense is that there would be no comparison. Each was bent on something very different. They were all great in a way that, forced to make a judgment, I would say that Clyfford Still was not. I would compare Joan Mitchell, I suppose, with de Kooning if anybody, rather than Brice Marden, mainly because she was engaged with the same philosophy of painting as he, and because her paintings were importantly referential to landscape motifs. But she was in the second generation, and one has to say that de Kooning and Kline made her possible in a way that, really, she made nobody possible: The line ended with her. She went on doing Abstract Expressionist paintings when the movement itself was long over with, historically speaking, and she was living in France, and there was
nobody with whom to compare her. That may be why her painting fell off later in her career. Painters challenge one another, egg one another on. That is why being part of a movement is so important.
On the other hand, she may just have had her run. Critics too have runs. Greenberg outlived his moment and had nothing to say of the moments that followed when, for example, I found my footing as a critic. He could do nothing with Duchamp or Warhol except insult their effort, dismissing it as “novelty art.” But how long can one go on saying that? The kinds of value judgments he was good at making had no relevance in explaining why, say, Warhol was greater than Wesselman. How would we compare, in terms of value, any of the great Abstract Expressionists with any of the great Pop artists—and what would be the point? We are here in the world of incommensurables, which makes life so rich and so varied.
But I want to say something more forceful. I don’t think there is a crisis of criticism at all, at least not the kind that Rubenstein is needlessly alarmed by. I really don’t, any more than the majority of those who responded to the National Art Journalism Program questionnaire believe that “rendering a personal judgment” is a particularly important thing for art critics to do. And I don’t believe that Greenberg felt that it was either. He believed that he was singularly qualified to render impersonally valid judgments about art, that he possessed a remarkably good eye. The difference between his moment and mine is that today the eye is a less important critical organ than it was at the high moment of Abstract Expressionism. What we are increasingly dealing with in the visual arts today is what I call
visual thinking, and it is the thought that has to be unraveled and assessed in addressing the art of our time and the way the thought is embodied in the work. Christopher Knight wrote that “criticism is a considered argument about art, not a priestly initiation of the unenlightened into a catechism of established knowledge.” But I don’t for a moment believe, if indeed I am as much an authority as Rubenstein believes, that the critics who described their role as educating the public mean “initiating the unenlightened into a catechism of established knowledge.” Wittgenstein described his agenda as showing the fly how to get out of the fly bottle. That is what education is in art—helping people find their way. Knight’s is a caricature of what education is. Education is not training people to say, Mitchell’s
Hemlock is better than Marden’s
Cold Mountain. It is rather explaining how and why each of them is good in its own way.
Let me illustrate with an e-mail I recently received from a young writer about a highly regarded conceptual artist, Janine Antoni.
I question deeply what it is Janine is doing, and why, as the work does not really speak to me in aesthetic or conceptual terms. I was raised with an art that equated beauty, even different norms of beauty, but it was all for the most part poignant and thrilling and accessible. You could see the WORK in it, the painter’s or the sculptor’s vision and skill, you could recognize some aspect of the struggle, you could appreciate the beauty of the result: it looked like something that spoke to you, whether a nativity or a hill in Tuscany or two marble nudes lightly embracing. Why has all that been so de-legitimized?
My correspondent is a sensitive, informed, and earnest young person. She is far from a philistine, as you can tell from her writing. But she was, one might say, caught in the fly bottle, and here is my response, intended to show her the way out:
In Janine’s
case, her art responded to many contemporary preoccupations, especially female preoccupations, and especially about the body. She found ways of articulating these in her art. The piece that made her famous was called
Gnaw, and it was widely seen as about eating disorders, especially bulemia, since it involved biting off pieces of chocolate and spitting them out, and then making something beautiful out of that. Her pieces were about fat, about body image, about love. Many of them involved an ordeal, like washing the floor with her hair, which suggested abasement, or drawing with her mascaraed eyelashes, making butterfly kisses on paper. That is the kind of thing a lot of art today does. It addresses issues that engage people through symbolic enactments. The issues are often very intimate, and the art very remote. I deal with it a lot. You have to get inside it a bit. Once you start writing about it, you may find yourself liking it. I keep myself open.
