Amateur Artist Poses as Art Critic

Over five hundred of my reviews have been published by New City in the first ten years of my career as an art critic. The feedback below, however, is the first I’ve ever received from someone not personally involved with a show under review. It’s anonymous and belligerent, but at least it opens a discussion about art criticism and who may, or may not, be qualified to write it.

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Amateur Artist Chris Miller Poses as "Art Critic" for New City. New City's audience deserves to know the credentials of “Art Critic” Chris Miller. It’s a story not unlike Steve Bannon. Miller, a music retailer who began his writing career as a blogger who drove from the suburbs to the big city to experience the art scene and then blogged stories of his experience. He gained access to a platform and uses that bully pulpit to spread unfair and ill informed information. Miller is not concerned with the effect he has on accomplished artist long careers simple because he does not understand the work.   With the abundant art community and a plethora of qualified art writers in Chicago, it’s sad that New City has chosen a untalented artist wannabe as an Art Critic to write for the “culture and arts” publication. But it’s hard to employ qualified writers at $15.00 a story.   see attached photos of Miller’s work.



 
Your pitch is accepted - if not by New City, at least by me
in my blog of unpublished New City Art Reviews.
You won't get paid the $15, but everyone who cares
about the subject matter will eventually get around to
reading your opinions. And I would like to read why
you think my art is so bad. Hopefully you will have
more to discuss than credentials.

[Postscript from seven years later - right after Trump’s second election.  David Brooks wrote about The Moral Challenge of Trumpism. in the New York Times.  As indicated by the above reference to Steve Bannon, Trump's revolution was much on the mind of my anonymous correspondent. (he was writing in December, 2017).  Brooks posits a clash between  institutionalists like himself versus the anti-institutional value system of MAGA et al.

Do I wish to destroy the institutions of the artworld (schools, museums, etc) ?  Not really.  May they live long and prosper. But may they also listen to those who do not share their allegiance to the anti-aesthetic or nihilistic art theorisms that have been trending for more than half a century.  Eventually they will have to  do a better job of accommodating the positive and the negative :  art and anti-art.   To help them, there are currently many who better read, more widely experienced, sensitive, and  astute than I.  If you, dear reader, know of any - please send me their names! ]

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Hey, don't give up on me here!  You have expressed a valid concern: what are the qualifications for writing art criticism?  Now it's time for you to continue the conversation.  Requiring that a critic be a good, professional artist would disqualify most of the iconic names in art criticism from John Ruskin to Clive Bell to Clement Greenberg to Jerry Saltz. That's OK with me --  perhaps their reputations are undeserved.  But to make your case, you might at least demonstrate the inadequacy of a specific art review that they, or I, have written.

Or... maybe you're not really interested
in the qualifications of an art critic.  Are you an artist who feels poorly served by one
of my reviews?

I better respond before I get another email from you. I guess spoiled husbands have a lot of time on their hands unlike the artist you review whose livelihoods are derived through art. Something you need to understand...this is not a conversation, it’s a one sided narrative...like a published art review. Don’t worry about the $15, however I have failed to find the pitch on your blog, therefore I guess your honesty is in question too. It’s understandable that it would never be published by New City so you’ll have to look for it somewhere else.   As to why I think your art is bad, all you have to do is go to a high school art class and find that answer. But I’d be interested in seeing an artist CV/Resume if you think you are a professional artist. I realize you don’t like discussing credentials given you did not defend or add to your “art critic” farce. Chris, you are no John Ruskin, you are no Clive Bell, you are no Clement Greenberg, and you are no Jerry Saltz and the thought that you think you are in this club is laughable. If you think art reviews are accurate and unquestionable you should really read some more about Art History. You’ve managed to worm your way into the Chicago art scene and you must enjoy that press pass. It’s okay Chris, there are plenty of frauds in the art world, the problem with that is you will always have the fear of being exposed for being a hack.   Oh, and your guess is wrong I am not an artist who has been "poorly served by one of your reviews".  I am however someone who earns my living in art world and I'm fed up with hacks who muddy those waters. I will defend artist until my last breathe, not tear them down.  

My mistake.   I was  thinking of your pitch as a
proposal for a story, not the story itself.
 I incorrectly assumed that you were planning to
write a more thorough treatment of the
subject. I will go ahead and publish the
"pitch" that you sent me, as soon as I can
confirm your address.

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In the above dialog, one of my readers asked who has the right  to criticize the work of a professional artist.  He asserted that I don't qualify because I'm only an amateur, and provided examples (shown above)  to demonstrate that I am a poor one at that.  (they come from my works in progress blog   and  my drawing blog  )

I  replied that most, if not all, of the best known art critics throughout history have not been professional artists -- to which he replied my writing could hardly be compared to theirs.

Since this reader considered his judgments of both art and criticism to be too obvious to require explanation, he did not offer any -  so our conversation has ended.  We still don't know about whom I "spread unfair and ill informed information", so no attempt can be made to rectify the matter.

It wasn't much of a conversation - but at least it was something.

If this reader, who wishes to remain anonymous,  ever gets around to explaining himself, I will append it to this post - and will do the same with responses sent by anyone else.

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Regarding credentials in the arts, they cannot make a good painting look any worse -- or make a bad one look any better. And looking for visual quality is what I do first - before thinking about who made it and why.  Most other art critics do not  share that priority.

Likewise, for me,  the credentials of an art critic have no effect on the merit of what that critic has written. Obviously, the anonymous reader quoted above would strongly disagree.

I want art criticism that relates art to life - so the more it reflects a passion and broad experience with both, the better.  And I consider it provisional -- i.e. not so much a final judgment as one voice within a never ending discussion.  Which is why I like to respond to art criticism written by others -- and invite others respond to mine.

Participants often feel that personal authority is at stake,  so discussions about art often descend into personal attack.  Especially in the anonymous world of the internet, where a troll seems to hide beneath every bridge.   But we can all do better - can't we?

Unlike most art criticism, but similar to most film criticism, the question of "is this art work worth viewing ?"  always lurks in the background of my writing - and evidence of the artist's success, hard work, erudition, reputation, and sincerity will not drive it away. No one is qualified to render a final judgment - but each of us has to decide where to allocate our own time and attention.  Each of us has to have our own hopes and dreams.

