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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
College Success Depends on the Dentist | Comment [1]
Welcome Back to School | Comment [1]
McCain's Misogyny | Comment [38]
One Hundred Years of Blogitude | Comment [2]
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Featured Articles By the Author
Art Attack
Modern art, which began to peter out in the 1960s when the fun of Pop defeated the hyper-seriousness of Minimalism, produced lively, vigorous art criticism. Such critics as Charles Baudelaire, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg played a crucial role in promoting various modern-art movements to a public initially hostile to it.
Today, with no particular art movements to defend (artists no longer belong to “movements”), no hostile public (the public doesn’t much care about contemporary art), and a powerful, moneyed triumvirate of big-name artists, rich collectors and ambitious museum curators, contemporary art doesn’t really have much need for art critics.
Yet art criticism continues (albeit with less intensity), and major art critics are devoting their careers to reviewing contemporary art. Dave Hickey (author of Air Guitar, Peter Schjeldahl (art critic for The New Yorker), and Roberta Smith (art critic for The New York Times), are among the most prominent (mainstream) art critics writing about contemporary art, enthusiastically and with an open mind. Mostly, these critics write about art that they like. When they write about something they don’t like, they exercise considerable restraint.
For the most ferocious attacks against contemporary art, the best critics are usually conservatives. Today, the best attack critic is Jed Perl at The New Republic. (Before retiring, Hilton Kramer at The New York Observer held this honor.) Like Kramer before him, Perl likes art up through perhaps the last gasp of true modernism, Abstract Expressionism, but after that his taste is very narrow and his attitude quite negative.
Perl’s target isn’t just artists. He also goes after rich collectors who have no real taste and curators who permit big-name artists to have exhibitions that overwhelm whole museums. For these artists, Perl says, “having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth who has been given the keys to Rome.” Perl attacks museums for showing big, bad, shallow art, and architects for building museums designed to show big, bad, shallow art. His underlying theme, present in all his criticism, is that the contemporary art world has turned its back on stand-alone, hand-made, often modest works of art designed by artists strictly for aesthetic contemplation.
In “Postcards from Nowhere” (in the current issue of The New Republic,25 June 2008), Perl scathingly attacks a slew of recent exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. He argues that contemporary artists “replace the there that constitutes a work of art with a nowhere.” To Perl, “there” means art that’s ordered and substantial, whereas “nowhere” means art that’s incomprehensible and all over the place.
For example, he describes the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, with its super-flat colors and Louis Vuitton boutique tucked into the heart of the exhibition, as a “trickster’s trap.” As to Jeff Koons’ shiny stainless steel balloon doggie on the Met’s roof, he says there’s “no art here to enrage me — or engage me, either.” He assails the current Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (Eliasson is a Danish-born creator of spectacular installations, such as an artificial sunset in the Tate Modern in London) for its “belligerent glamour,” and dismisses the recent exhibition of Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition at the Guggenheim (his show included a bunch of automobiles suspended from the ceiling in the Guggenheim’s rotunda) as “follies.” The architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who designed the New Museum, are blamed for making “incoherent spaces” for “incoherent art.”
Perl’s most recent jeremiad is both powerful and persuasive. Despite the fact that I agree with just about every word he writes, however, I liked seeing the shows he mentions that I, too, happened to see. It’s a little like the news: You watch it to stay informed, and it delivers a peculiar, distinct pleasure even though it’s often very grim.
If Perl actually thinks that there’s any hope that significant contemporary art will ever return to being predominantly modestly-scaled, hand-made objects designed for aesthetic contemplation, he’s terribly deluded. It’s like thinking that Oscar-winning movies will return to being “little films” in black and white, with practically no digital special effects.
The reasons for this sea change in contemporary art are complex, but prominent among them is the fact that, compared to what it was in the heyday of AbEx, contemporary art is a huge global business. The amounts of money involved (not just at the auctions that make the news, but in simply running a serious gallery in a major city) are huge, the margins between profit and loss are razor-thin, and up-and-coming artists are as ambitious as aspiring movie stars. (They’re also frequently about $50,000 in debt from getting a Master of Fine Arts degree at one of the “hot” art schools.)
