Jun

4

Artistic Inflation.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 4, 2008 |

In an article titled Inflated Phrases, art professor Christian Demand makes a staggering attack on “the mass of linguistic strutting, moral imposture and lazy thinking” that fills the texts that usually accompany art exhibits. Admitting that he’s not an art critic, and resisting the temptation to treat that as a virtue, he fires a pretty direct shot into the heart of art criticism:

As far as I’m concerned – and please excuse this old fashioned expression – it’s all just a matter of taste and as such, can only be substantiated to a limited extent. I am also reluctant to deduce consequences for other people based on my personal likes and dislikes. After all I would never dream of trying to convince someone else that football is a better sport than ice dancing, just because I happen to prefer watching football.

Fair enough. I prefer baseball myself, especially since I get a good laugh whenever I see the headline, “Is this the year for the Cubs?” But I digress. I think Demand is absolutely right. I’m speaking as someone who’s not an art critic either, and, while there are some art critics I respect, I agree with him that a lot of what passes for art criticism is pretty shoddy. A lot of it seems to be padded out with big words and oddball theories. A lot of this is driven by abstraction, which usually doesn’t have a recognizable subject. Take a Vermeer painting and you can probably get a couple of good solid paragraphs out of how little is known about him or his models, but cover what at least is known about his time. That’s a little harder to do with, say, Mondrian, but that doesn’t necessarily make abstraction evil. A good piece of art criticism can draw our attention to details we might overlook, and maybe even venture a theory or two. Art critics spend a lot of time looking at art, and the lucky ones spend a lot of time hanging out with artists. This doesn’t mean their insights are necessarily better, but it does mean they can point out things or share things we wouldn’t have any other way of knowing.

To back up his point, Demand quotes a text accompanying an exhibit of artist Anish Kapoor, which says, “In Kapoor’s work, material plays a central role, although always in connection with an idea of presence and spirituality that transcends the superficial ‘actuality’ of the object.” Okay. If you say so.

The problem is that, while Demand admits that he’s hardly the first to say this (he even cites an example from the 18th Century), he doesn’t go any further than that. There’s at least one while book, Julian Spalding’s The Eclipse of Art, that makes a lot of the same arguments. In other words a lot of smart people–some of them art critics–have already said this, and yet art and art criticism seem to be running in circles. We live in a consumer-driven society, though, which means somebody’s paying the artists and their critics. Who’s doing that? I can’t blame Demand for not looking into the issue, especially since I haven’t myself, mainly because the issue seems less like art and more like economics, a subject which automatically makes my eyes glaze over. And I also believe there’s still good art criticism being produced, stuff that’s solid and interesting, just as there’s still good art being produced. The problem is that targeting the bad stuff makes better copy, and, because there’s so much of it, it’s so much easier. I realize, though, that it’s not fair of me to criticize someone else for doing something I’ve been guilty of myself. And just because they’ve been made elsewhere doesn’t make Demand’s points any less valid. Although there’s a danger of creating the ultimate navel-gazing genre, criticism of criticism, there’s also a danger of falling off the other edge into meaninglessness. Art criticism walks a constant tightrope between the good, the bad, and the woolly.


Comments

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « Check Your Spelling. | Get Covered. » »