My approach fits much better into the American artworld of sixty-five years ago -- back when a leading artist like Ben Shahn might write:  "Form is the visible shape of content".  If you are searching for content, take a look at the art.

 In the artworld of today, a much greater emphasis is placed on context as validated by institutions and those they employ.  Which might explain the above job-holder's resentment and anger.

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Here are my priorities in art criticism:

1. Does it point to something worth striving for? (not necessarily by me). Because that is why I come to art.

2. What kind of human condition or life issue does it seem to represent? - because that’s the  most  engaging topic for discussion

3. How does it relate to and compare with art history? - because I find this question unavoidable.

4. How does it relate to what has been written  by the artist or others? - because I am fascinated by opinions other than my own.

My art criticism is based upon personal reaction and reflection - not because I claim that mine is authoritative -- but because that’s the kind of art writing that I want to read - and I don’t want to be told what I should be thinking. Often politically correct, that kind of criticism is tedious, pretentious, and useless. As well as ubiquitous. It's my hope that eventually other art writers will share the above priorities. Like myself, however, they will probably also have to come from outside the worlds of journalism, universities, or investment grade art galleries. 

 

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Susan Snodgrass, a prolific local writer,  has provided a job description  for art critics that is much more prevalent in today's artworld:

Artists are creative thinkers who challenge, expand, educate, disrupt, and revision the world in ways that others cannot. The task of the critic is not dissimilar to that of the artist. Our charge is to use the power of words to elicit, extend and mediate the dialogue, to inform and educate, to re/frame the view, to challenge the status quo. The resolve of art and artists will be tested once again with the imminent return of the culture wars reignited by Trump. Now is the time for critics to take back the discursive function of public space and re-energize the critical apparatus of alternative media and the art press. Above all, our primary mandate is to uphold the rights to free expression and free speech, including our own.

If this paragraph began with the word “politicized”, I could hardly disagree.  Politicized art promulgates one side in a conflict - but I  think of art as more like a harmonization of the human condition -- which is psychological, social, and environmental all at once.  The more stressed  the conflicts may be -- the more useful and amazing their resolution can feel.  Politicized art calls for a politicized criticism that will "elicit, extend, and mediate the dialogue" that it has begun.

But the kind of art that interests me does not  so much initiate a dialogue as satisfy a yearning -- and the job of the critic is to report on its satisfaction.

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A very different task for art criticism was presented by Edmund Burke Feldman in a chapter entitled "The Theory of Art Criticism" in "Varieties of Visual  Experience", a textbook  in American universities from 1967 through it's final edition published in 1992.  One might notice that its original title was "Art as Image and Idea" -- and then the word "art" was removed from the title in an academic world that was  beginning to prefer "visual studies".  (though one might notice that no chapters are devoted to the biophysics of vision or looking at natural phenomena)

"The chief goal of art  criticism is understanding.  We want to find a way of looking at art objects which yield the maximum of knowledge about their meanings and merits.  Works of art yield information to the trained  viewer, but we are not interested in information for its own sake.  For the purposes of criticism, we want to know how information about a work is related to its excellence.  For this reason, archaeological, historical, or literary data about works of art may be fascinating but not necessarily useful in art  criticism. In short, we want to understand the causes in the work of the effect it has upon us"

To "yield the  maximum of knowledge" introduces a notion of quantification which I do not believe applies to the kind of knowledge involved. To attempt to "understand the causes in the work of the effect it has upon us" undermines that which makes things qualify for study as art: their inner unity.

I  fear that like all textbooks, this volume primarily serves an institutional need to present a subject in a non-controversial way  to young people who are mostly interested in  graduating. 

However ---- he does elevate the importance of "excellence" while diminishing the importance of "archaeological, historical, or literary data".  This hierarchy would probably not be found in the textbooks of today.  Connoisseur-ship is long gone from the humanities - but still quite important to anyone, including myself,  who seek and are grateful for excellence in things.

He also lists the four kinds of art criticism as:  Journalistic, Pedagogical, Scholarly, and Popular.  Nothing that I have written  fits into any of these categories.

Perhaps in our new age of internet self publishing, a fifth category will receive more recognition: Amateur - not as in half-assed - but as in done for no reason other than love - an all consuming love.

And so we return to the title of this post

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Lori Waxman  shared her thoughts about art criticism in The Creative Independent  , a website sponsored by Kickstarter.  She has been the principal free-lance art critic at the Chicago Tribune since 2014.

Critics are not commentators. Critics are not influencers. Critics are experts in a particular discipline that are able to articulate their opinions about what they encounter in that field, while also providing immense amounts of context and other sorts of arguments to back up their opinions.

This statement does not identify Waxman as a professional journalist, but she does so later in the interview.  She likes subscription newspapers - she does not like the  free-for-all,  un-edited, self-published  internet. Art critics are not opinionated bloggers like myself - they are professional  journalists, like herself,  whose expertise is art - so they can provide “immense amounts of context” to  substantiate whatever opinions they offer.  I question whether expertise in the arts can be validated unless it is financial (how much will it sell for?) or institutional (where has it been exhibited and discussed?). Those criteria do not interest me -- though I realize that hardly any recognized “experts” would take my side. Some might agree, however, that what's important about context is not the "immense amounts" of quantity - but rather some notion of quality. Or, at least I hope so.

I write about a fairly elite subject, which is contemporary visual art, and I write about it in a general interest publication. So I also have to provide whatever is necessary for your average reader to understand what the hell I’m talking about. Just at the level of, “What is this art? Why does it matter? How does it fit into the grander scheme of things?” Influencers and lay commentators do not have that responsibility.

Even if there is something about a piece that compels such questions, there is no correct answer to them. Personal meaning is the most important because that’s how artworks come to life in each of our lives. Driven by how the work has affected us, we’re all alone on that search.  It’s the job of the art critic to stimulate thought and experience by sharing feelings, observations, and references - though that’s the job of any interlocutor in a good conversation.

The responsibility of a journalist is - or used to be - to aim at accuracy and objectivity. Objectivity is a killer, isn’t it? Apparently it’s considered impossible if not immoral in our current election cycle.  Is it really any more attainable in the discussion of art? So the only serious responsibility left for the professional arts journalist is to give the editors what they want. Which would make the “Influencers and lay commentators” somewhat more sincere - for whatever that is worth

To be a critic is a very particular vocation. It’s to know your field inside and out. It’s to know what happened before, what’s happening now. To know why something is important beyond just your particular interest in it is to be able to defend all of that contextually and historically. And it’s also the ability be a fucking good writer!