When I wrote about Antoni’s piece in my review of a Whitney Biennial, that is what I tried to explain. I think Antoni’s work really is personal, but I don’t consider it a personal statement. It is more than that: She is speaking for young women everywhere, but speaking to everyone about issues we all can understand. I would want to understand it before I set out to compare it with anything else, and then I’d need to know that what I was comparing it with was trying to make the same kind of point, only doing so better than or not as well as
Gnaw. She somehow hit on the idea of making her point through two large blocks of matter—six-hundred-pound blocks of chocolate and of lard. Some critics wrote about her work in terms of blocks, but that seemed to me oblique and formalistic. What I know is that it was good art, and perhaps her best piece, or her best so far. I’ve seen a piece by Antoni consisting of a pair of nipples cast in gold and displayed in a jewelry box, like a set of ornamental buttons for a blazer. I imagine they have to be her own nipples, to be consistent with her work, and there is something saucy in the thought that her nipples are worth their weight in gold. And in an age in which breast cancer is a burning issue, a work like that can be a memorial to mastectomy. It is not a criticism of the work that it is not as good, because it is not as deep, as
Gnaw, to which I would have given a blue ribbon for Best in the Biennial if I were a judge, but I have no formula for that kind of judgment. I would have to describe the other works in the show in comparable detail to get my fellow judges to see it as the inevitable top choice. But if the panel also consisted of Hilton Kramer, Jed Perl, and Robert Hughes, I am by no means certain I could bring it off. We would have a terrible fight, trading nasty insults. People in the art world today don’t have fistfights, as they did in the fifties. Is that what Rubenstein feels is missing?
Let’s consider at this point a work I have spent a great deal of time thinking about ever since I first saw it, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box of 1964. It happens to have been one of the works Janine Antoni’s piece was compared to because of its being a block, though this is the same kind of forced basis for comparing as Sancerre and sauternes. Like Joan Mitchell’s Hemlock, Brillo Box knocked me out, but I cannot imagine myself thinking about her piece for nearly forty years, the way I have about Warhol’s work, which, for reasons I will explain, I am not even sure is his masterpiece. I think Hemlock is her masterpiece, and I can think of looking at it for a very long time, getting more out of it all the time. From that perspective, Warhol’s work is almost laughably uninteresting. Its success is due not to its visual but to its intellectual depth. In my case, it has to do with its great philosophical interest. And though in a sense, this says as much about me as about it, what gives it its philosophical interest is almost the same as what gives it its artistic interest.
What interested me—what obsessed me—when I first saw the exhibition in which it was shown for the first time at what was then the Stable Gallery, was the fact that the show consisted of facsimiles of shipping cartons placed in piles as they would have been in the stockroom of a supermarket. There were six or eight kinds of cartons, constructed of stenciled plywood, made to look like the boxes in which grocery items familiar to everyone in America were sent from warehouses to stores. The question for me was why they were works of art while their nearly indiscernible real-world counterparts were purely utilitarian objects with no claim to the status of art. Until that time I had no idea of how to think philosophically about art, though, as my experience with
Hemlock indicates, I was pretty deeply engaged by contemporary art in 1952 when I first saw it. I was not a “philosophically inclined” art critic in 1964. I was a philosopher with an interest in, even a passion for, art. I would not actually become an art critic for twenty years.
When I wrote my first philosophical paper on art, in response largely to the Stable show but really to the art that had taken over the art world in the mid-1960s, I wrote primarily about Brillo Box—though the problem I addressed could have been raised about any of the five or six kinds of cartons Warhol showed. I have lately begun to think about what made Brillo Box the obvious outstanding piece in the show and have realized that it was its great merit as a piece of commercial art. Here is the art criticism for Brillo boxes, which celebrate the product they contain.