But for all their profiting and posturing, artists like Murakami and Koons, who dominate contemporary art, have the merit of being firmly planted in their own times — our own times — and there’s something to be learned from them. Artists like me — who devote themselves to hand-made objects designed for aesthetic contemplation — are foolish to look entirely away. Which is not to say we don’t enjoy reading jeremiads like Jed’s.
(Image from photobucket.com)
Posted at 09:27:22 AM on June 23, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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Gone are the days when Sidney Tillim could dismiss Optical Art with the statement: art to hang in the hall. Perhaps we miss the old days of searing reviews. Certainly my favorite was John Simon’s delightfully nasty attacks on terrible plays and actor.
But we live now in a time of post post modernism and pluralism. The art world is muti-voiced and to subscribe to the idea that one critic holds unquestionable power when discussing art is to admit to appreciating their bias, prejudice, and sad to say, it also often aligns itself with a white male, Euro-centric, market driven agenda.
As much as ever, art is designed to question art and the criteria by which it is viewed and judged. Can a set up allowing us to make soup be seen as great art? Not by most critics who are entrenched in outdated methods of aesthetic criteria.
So in that sense, we should be happy that criticism has moved away from authoritarian models to one of fluidity.
The dilution of reviews though, is not a particularly new occurrence. Reviews in many magazines going back into the mid 20th Century were nothing but fluff and puff. And if we think there was a golden era — don’t look at the latter end of the 20th Century, John Simon took hits for every review he wrote that wasn’t positive, and not many were. Hilton Kramer’s reviews showed more about his promoting an outdated agenda than the ability to grapple with contemporary art. And there is outside influence too. Even today rumors abound like movie houses threatening to pull all advertising from a major newspaper due to a severe review, there have been lawsuits over bad reviews, magazines often admit (off the record) that ad space influences content. So it is any wonder that reviews have become little more than descriptions of the art.
But, we live in a moment of contradiction. On one hand we long for scathing reviews, we want someone to tell it like it really is. We area addicted to competition shows on TV where as much as we hate the negative guy, we secretly love his honesty. And in private we will say to friends, oh that was terrible, but when asked in public we defer to vague praise.
So do we want strong criticism or has the media trained us to be uncritical consumers? I think we actually want it both ways, we just don’ t want to be the messenger.
— Christopher Willard · Jun 23, 01:23 PM · #
Art is designed to question art. Hmmm. How about art being designed to create beautiful things? (And doing it in a way that surpasses other cognate creations.)
— Observer · Jun 23, 01:52 PM · #
Sorry you didn’t mention Robert Hughes. Everything I’ve read of his has been informative and enlightening. He’s always interested in saying something about the art worth saying, rather than in impressing the reader with Robert Hughes. Oddly enough, the cumulative effect is to impress the reader with Hughes’s knowledge of art, his understanding of artists, and his enthusiasm for the subject.
— Dan · Jun 24, 07:39 AM · #
Critiquing curmudgeon “art” critics while feral genius chases down rodents right under nose blowing brains out through cranium bone, radiant paths stopped mid air by dizzy fans, nervously archiving tall drink-o’waters in tgirl stripey singing cowboy shirts gun-slinging m2 velvia earbuds/ leaking Lauridsen. Art lives! I swear it does. Over there.
— Hamlin Haroset · Jun 24, 01:47 PM · #
And I thought I was the only one I knew who read Jed Perl in TNR. I’ll have to get out more. Your take on the situation is spot on — we have to keep looking at what is being shown, but it’s reassuring to get a reality check from Mr. Perl.
And, by the way, your blog is a “must read.”
— Colleen Babington · Jun 24, 05:23 PM · #
Did “Modern art” really begin to “peter out” in the ’60’s, or was it modernism’s marketing that faltered? Sure, pop, conceptual, etc got more press, but did it supplant the best modernist works being made, in terms of real quality?
The answer is no, of course. Tony Caro kept sculpting, Lucien Freud kept painting, as did countless other ignored modernists, who still created the best art around, but did it out of the spotlight, in the shadows…
The great modernist critics were at the end of their careers, and the hacks that followed them, writing in newspapers and art mags, didn’t have the writing chops, never mind the critical acumen, to take their place, or to make any contribution at all, really, other than to transmit PR from artists and galleries to their readership, which is certainly “petering out” now.