"To know why something is important beyond just your particular interest in it” is to speculate on the relative status of the opinions of others.  It contributes nothing to the discourses involved. That’s not art criticism - it’s social journalism.

And to know this entire “field inside and out” is impossible -  even if that only refers to the academic field in which she has taught. The world of art is so vast -- even if you’re only considering the  American  art of our time.  That’s what I learned from going to exhibitions every weekend for the past ten years. Whether it’s Puerto Rico  abstract expression or Ukrainian American tapestry - there's more different kinds of things out there than one lifetime can comprehend.

These requirements are beyond challenging -- and yet Waxman is now practicing a “short form” art criticism (the “60 wrd/min art critic”) that is intentionally shoot-from-the-hip rather than based on careful deliberation  and research. The critic declares that she will only spend twenty minutes on each review.   Occasionally  that review is judgmental rather than merely descriptive. That’s what I would call irresponsible - even if the artists are fully aware of the circumstances.

Whatever our theoretical differences, however, sometimes we come to similar conclusions in our reviews. The "Modernisms" show this year at the Block Museum is one that both of us covered. Here is her review in the Chicago Tribune ;  here is mine in New City .  We also both agreed about the Edlis / Neeson Collection. taking up so much space at the Art Institute for another fifty years.  

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It is amusing to see with what constant recurrence the epidemic of discussion on the subject of art criticism breaks out every now and again. Opinion on this matter is like a spring that overflows at irregular intervals. And that makes up for long periods of a quiescence by occasional displays of violent energy. There is no fore-telling when the outburst may come, nor how long it may continue; it begins as a rule with hardly a warning, and all at once drowns the world with a muddy torrent, that carries along all sorts of incongruous mental wreckage, and intellectual odds and ends. Yet these alarming manifestations are only so much force wasted. It is surely obvious that, so long as the artist who possesses and uses technical knowledge is confronted with a public that neither has nor desires anything of the sort, the critic must find occupation - as a go-between. This indeed, however it may be disguised, is the real mission of all who write about Art. 

 

......Alfred Lys Baldry (1858-1939)

 

an articulate statement of a kind of art writing in which I have no interest - as either reader or writer.  Why should anyone care about technical knowledge other than those artists who wish to learn how to use those techniques?

For what is the New Art Criticism? It is simply the attempt to apply to current art the same standards which we apply to ancient art, to disengage from the enormous stream of picture-producers the one or two contemporary masters who are worthy to be named beside the ancients, the one or two promising talents that may some day deserve the same praise ; to refuse steadfastly to confound the very good with the pretty bad, and to take mediocrity at its own estimate.... Dugald MacColl, 1893

So now you might say that I practiced  the "New Art Criticism" as it was practiced in London, c. 1890.... as long as we allow that these "standards" need never be articulated. They're like the Tao as described by Lao Tse -- whatever you say about them is wrong.

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Sean Talol self-publishes  as The Manhattan Art Review.  He covers the New York art world with short pithy comments, accompanied by a 1-5 star rating system much like movie critics use.

He has written this fine essay about art criticism.

 Is criticism nothing more than sophistry motivated by self-interest? Or does the critic have a role to play in helping us make “better” judgments about art? …….the critic’s social standing, however misused, is grounded in the possession of perceptual skills that are of cultural value. At present, even that allowance is no longer certain.

Right on!  Ironically, I find his writing about art criticism far more  entertaining, informative, and inspiring than his art criticism (even when I agree with it).   The essay tells us so much more about himself. ( and the 5-star system  is really rather useless unless you’re  familiar with the taste of the critic. It would be so helpful if  an online gallery of five-star contemporary pieces were posted)

 

  He’s a  34 year old writer who

"was born a pathological overthinker, neurotic and hard to please. For years I nursed vague artistic aspirations, but it turns out that obsessively thinking about art is a bad way to become an artist."

It’s also a bad way to write what I find readable.  The compelling subject here is human life. Not the ongoing history of art theory and techniques.

..... off-the-cuff reviews would attract more attention than intermittent longer essays. 

As Ben Davis noted, negativity also attracts more attention than positive — and as the new Republican Party has learned, colorful lies are better click-bait than boring truths.

 The value of these judgments is not in their being absolutely right or wrong, but in the way they crystallize the critic’s sensibility.


I’d rather have that sensibility elaborated than crystallized.


The disappointment of bad art is its inability to be anything more than what was expected, whereas one of the greatest pleasures of art—and one of the few well suited to the critic—is when it proves to be more than what was suggested by your preconceptions or by the small photo you could make out on your phone.


For me, the disappointment of bad art is that it’s a dead end.  You turn into it - like any other street on your journey  - and then it goes nowhere.  You have to back out. 

On less grand but more useful terms, artistic quality is never given; it has to be found, fought for and defended. This is the critic’s fight.


I don’t like to fight - let the artwork itself win or lose affection.  The critic can only report on their own experience.  And everyone is a critic when they say something like "Wow!  Did you see that ? It’s just like xxxxx"

…… the function of art: the struggle toward expression, to eloquently articulate qualities that are beautiful, emotive or otherwise engaging. 

The function of art:  to enhance human life through the imagination.

In the contemporary context, becoming cultured requires a resistance to the prevailing culture, and could ironically  be considered countercultural. Nevertheless the pursuit remains necessary, and perhaps even unavoidable, because it is intrinsic to our nature. I certainly agree with this first sentence:  popular culture creates whatever can be sold - whether it’s porn, French fries, or MAGA resentment.  University culture should be the antidote - but instead it’s been cultivating a narrow minded, overly mental conformity.  Becoming cultured needs to resist both.Cultivation is the growth into a distinct individuality by means of culture, an understanding of oneself and the world that always seeks to more fully encompass this understanding, a knowledge of life, an intelligence. 

High-Classical-culture person that I am - I’d like to say that I’ve seen the difference that it makes in the "knowledge of life" and "intelligence" of others —- but I can’t really.  And nothing  in this key sentence suggests anything like "spirituality" -  despite what follows.  This aspiration reaches toward an absolute, an omniscience that is both desired by and denied to humans: something I might call God if I were religious, but that for our purposes we can call the good. This good is something we can only put ourselves in service to. Good art, by extension, is good by its achievement of the good, a channeling of an external sense of life into an artwork. Good criticism seeks to recognize this good in art as much as it can. 