The box is decorated with two wavy zones of red separated by one of white, with blue and red letters. Red, white, and blue are the colors of patriotism, as the wave is a property of water and of flags. This connects cleanliness and duty, and transforms the side of the box into a flag of patriotic sanitation. It gives two connected reasons for using Brillo, which is printed in proclamatory letters B-R-I-L-L-O, the consonants in blue, the vowels—I O—in red. The word itself is dog Latin, viz., “I shine!”—which has a double meaning, one of which is consistent with the condition of embodied meaning. The word conveys an excitement that is carried out in the various other words, in which the idioms of advertising are distributed upon the surfaces of the box, the way the idioms of revolution or protest are boldly blazoned on banners and placards carried by strikers. The pads are GIANT. The product is NEW. It SHINES ALUMINUM FAST. The carton conveys excitement, even ecstasy, and is in its own way a masterpiece of visual rhetoric, intended to move minds to the act of purchase and then of application. And that wonderful band of white, like a river of purity, has an art-historical origin in the hard-edged abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly and Leon Polk Smith. It could not have been done before that movement, the clean edges of which give a certain palpable contemporaneity to Brillo.
This would not be the right art criticism for any of the other cartons, and I think it fair to say that Warhol deserves no credit for it. He did not design the box, though it was, I was to discover, designed by an artist, James Harvey, an Abstract Expressionist hopeful, who died soon after the Stable show. What would be the right art criticism for what Warhol did? From my perspective, what Warhol did was transfigure a set of particularly unpromising commonplace objects into works of art. That, one might say, was his artistic mission, much as it was Monet’s mission to draw our attention to the landscapes of the Île de France, or Cézanne those of the area around Aix. Warhol’s first exhibition was in the windows of Bonwit Teller, and the paintings were on display for one week only in mid-April 1961. His images were vernacular, familiar, and anonymous, drawn from the back pages of blue-collar newspapers, the cover pages of sensationalist tabloids, pulp comics, fan magazines, junk mail, publicity glossies, boilerplate for throwaway advertisements. In 1961, it would have been almost impossible to believe one was looking at art.
Advertisement is based on a montage of black-and-white newspaper ads: for hair tinting, for acquiring strong arms and broad shoulders, for nose reshaping, for prosthetic aids for rupture, and for (“No Finer Drink”) Pepsi-Cola. Bonwit’s window also included
Before and After, advertising the nose you are ashamed of transformed into the nose of your dreams. The remaining paintings are of Superman, the Little King (on an easel), and Popeye. The ads reflect Warhol’s personal preoccupations—impending baldness, an unattractive nose, a loose, unprepossessing body. But the placement of the original images—in back-page ad sections of the
National Enquirer and comparable publications of mass consumption—testifies to the universality of such nagging self-dissatisfactions and the inextinguishable human hope that there are easy ways to health, to happiness, and to “Make Him Want You.” I think these works of Warhol great, but I would sound like a lunatic if I were to say that the images in their normal venues were great. My art criticism would have to justify my judgment of their value. In their way, those early images of Warhol’s make suddenly visible what one might call the mind of a culture. They are somehow like what Joyce achieved in
Finnegans Wake. They are a mirror of the American mind. And there is something profound when one takes them in conjunction with the garments they set off in Bonwit’s windows, those expensive fashionable fluttery garments, to be worn by women whose thoughts are taken up with worries about acne, about whether their noses are too big, and how they are going to be able to “make him want you.”
This is obviously not visual art criticism of the sort I wrote in response to a painting like Joan Mitchell’s Hemlock, in my review of her 2002 show (see page 197). It is, rather, conceptual art criticism like that I have devoted to Warhol’s Brillo Box on the many occasions on which I considered it as a vehicle of philosophical and cultural meaning. I have no sense of what it would mean to compare Mitchell with Warhol, and comparing her work with that of Brice Marden is nearly as pointless. It is, on the other hand, both interesting and helpful to compare her with Franz Kline as a painter, and to show how she succeeded where Kline failed, without for a moment suggesting that this made her the greater painter.