Roberta Smith is one of the worst of these, this not-so-new breed of eyeless critic. Is she a “conservative” or a “liberal”? Who cares! She’s a bad critic. Is Jed Perl a “conservative” or a “liberal”? Irrelevant… at least he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em, and he has the balls to point out that the Emperor’s balls are showing. That’s not brilliant criticism, maybe, but it’s a start. If only the NYTimes critics had Perl’s integrity. It is not narrowness of taste, or personal negativity that is to blame with Perl, since after AE’s prominence, there simply has not been a major movement of art that has produced work of such a high level. That is just a statement of fact, and that is the source of any “negativity” you detect: the dearth of good work, at least, the dearth that is in the spotlight. Again, there’s lots of new modernist work being made, in the shadows, that if Perl could only encounter it, you’d see his taste “broaden” alongside his “positivity”.
If anyone’s negativity deserves rebuke, it’s yours, Ms. Fendrich. Your timidity, as a modernist yourself, in the face of the big bad post-modern art market, is shameful. The pessimistic, “oh well, I guess we all better go to the HOT school and make Louis Vuitton bags” attitude is such a cop out as to risk embracing the very nihilism that sick trash art like this entails, and it is precisely such corrupt, kitschy, corporate crap that real art should push against.
Come on, Laurie, you’re better than that!
— Marc Country · Jun 25, 08:06 AM · #
Here we go again.
The third-hand, third-rate Greenbergian (closest encounter with the master: whining about a John O’Brian lecture) out in the boonies pronouncing on the fall-of-civilization-as-we-know-it aspects of exhibitions he hasn’t seen and the writing of critics whose subjects he knows nothing about. I knew Clem and, whatever his general opinions, he always maintained that judging art was a matter of experience, and that works of art should be judged—I’ll give you this verbatim—“one at a time, one at a time.” Which means, of course, that one has to see contemporary art, a lot of it, in the flesh the rough with the smooth, shown in a major art center where some contemporary context is available, in order to make informed and prescient judgments. Sitting up there in some outpost, re-re-reading a well thumbed copy of Greenberg’s sacred texts, anxious for the next lecturer from the bigtime willing to travel that far to come through and give him the word, huddling afterward with fellow perennial graduate students in some pub to reinforce each other’s ego-salving rationalizations that nobody has topped those Modernist Giants, Anthony Caro and Lucien Freud, telling each other that all that PoMo stuff they’re hustling in such corrupt dens of aesthetic iniquity as London, New York, Berlin and Los Angeles, where the big-money fix is in, will be laughed at by Future Art History, just doesn’t cut it. Neither does asserting that there’s all this wonderful modernist work being made “in the shadows” (i.e., academic work in the boonies made by artists who’ve never gotten over the thrill of having some second-hand Greenberg acolyte come through and give them actual crits, and who still stain and pour and gel and weld to beat the band, like it’s still 1961 in the Hamptons) that could set the art world straight again if only Jed Perl could be persuaded to come see it and then (of course) Get the Word Out. The only difference between Mr. Country and his brethren down in Minnesota—the Poussiniste “classical realists” who think everything went to hell in a handbasket after Bouguereau—is where in the past they choose to pull their wagons in a circle and fire their reactionary arrows at them damn injuns.
Then there’s his manners. After the gratuitious personal insults (“deserves rebuke,” “timidity,” “shameful”), and the General-Alexander-Haig-worthy “I’m in charge here” telling Ms. Fendrich how derelict in her duty she’s been as “a modernist yourself,” he tries to play mentor by saying, suddenly on a first-name basis, “Come on, Laurie, you’re better than that!” We’re all probably better in glorious entirety than we are in our posts. But the small-time, cloistered, isolated, contemporary-art-deprived, self-important, leader of some studenty band of defiant, provincial “modernists”—Mr. Country, that is—in all probability is not.
— LuckyJim · Jun 25, 04:02 PM · #