2 comments:
- John Luna said...
- The results might be positive, I agree, but I don't find the article refreshing...it's really the same kind of thing Amos said in a panel a couple of years ago and I hear people say at the dreggish end of an opening. At its best it's a genuinely frustrated complaint made by people who want something better, at its worst it's just "cocktail bitchiness"...see http://www.rrj.ca/m8451/ for a sound take on the problems of Canadian criticism in general. See James Elkins (http://criticaycontracritica.uniandes.edu.co/textossimposio/ElkinsWhathappened.pdf)for a bigger exploration of problems faced by conmtemporary criticism and see http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2010/01/20/state-of-the-art-criticism-subjective-musings/ for a weather report on the challenges faced by online criticism. These problems are bigger and more interesting than anything you folks have had to say about them so far...
- December 31, 2010 12:08 AM
- Philip Willey said...
- Thank you John. Brian’s article was refreshing to me because I haven’t read anything like it locally. Locally being the operative word because I haven’t been keeping up with events in the real world. So at the least Brian prompted you to post some very interesting links. I’ve been out of touch with the state of art writing for some time but after reading those articles I feel as though I’ve caught up. Back on the cutting edge...whoopee! I find something entropic about them though. Reading them it’s not hard to sense an overall ‘been there, done that’ cloud of ennui over the art scene which must be very dispiriting for young artists. It’s also clear that the John Ruskin, Clement Greenberg and Robert Hughes days are well and truly over. Art criticism was always a minefield but anybody with the nerve to call themselves a critic, or even a theorist, these days is likely to get lynched. So maybe art journalism is the best we can hope for.
Hi Philip,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your apprehension of the ennui thing, but I also think it is in its own way a form of Groys' "negative attention"...I'm actually encouraged by the Elkins piece because it emphasizes the degree to which criticism is driven by individual creative sensibility. Sometimes a Baudelaire, Diderot, Greenberg, Lippard, etc. is just not on the scene and we have hoardes of epigones, but it doesn't mean that creative criticism is over. I personally think that those creative high points mark convulsive, synthetic moments in a longer learning-curve of expansion & contraction.
Damn these comments get me fueled...
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see a giant art criticism Rap battle, something that rips the "panel discussion" and "artist talk" pandering to it's heart. I'm not fooling around, even if it had the overall authenticity of a UFC match (not very by my estimation, i digress) this is something I believe the art world could really revel in. Where's my girl Marlaina, to back this up? My copy of 'Shock of the New' got dusty, and don't even ask me how many Berger books I have seen withering on the bottom shelf at the Sally Anne on west 4th.
It's a cold war kind of feeling in the BC art world, and we need a Dolph Lundgren juiced Russian to punch out some real conversation. I propose a new Anti-hero in the guise of Saul Ostrow, or I guess even Greenberg. Put your hoods up ladies and gentlemen and drop the needle DJ...
John, you may be right about art writing being in a long learning-curve. Certainly art criticism has evolved. It has become more readable which isn’t a bad thing even if it happened at the expense of gravitas. The language used was becoming abstract to the point where nobody was sure what they were reading anymore. Was it art or philosophy or just semantic exercises? In a way I prefer the chatty journalistic style of Jonathan Jones, Jerry Saltz or our own Robert Amos. I can’t imagine what will replace it.
ReplyDelete