This is the sentence that provoked Ben Davis to write The Quasi-Theological Turn in Art Criticism is a Mirage Leading Art Criticism in the Wrong Way" and it echoes the quote from Thomas Aquinas that preceded it. Whoever dreamed we’d be arguing about scholasticism in 21st Century Art criticism?!?

You can mark me down as Franciscan as opposed to Dominican.  Reason has its uses - but spirituality is something else again.  And if you remember that 1987 groundbreaking exhibition at LACMA, "The Spiritual in Art" , spirituality has been important to much  of the art that came after Kandinsky.

The process of learning to discern what separates the truly good from the seemingly good, and the failed attempts at the good from the irredeemably bad, does not follow rules. 

Yes - there are no rules.  And if AI ever discovers any, they will apply to the new silicon life forms, not us hairy, smelly humans. …… However……I do think the human adventure is too ever changing to have a "truly good".  This is the medieval scholastic mind at work again. My alternative scale would be "most intensely good - benign - incompetent - confused - damaged "

Writing about art can have any number of objectives, but lurking behind any analysis is the question of judgment. Most contemporary art writing uses interpretation as a way of sidestepping the problem of quality, but interpretations are impossible to take seriously if the art itself is bad. A critic who avoids evaluation may have a less contentious body of work; perhaps they will protect themselves from ever saying anything that will sound embarrassing to future generations. I agree 100%   The cost is that they won’t be able to help their readers learn how to judge art or to understand it, which are in essence the same thing. Judging and understanding are far less important to me than experiencing - and surprisingly, Tatol himself writes something like that in the following quote:

The real sustenance of the artistic is the scope of experience it provides, the cumulative sense of growth and cultivation of ourselves through art, a tendency toward a good that we can never capture but only assist in radiating itself and existence.

I’d like to replace the word "good" with the phrase "higher energy" — if anyone really cares.

In his critique of Tatol,  Ben Davis offers two interesting quotes.

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: “What would I like about this if I liked it?” I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology. I assess art by quality and significance. The latter is most decisive for my choice of subjects, because I’m a journalist. There’s art I adore that I won’t write about, because I can’t imagine it mattering enough to general readers. It pertains to my private experience as a person, without which my activity as a critic would wither but which falls outside my critical mandate…………  Peter Schjeldahl ( I have written about him here )

Obviously, I do not share Peter Schjeldahl’s critical mandate - and so I must forever be self published. It does raise the question, however, whether publishable art criticism can ever be sincere.  It’s all phony: the writer pretends to pass judgment, but is only really a journalist.  He could just as well be reporting the weather.

The consumer service remains the professional basis for the staff reviewer’s job; fidelity, evidence, and so forth are still the measures of his value, but the high critical edge becomes misplaced, disproportionate when applied to most ordinary work. The staff critic is nonetheless obliged, and paid, to do more than simply mark time between rich periods and occasional masterpieces. The simple truth—this is okay, this is not okay, this is vile, this resembles that, this is good indeed, this is unspeakable—is not a day’s work for a thinking adult. Some critics go shrill. Others go stale. A lot go simultaneously shrill and stale… By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis—the most, first, best, worst, finest, meanest, deepest, etc.—to take on, since we are dealing in superlatives, one of the first, most unmistakable marks of the hack.......... Renata Adler

Another way of telling us that professional art critics are all phonies.

Two of our local painters,  Dmitry Samarov and Alan Pocaro , exemplify the kind of critic who is not.  Every few months or so, a show provokes them to write  -  and it gets published in an alternative weekly.  It’s not a living - but it’s one of many streams.  And they always have something interesting to say.

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Mention should now be made of that paragon of nasty quips and negative criticism, Denis Diderot - the super-star of 18th C.  art criticism. (I’ve written about one of his Salons here )

"I haven't the courage to describe this thing. Read Anacreon, and if you have a copy of his bust, burn Boizot's painting in front of it, pleading that he never again be permitted to produce anything so limp based upon so charming an author."

History has been validating Diderot for more than a century.  His favorite artist of the Salons was Chardin - and he considered most of the others as badly flawed and mockable.  You would probably agree with him as well.  His raucus negativity is forgiven because he was right.  That may or may not be the case with Tatol.  (mostly I think he needs to learn and experience a lot more before sharing his snap judgments)

But regarding his demand for qualitative judgment - that’s how I was taught and that’s what I live by.  An artist is no less responsible for producing good art than a chef is for presenting a wholesome and delicious entree - regardless of  the differing tastes of the customers. The artist establishes a taste - and lives or dies by it.

A hundred years ago, the universality of taste was proven by the encyclopedic museum - with a collection of alleged masterpieces that spanned continents and centuries.  That proof has been challenged by a conceptual relativism in the Humanities (what a statue of Anubis meant to an ancient Egyptian could not possibly be what it means to you).   It has also been challenged by an art market where objects of no special  visuality are sold for astronomical prices.  And there’s really no way to defend against them.  Either you see that universality or you don’t - and either you find it painfully absent in Andy Warhol , Jeff Koons, and Thomas Kinkade —- or you don’t.

I empathize with Tatol’s religious inclinations.  There is one Taste - just as there is one God ( or Tao ) - and a oneness in each piece.  Our small human minds can never fully comprehend it - but at least we can grow in understanding.

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We might note the title of Ben Davis’ first essay : " Is Art Criticism Today Too Affirmative? That’s the Wrong Question to Be Asking ".  And so ——- what question should  we ask?  His answer:  " Is “the question of judgment” really a full picture of what is at stake."  — rather than something like "how good are today’s art critics?"

And Ben Davis, though offering a fine critique of Tatol, nimbly dances around a notion of art criticism without actually offering one:

But if the vision for culture being offered is different from cultural conservatism in either its old-school or new-model forms, where a call to reassert aesthetic hierarchies is read together with a call to reassert social hierarchies, there’s good reason to be clear about how......The simplest and philosophically cleanest way to make this differentiation is just to incorporate the reality of aesthetic pluralism as a positive force into the theory—to say that it is not always a name for intellectual laziness but can also be a name for intellectual curiosity, that it is not a barrier to having standards but their desirable starting point.