When, in the passage that Raphael Rubenstein quoted, I stated that I select only those artists whose work has already quality enough that “nothing needs be said beyond explaining the way they embody their meanings,” I meant to imply that the fact that I write about one show or artist rather than another is already a value judgment. I get to write perhaps ten pieces a year, and my essays are about three thousand words in length. My criterion for choosing a subject is a judgment that it has a certain cultural importance, not just for the art world, but for everyone, since
The Nation is not an art magazine, and its mission to is to help readers think about issues of great immediate moment. I want to feel confident that knowing about Leonardo or Malevich or Matthew Barney are culturally important by that criterion, and not just where the work stands in relationship to everything else that is on view. The magazine’s founders were disciples of John Ruskin, who felt that nothing in society was more important than its art, and some tincture of Ruskinism continues to inflect current editorial attitudes. My readers are vastly more likely to visit museums than galleries, but since I want them to see the art I write about, if that means going to a gallery, then I am up against some fairly stringent time constraints that belong to the reality of being a critic for a weekly magazine. I have to see the work almost immediately; be sure there will be space in the magazine; write three thousand words, which takes some days; have the work edited, set, and corrected—and, with luck, the piece will appear the last weekend, if it is a gallery show. I have to have great confidence in the importance of a work or body of work to take on something that exigent.
The last time this happened was with Shirin Neshat’s film Rapture, which I happened already to have seen in Chicago. It was being shown at a Chelsea gallery, D’Amelio Terras, when I returned to New York, and I felt I had to stop everything else and write it up. I believed it a masterpiece, a work of exceptional importance, something I really wanted people to see—something I felt it urgent that they see. I could not read the Persian calligraphy with which it begins or understand the words that accompanied the urgent music. But the moment the choreographed action began—a group of women in black chadors, a group of men in black pants and white shirts, the men on the ancient battlement of some castle, the women acting as a chorus, close to one another, on a stony desert outside the castle walls, responding, commenting, and finally reacting to what seem like the pointless and frivolous conduct of the men—I felt I was witnessing something ageless and profound. And when at last the women take action, lifting their heavy skirts at the sea’s edge, pulling a heavy boat out into the surf, and then, a group of them, sitting in it like nuns, allowing themselves to drift out and be carried away, abandoning themselves to Allah as they head for some undetermined and perhaps unimaginable destination, I felt I was seeing some spiritual enactment, religious and political at once. I compared it to an early Greek tragedy, which made use of two choruses.
This bare description gives no sense of the extraordinary beauty of the black-and-white photography and the remarkable choreography with which the Men but especially the Women, are deployed in their very different spaces. Nor does it give an idea of the powerful music by the Iranian composer and singer, Sussan Deyhim. The music gives voice to the various actions. It expresses what the linked sequences show. It combines with the ululation, the clapping, and the drum tattoo—the only sounds the two groups make.
What is it all about then? What has taken place and what is its meaning? What occasions the women’s triumph? Is it that they have gone off on their own, or is it that they place themselves at Allah’s mercy? The work seems to have something urgent to communicate, but it does so in the way a solemn ballet would do. Neshat is still not pointing fingers. “From the beginning,” she says, “I made a decision that this work was not going to be about me or my opinions, and that my position was going to be no position. I then put myself in a place of only asking questions but never answering.” It is not a self-portrait. And the actions are too emblematic to furnish an agenda for social activism in the Middle East. Yet they seem to belong to some immemorial enactment, which has been ritualized and repeated. The work is mesmerizing, and if you are like me, you will want to see it again and again. It is an allegory of obscure but inescapable meaning.
I wanted my readers to say to themselves, I have to see that. And indeed they did. I had the satisfaction of learning how crowded the gallery was the last weekend of her show, after my piece appeared. I felt my writing had some impact. This, to be sure, to use Rubenstein’s term, is advocacy. But what more would I have had to do by way of making a value judgment?
Rapture is
part of a trilogy by Shirin Neshat. I think it better than the other two films that make it up, and that the trilogy as a whole is superior to her work that has come since. But that is how it is with masterpieces, and that is how it is with life. As an art critic, I am not an art teacher doing studio crits, pointing out strengths and weakness, prodding them to become better artists. Nor am I advising collectors interested in wanting only the best for their collection but in any case needing to make sure they have not settled for something inferior or bad. Even when I have reservations about the work I write about, as I sometimes do, my task is to give my readers something to think about—about art, about life, and about the relationships between them.
2003