Art Criticism as Art

Peter Schjeldahl's art criticism each week in The New Yorker is a slice of pound cake, glossy with magazine stock and fine butter. The density of the writing instantly reveals him as poet; he ostensibly ceased writing poems at age 30.

A characteristic bit:


"If I were stranded on a desert island and could have only one contemporary art work, it would be a picture of a starry sky, a spiderweb, or a choppy ocean by Vija Celmins - a smallish painting, drawing, or print that is somber, tingling with intelligence, and very pure. I imagine that the work's charge of obdurate consciousness would give my sanity a fighting chance against the island's lonely nights, insect industry, and engirdling, unquiet waters."

His professed love of Ashbery is also occasionally evidenced: articles can glint like suspended assemblages. But given his other touchstones (Blake and Pope) and alertness to language (Pollock is "dribble" not "drip" painting), I overcame Ashbery-ennui to spring for his collected Let's See. Indeed, I paid full price for this hardback of magazine articles, and regret the purchase not one whit. (Save for loathsome dust-jacket: John Currin painting.) Is there higher praise?

Rich reads are scarce these days. So much writing consists of loose crochet, sentences as air-filled as BSE brain tissue. Any actual matter is microscopic. I'm reminded of Fred Allen's saw: "you can fit all the sincerity in Hollywood in a flea's navel, with room left over for three caraway seeds and an agent's heart." Give me not crochet but knit goods, yarn tension that generates heat. Give me not a sweater, but carapace.

(I v. much wish that I hadn't thought of Fred Allen, as find that he is misquoted across the internet. Worse than porn sites are the citation-free, fake quote compilations. Now I must track down the source, because it isn't "fruit fly's navel" or "producer's heart." Timing, people: Allen was a master.)

Dense composition in the wrong hands is, of course, frightful. Those of us who bake black-hole souffles can but cheer Schjeldahl's skill. Because my heart is small, I did seize upon his admission that "north of two thousand words I start to lose all sense of structure and seize up."

He doesn't hone aphorisms, but is generous with apercus:

"Beauty makes a case for the sacredness of something - winning the case suddenly and irrationally. It is always too late to argue with beauty."

"Calder doesn't seem to derive forms from nature so much as fumble to reinvent nature from hearsay."

"Each of Manet's paintings raises its subject into a present time that forgets the past and ignores the future. Each is a lesson about dying: don't."

Humor also is integral, and often dissipates any disagreement that one might have with his conclusions or choice of subject:

"When you are in the mood for him, Beckmann can look like the best modern painter in an alternate universe -- a place not ruled by the Francophile cosmology that became American holy writ by way of MoMA during the century's decisive decades. Beckmann himself was always in such a mood."