So the best way to avoid "cultural conservatism" and still have standards  is to always be at the "starting point" ?  Davis just needs to consider the very high standards of his own prose - and realize that he has been well educated in the verbal, but not the visual arts.

Kano Masanobu, Bodhidharma in Red Robes (late 15th century)

In response to a query for "one work of art that brings you joy", here is  (an abbreviated version) of what Davis wrote:

What first stopped me is just how grumpy he looked. He’s got these big, haunted eyes, and he’s kind of giving you the side eye, like he’s not sure about you. He’s got heavy, frowny, wispy eyebrows. He’s got a five o’clock shadow. His hair is kind of scruffy.

But I also really love how vivid this image is. Like this painting really captures something for me. It just really looks like this guy who’s had a hard day, who’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, who thinks too much. He looks like someone who hasn’t had his coffee yet. It’s simple, but it’s very powerful for me.

After I saw this artwork and kept thinking about it; I kept thinking about why it stayed with me. The text at the Met says it is about Bodhidharma’s message: “look within to become a Buddha.” But this guy doesn’t look like he’s looking inside; he definitely is looking out at me. And he doesn’t look like he’s found tranquility; he’s scowling at me.

All of this is fine.  Joy is primarily what I seek in art - and it’s personal effect is exactly what I want an art critic to write about.

But Davis has only written about that  narrative theatrical part which many representations of the Bodhidharma have in common - and which a competent cartoonist could whip up today in a few minutes.

What about those more formal aspects of internal energy and how figure/ground become one?  What about the electric tension of the brush strokes as they shape and organize space ? This is what can make the ordinary feel profound.  To savor the  balance  between  something and nothing is especially meaningful in the context of Zen.

Nope - Davis has nothing to say about that— and since he is quite articulate, he probably would have mentioned it  had it made any difference to him.

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Now let’s move on to a short review by Sean Tatol:

Magalie Guerin , untitled (CC2), 2023

Magalie Guerin, Some Mondegreens, Sikkema Jenkins & Co.  :  **.5 The compositional sensibility is decent, if a little one note, but the real problem that's hard to shake is the insistence of a bad color palette. 

"bad color palette" is  quite reasonable as a personal preference - but as a serious criteria for quality in  painting ?   Tatol must be joking. His essay touted something like an education in the Liberal Arts as a path to deeper understanding and personal development. Here - as  Ben Davis puts it - he offers nothing more than "Random personal antipathy”

 

By contrast -  here is what John Yau had to say about the same show on Hyperallergic:

In her latest exhibition, what struck me immediately about Guérin’s work was that it neither looked like anyone else’s nor immediately disclosed its meaning.

 Both Guérin and Nozkowski are abstract artists who explore a subjective space that the latter helped open up, starting in the mid-1970s, when Conceptual art superseded painting. It is a direction in abstraction that has been largely overlooked because the critical narrative of 20th-century abstraction that has dominated Western art history focuses on the pursuit of objectivity, with an emphasis on external structures, such as the grid, two-dimensionality, paint as paint, and post-easel scale. Working from memory, Nozkowski undermined these measures of objectivity with skewed grids and irregular geometric shapes drawn from the landscape or things he experienced or read about.

I've liked Guerin's paintings for more than ten years - so I appreciate Yau's positive evaluation ("one of the best of her generation")  But more than that -- Yau's review introduced me to Thomas Nozkowski - so I could think about the similarites and especially the  differences.  That's the kind of thing I want from art criticism.

 

But I would not present this review as exemplary.

 

Regretfully, Yau's text is void of aesthetic response and judgment.   He's a poet - so it's enough for him to say that a painting  is enigmatic - without querying why anyone might care to puzzle it out.

Something does feel wrong or broken about Guerin's world - but her response has a strange grittiness  and determination that I find fascinating and admirable. And her work has become more lighthearted over the past two years. Has she found love?  I want to cheer her on.

M.F. Husain at the Art Institute of Chicago

India, the largest experiment in democratic institutions the world has ever known, has many grave challenges. Pollution, communal strife, massive income disparity, and especially lawlessness continue to flourish. No wonder both M.F. Husain (1915-2011), the artist, and Lakshmi Mittal, his multi-billionaire patron, decided to live somewhere else. The awkward quality of these eight wall-size triptychs, twelve feet wide by six feet high, reflects this difficult moment in history. Executed 2008-2011, the design and drawing is crude, while the iconography wantonly conflates the personal with the national. Much of it is incomprehensible without the accompanying texts in the gallery signage which are often incomplete. Is this really how “India’s most important 20th-century artist” presents South Asia’s cultural legacy?

Mostly, what Husain has to offer is sincere affection and sentimentality. He loved the streets where he grew up, even if he could no longer walk them. Offended by how he depicted their deities, militant Hindus threatened his life. One of the triptychs in this show depicts the great trimurti, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, as Marc Chagall might have imagined them. They are more like charming characters in a folk tale than cosmic divinities who demand worship and interpretation. They feel no more sacred than the heroes of Bollywood cinema—just goofier—as if all of creation was a situation comedy.

A few pieces offer a pleasing, cheerful design – especially his depiction of “Traditional Indian Festivals” . The bold colorful pattern would look good printed on a tropical shirt, as well as hanging from the wall of a restaurant. One might note, however, that all three festivals depicted are Hindu, despite the artist’s Muslim background. Indeed, the only Muslims depicted in these eight paintings are the Mughal emperor, Akbar, and members of the artist’s own family.

For Americans, the most revealing piece might be “Indian Households.”. Grandfather and teenage granddaughter are sitting on the same bed— – he is smoking a hookah, while she is leaning back with her knees spread and a fresh green mango in her lap. That arrangement may suggest sexual transgression, – but probably not for those who grew up in small, one-room apartments. Americans might also be surprised by the prominence given in “Three Cities” to Chandra Bose. His status as a liberation leader has been undercut, for us, by his collaboration with Hitler.

For me, the most annoying piece is “Language of Stone”, a celebration of India’s tradition of stone carving. It hangs in the Alsdorf Galleries, surrounded by many examples of devotional sculpture whose qualities Husain’s stiff, awkward scrawl cannot even begin to suggest. Has India’s greatest artistic legacy really become so invisible in the modern world?

