Thursday, a new day [by Vincent Katz]

Here we are again.  A fresh start.  The sounds of morning.  The sounds of children, endlessly fulfilling, except the sounds of sad, bothered children. 

I wake up thinking about words.  I am interested in the way writers use words to think about art.  In David Cohen's review of John Ashbery's collage show (The New York Sun 9/4/08), one realizes he is almost daunted by the knowledge that  the greatest word-user of our time will be reading with interest.  My favorite sentence in Cohen's review, in speaking of the collages of another artist/writer, Mario Naves, contains the phrase: "...in drawing upon detritus whose desuetude survives the alchemy of its artistic transmogrification."  This is exciting writing, it wakes you up, whether or not the critical determination is accurate.  You realize that an important part of criticism is precision in using words.  I believe many people think you only need to learn the correct terminology and then slot the art into the terms.  The problem is that good artists have no interest in terms and are constantly trying to get us to redefine our terms, or rather, to show us that our terms are useful only up to a point.  That is why the best criticism does not make use of preconceived terms of discourse but rather uses everyday language to try to translate what the artist is doing.

After seeing Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut In Two last night with Karen Koch, we went to Le Zie for dinner, where we ran into Irving and Lucy Sandler.  Irving interviewed Jerry Saltz in the curent Brooklyn Rail, and it is a very interesting account of how Saltz became a critic.  (Saltz' piece in a recent New York on the Catalan restaurant El Bulli is highly entertaining).  Saltz in the interview says that he feels the need to visit the Met regularly, always finding something he had not noticed earlier, whereas with the Frick, he only needs to visit it twice a year, just as one needs to hear the opening bars of "Gimme Shelter" a couple of times a year.  I loved that comparison, and it got me thinking, again, about Popular Song, about which more later.

Comments

[Stacey]

Great discussion of the elements of good criticism. Seems the best critics are hyper-attentive to their response to a work of art and they have the vocabulary (not the jargon) to describe that response. I have in mind Edwin Denby's dance criticism. He describes the action on the stage (difficult because it is fleeting) and the associations and feelings that it arouses in him, the viewer. All informed by a deep understanding of the form - the history, the context, and such. Great post (they all are). Thanks.

[Laura Orem]

You have hit on one of the elements of art criticism that drives me bonkers - its prediliction for being completely incomprehensible to the average reader. More than once, I have been reduced to utter confusion by sentences in publications like "Artforum." I'm a language person; I teach writing, for God's sake; and even I can't untangle some of the jargon and abstraction. How does confusion inform anyone's experience with a work of art? That's why I love reading people like Frank O'Hara on art; and John Ashbery on Joe Brainard is just wonderful. Poets in general seem to have a facility for writing about art - maybe because their job is to render the visual and the abstract into words. Thanks for your post - I was starting to think I needed to take ginko biloba before reading any art criticism.

[Yaehoo]

Hi, It's the second time i'm posting you without a reply. I found your site using Yaehoo, does your site support firefox?

[Yaehoo]

Hi, It's the second time i'm posting you without a reply. I found your site using Yaehoo, does your site support firefox?

[Laive]

Hi, I found your site using http://www.laive.com Laive, does your site support Firefox?

[Laive]

Hi, I found your site using http://www.laive.com Laive, does your site support Firefox?