Husain’s approach to “The Indian Civilization” appears to be nostalgic both for the land of his childhood as well as the painting of early Twentieth Century European Modernists. He offers more of a suggestion than a strong connection to either one of them. His work has the content as well as the aesthetic quality of a cheap travel brochure. One of the great achievements of Hindustani classical music is that it expresses South Asian identity in a spiritual yet non-sectarian way. Husain’s attempt to do that with visual art was a noble, but not especially successful one.


“India Modern: The Paintings of M. F. Husain” shows through March 4 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

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Unlike most of the reviews posted to this blog,  this one was rejected by New City and an explicit reason given:

"It doesn't approach the work with the generosity of spirit that such works require, especially from the standpoint of someone who knows little about the culture from which it comes."


This review , written by Rachel Q. Levy,  a graduate student in Art History, was published in its place, and it exemplifies the kind of  "social justice" art commentary that now dominates academia.

First, one might note that an ideological assertion has been made without reference to specific evidence: "The triptych challenges recent claims by Hindu nationalists that India is synonymous with Hinduism"

Yet as I pointed out in the review left unpublished, the series portrays no Muslims other than Emperor Akbar and the artist's own family. The "Language of Stone" panel does include the Qutb Minar as well as ancient and medieval Hindu artifacts. But elsewhere, all the political leaders portrayed are Hindu, all the festivals portrayed are Hindu, all the deities portrayed are Hindu, and there are no Islamic saints or other spiritual leaders.

M.F. Husain's attitude towards Hindu hegemony is not as clear and simple as the reviewer would suggest. Husain seems to be reasserting it, though it's been secularized enough to displease some Hindu fundamentalists.  As they seek to align themselves with a well established political correctness, both the reviewer and the art editor have paid little attention to what was actually up on the wall.

Then, one might also note that aesthetic judgment has been made in the passive voice: "Husain is often referred to as “India’s Picasso.” Who, actually, has ever made that assertion?  There is no other mention of aesthetic qualities other than "rich color palette and grand scale" -- and the same could be said for most billboards along any highway.

The only indication that the reviewer has actually seen these pieces is her comment that the installation serves to interrupt the flow of traffic through the Alsdorf Galleries. If that is all one can say about the visual qualities of these paintings, why do they belong in an art museum ?

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Real - Impressions at the Palette and Chisel Academy

Donna J. West

“Gracious”, my favorite painting by Donna J. West , seems to record an ecstatic moment – like the breathless aftermath of a paint-gun fight or the Hindu festival of Holi.  There are bursts and slaps and smears of color.   Her figurative work, however, reflects the life of young women finding their way in the big city.  In accord with her career in activewear fashion, West depicts the stroll of stylish young models.   They are slim and vigorous  - but there is also a  sense of anxiety, tension, and emptiness.  They are trying, perhaps too hard, to appear carefree.  Most of them are faceless mannequins, and if they have a face,  it feels disjointed or the eyes are concealed by dark glasses.  The paint is too thick and chalky. The colors are annoying and discordant. The drawing is angular and jagged.   The same is true of her floral still-lifes.  They are more about the conventional idea that flowers are supposed to be pleasing than the luxuriant growth of actual foliage.  Beneath the surface of all her work, there are the ripples of edges  painted over – echoing  much struggle and effort .  It takes hard work to appear casual and attractive– and West documents that corner of modern, urban life.

Stephanie Weidner

There is a different kind of tension in the paintings of Stephanie Weidner.  In her best work, she offers the perfect depiction of a world that is just a little strange.  Not as strange as a surrealist like Magritte might make it – but strange in an ordinary kind of way.  As when she depicts a twisty, sinuous  vine erupting from a  squat, solid vase. Or a maze of tree roots hovering over a neatly folded tablecloth. Or a flight formation of large-winged insects pinned against a checkered cloth.  Or a red vase painted beside a gray oil can that might suggest a conventional married couple: the woman tall elegant and poetic ; the man  squat, strong, and  practical.  And then there’s the totally weird “Dragon with Craspedia” – a larger work where the stability established by a solid  black vase seems threatened by a whimsical dragon emerging from a printed pattern behind it.   Weidner is not familiar with Chicago legend, Gertrude Abercrombie, but their odd, careful, claustrophobic work has much in common



“Real /Impression” is the name that  Weidner and West have chosen to denote how their styles differ. At the Palette and Chisel Academy, where they met and are now showing, one might indeed find two ongoing traditions being taught.  One group is inspired by the object-centered realism perfected by the Seventeenth Century Dutch masters.  Another group is inspired by that emphasis on light and expressive  brushstroke pioneered in nineteenth Century Paris.  But Weidner is more concerned with the mysteries of an inner world than with the perfection of an outer one.  And West is more about the drama of life in Chicago than with how light falls on a garden.  The two still make for a good contrast, though, and good examples of what contemporary painters are doing outside the contemporary artworld.

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Responding to my suggestion that her painting resembled that of Gertrude Abercombrie,  Stephanie sent me the above images.

She painted the cat on the left -- Abercrombie did the one on the right.

Gauguin : Artist as Alchemist

It would be hard to find an artist more politically incorrect than Paul Gauguin. His work, as well as his life, can easily “appear to be a veritable encyclopaedia of colonial racism and misogyny" to either the titillation of the general public or the dismay of academics. The curators of this exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago decided to avoid those issues altogether, and focus on the artist as a craftsman in a wide variety of media. Which would be a reasonable strategy – except that his techniques in painting, wood carving, and ceramics were neither virtuosic nor innovative. Even his unusual glass transfer drawing dates back at least to the 18th century. So there’s a keen sense of failure about the show’s signage as it desperately tries to distract viewers from the elephant in the room.

Alternatively, we might also consider “Gauguin's use of religious and mythological symbols to tell stories….and invest his art with deeper meaning” – as did the 2011 exhibit at the National Gallery, “Gauguin, Maker of Myth”. That myth making begins in this show with ceramic pots that depict the Greco-Roman Arcadian memes that so enthralled French aristocratic taste in the 18th Century. As with the other avant garde artists of his day, Gauguin’s rustic nymphs are more matter-of-fact than alluring fantasy. His Leda is a peasant girl carrying a Swan to market. The piece is more expressive than naturalistic, but its eroticism is not overt. More erotic is his ceramic portrait of the wife of his friend Schuffenecker. Her face appears to be walking around on her two ample breasts. One suspects that the artist himself may have had something to do with the emotional distance in that marriage that he depicted so succinctly in the family portrait that hangs nearby.

It appears that Gauguin wanted to express something about the human condition, as well as his own, that was outside Classical stories and stylizations. He began by depicting the medieval world of the Breton peasant - painting his own hawk-like face in front of a Romanesque crucifixion. You just know, looking at his furtive eyes, that he was not going to take to Christianity. Then he moved to Polynesia – as far away from Europe and Paris as he could get while still being on French territory. Many of his subsequent pieces show the influence of South-east Asian as well as Polynesian figure sculpture.

One vitrine offers a late Gauguin wood carving, “Pere Paillard (Father Lechery)” (1902), side-by-side with a museum quality nineteenth century Tiki. The power, precision, and cosmic mystery of the Polynesian carving place it among the masterpieces of world religious art. Gauguin’s satirical portrait of his clerical adversary is more like an adolescent prank that imitates local art as it attacks an authority figure.

In other pieces, however, the French artist does seem to be sincerely addressing the cosmological questions inscribed on his monumental “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” That piece did not travel to this exhibit, but “Te Reriora”, “Te Nave Nave Fanua”, and “Manao Tupapau” also address conflations of spiritual and carnal hunger. They are on the cusp of being both beautiful and profound. Their dream like quality makes them look better when backlit on a computer monitor than when light on the surface brings out the physicality of their materials. Overall, the artist seems more concerned with an inner vision rather than with perfecting its presentation.

There is a rough awkwardness about everything he makes – as if he were eager to begin the next piece. But there is also the thrill of creating a new mythology that draws from European as well as non-European traditions, without being constrained by either or becoming too solipsistic. “Manea Tupapau” (The Spirit of the Dead Watching) does seem to present an episode from the artist’s personal life: a fourteen year old girl has moved into his bedroom. Possibly she is the somewhat reluctant object of his desire. But it also feels like he and the girl are just two of many actors in a cross-generational cosmic drama that is beyond our comprehension. It’s appealing because the characters exhibit a calm strength, dignity, and poise.  That is a contribution that Gauguin's figurative art will continue to make long after its exoticism has worn off.

Many of Gauguin's paintings found on the internet, however, seem to be more like pin-up girlie pictures. I'm sure there was a market for it back in Paris.   Only a few, like the one shown above,  accompanied this exhibit.

Many more examples, however, are shown of a narrative genre that is neither mythic nor erotic fantasy. If the artist could have taken color photographs, he might have preferred to use that media to show the world that he was discovering.  Like the American artists who were then going west to depict the lives of American Indians, Gauguin often seems more interested in documentation than in painting.

Perhaps a Gauguin retrospective should just be called "Gauguin: Twenty-Five Years of Making Stuff" - and then discuss relevant issues on a piece-by-piece basis - which is often what the signage in this exhibit is doing anyway.

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Portrait of Emil Gauguin, 1877

This marble bust is one of the more remarkable pieces in the show - even if it's formal qualities are more appropriate for a cemetery than an art museum.

According to gallery signage, this is the second stone carving that Gauguin ever worked on - and the first that he worked on by himself (with supervision).

He never attended an art school - and apparently didn't need to.  He learned how to do things rather quickly.

Here's one of my favorite pieces in the show -- along with the exhibition signage which, one may note, does not especially relate to "artist as alchemist"

The text is quite informative - though it does not notice, as Stephen Eisenman did, that it is nearly homoerotic - as the narrow-hipped reclining nude only shows us her buttocks and face.

It also does not discuss the social context wherein a naked thirteen year old is in the bedroom of an itinerant Frenchman.

The legal  consequences of a sexual relationship between a European colonial and a young native  are explored by the Indonesian novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in his "Buru Quartet".

Here's a  portrait of the same girl - more straight laced this  time - and more like a young person who does what she's been told. Galley signage fills us in on the iconography behind her.

This piece is in the Art Institute's permanent collection -- so I must have walked past it several hundred times.  But it never caught my eye. It still only interests me for its subject matter.

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Here is Stephen Eisenman's review published in Art in America. He suggests that rather than working like an alchemist who turns dirt into gold, Gauguin did the reverse.  And I would agree - except, of course, for the fact that his paintings are worth far more than their constituent materials.

Jim Dine at Richard Gray

Jim Dine "Looking at the Present" at Richard Gray Gallery

The octogenarian work of Jim Dine is the kind of serious art his ‘happenings’  were mocking sixty years ago.  It’s heroic in scale and cosmic theme. It even feels liturgical,as enhanced by its display in the new Richard Gray Warehouse, a remodeled industrial facility with the nave, aisles, vault, and clerestory windows of a Roman basilica.

By his own reckoning, over the past forty years, the artist has made “a million” heart-shaped ideograms in a project that conflated popular sentimentality with the semiotics of contemporary academia and the provocative banality of PopArt.  But now, apparently in anticipation of his demise, the artist is addressing the same kind of profound questions that religions have been asking for millennia: what is the purpose of our brief, harried, passionate, conflicted, mostly ignorant and occasionally desperate human lives?  How can they be considered worthwhile?  How do each of us measure up?

With the few brilliant exceptions that made it into art history, religious art, especially of our time, has been content with the skillful and sentimental illustration of conventional, historic narratives. Meanwhile contemporary secular artists have presented the human condition as ever more fragmentary, temporary, alienated, and absurd.  Jim Dine has been no exception.  But now, as if hearing the final trumpets, he has brought that kind of modern human life – his life – to a last judgment.  And like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, he has condemned himself to Hell.

It’s not the medieval kind of Hell full of devils and monsters.  It’s the modern Hell of the isolated, inescapable self – the artist’s own disembodied, faceless head, hovering in a maelstrom of mud  (the artist uses sand) and colors that feel too strong and too cheap – as if a newspaper’s Sunday color comics had been left at the bottom of a bird cage.  The cage’s bars are suggested by a recurring motif of vertical black stripes against a glowing red background.

These paintings are full of death, rot,and corruption. They often contain human skulls, leering and horrific. Yet they are also full of bright colors and life – of pictorial energy, on the surface and a wonderful, seething, jumping sense of pictorial space. Whatever the young Jim Dine may have thought about the Abstract Expressionism that he rebelled against, the old Jim Dine has mastered it.

He has also mastered traditional European figure drawing, and applied it in two multi-panel pieces  In the triptych, “The Funny Pleasures of War”, he ogles voluptuous female flesh. Does the title suggest that  raping women is a pleasure?  That’s outrageous, but the human psyche is a law unto itself, and lust is here presented as resulting in more entanglements than pleasure.  A similar theme is pursued in “Errant Rays and Seeds Escaping”, a five-panel conglomeration of flesh, garish junk, and leering skulls. "A Constant Reminder of  Age and Gender" is a grid of heads and skulls whose title locates this vision within his own condition.  He is aware of himself as an old man – while the teeming fullness of his depictions remind us of his social status: he is a rich old man in a stable society.  He seems to have more than enough of whatever he wants - and an appetite to go with it.

There are no ideals here. There is no divine plan for human redemption.  There is no compassion for others. There is no peace, there is no worship, there is no hope, there is no future.   There is only the slightly humorous, slightly annoying, possibly threatening, and definitely inescapable obsession with the voracious self – repeated again and again across the walls of the gallery/church. 

But to give the devil his due, this is painting that feels both very strong and very honest. The overall compositions of the multi-panel pieces are thrilling.  The energy never flags in the details.  And the artist has boldly turned his back on the sensibilities of the contemporary artworld.  He doesn’t examine the language of visual art – he uses it – and he uses it to say something like:  “I am a self-centered, rich, old, heterosexual white male… deal with it”. Perhaps he should have run for President. Of special note are his adaptations of Edvard Munch.  Many of Dine’s spectral faces  borrow from “The Scream”,  and he even digresses from his primary theme to offer the Norwegian master a direct and worthy tribute in “Oslo, Midsummer with E.”

For those who follow contemporary art, this show is likely tangential.  The artist is now looking backward – from fifty to five-hundred years. But that’s the same reason the show can be so thrilling. Like great historic art,  Dine is glorifying something -- his own hungry self – and that glory is as magnificent as his self is disappointing.

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Black Viennese Airport

Jim Dine's disembodied head reminded me of a cartoon character from the sixties -- so I've compared these three versions of faceless heads (from top to bottom):  a photo of himself, the image of Alfred E. Newman, and the head he depicts in his current paintings.

Looking at the Present Alone

.... and all he can see is himself, as his own giant head obstructs the view of everything behind it.

But what a strange, deep, translucent, glowing,  delicious form it is.

Coming from the  Darkness, I hear you laugh!

This feels like the arrival  of the goddess of voracious appetite - an American variant of Kali.
Note the black bars behind her -- you're locked in a cage with her and there's  no escape.

A Constant Reminder of Age and Gender.

Me, me, me, me, me.

Everywhere I look it's me.

Dine could be retroactively enrolled in the Monster Roster -- which might explain  why Richard  Gray is  now showing his older work in NYC, and his recent work in Chicago.

Errant Rays and  Seeds Escaping

Active – dynamic – violent – confusing – sexual – tawdry -  exciting – confessional – profound  

And Hellish

Four Ears

The repetition of empty,  monumental heads recalls the proliferation of giant stone faces at Ankhor Thom -- possibly depicting another megalomaniac - the Khmer ruler, Jayavarman VII

Oslo, Midsummer with E.

Red Eye

The Funny Pleasures of War

That sanding female nude on the left suggests that Dine still practices life drawing.

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While viewing the exhibit, it occurred to me that the cathedral-like  Gray Gallery would also be the perfect setting for the monumental Hellish paintings of Wesley Kimler.  Indeed, it would be instructive to see the work of both artists displayed side by side.

That could, of course, never happen because Kimler has been as antagonistic towards the artworld as Dine has been cooperatively engaged.

But as luck would have it --- the new Gray Warehouse is RIGHT NEXT DOOR to Kimler's studio -
so when Gray has an opening, Kimler can have an Open Studio and the same crowd  will visit both.


Here, for example an artworld paparazzi wanders into Kimler's studio after filming the Jim Dine opening at the Gray Gallery.

"Wesley who?"  She had never heard of Kimler.

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The Garden of  Eden, 2003

The above earlier piece is also included in his show, but it's behind a partition at the rear of the gallery and I didn't know it was there.

Dine grew up in his grandparents' hardware store in Cincinnati.  His fond childhood memories of tools appear to constitute his idea of paradise.

But he also grew up in Walnut Hills High School, a city-wide college-prep school that I attended fifteen years later.

A  few life-size plaster casts of Classical sculpture, including Discobolus, were in the hallway, and every student had to translate Virgil's "Aeneid" and Caesar's "Gallic Wars".

Perhaps that is the origin of Dine's fondness for the Venus de Milo.

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In his New City review Alan Pocaro writes:

but the paintings in “Looking at the Present” are far more Milton Resnick than they are Jasper Johns. It’s tempting to speculate that this late-career efflorescence is due in part to an existential gravitas brought on by old age. There is undoubtedly a conceptual seriousness present that’s lacking in a lot of Dine’s more lighthearted work of the past. Formally, however, there is a playful assertiveness to these pictures that is at odds with this reading. It is as if through art, one can be made, if not immortal, at least young again.

..with which I'd agree



In his New Art Examiner review Bruce Thorn writes:

“Looking at the Present” is an excellent and memorable exhibition. Not only is the work heroic in scale and visually strong, but Dine is also taking big risks simply by proclaiming the importance, power and relevance of abstract painting in a world of balloon dogs and technological advances. Academics have been preaching that the medium is dead since Duchamp’s earlier questionings. How is it that a contemporary artist fully knowledgeable of the brevity of his remaining years chose to pour so much time and energy into what could, at his age, be a swan song, and do it in such an obsolete language as abstract painting? This kind of commitment seems unheard of in today’s art world.

.....Think of how much more Dine might have accomplished had he always been committed to "the power and relevance of abstract painting" - instead of waiting until his final years.



This is the age of selfies and Jim Dine has been at it making self-referential art for a long time. If there is anything esoteric about this body of Dine’s work it is that he deconstructs the selfie to a nonspecific, more cosmic place closer to the collective unconscious. His work is always autobiographical, from using images of tools as references to the family hardware store, to his repetitive use of his own facial silhouette with protruding ears

The works are filled with exciting, unexpected details. In Coming from the Darkness, I Hear You Laugh, 2016, Dine surrenders sublimely to the act of painting as if surrendering to a lover’s laugh.