I Used to Been a Art Critic
This was in Detroit. I was a young prof in the academic department at an art college (teaching English--more about sometime that in "Adventures and Misadventures in Academe")--Center for Creative Studies--and I got a chance to do some writing for a Chicago-based arts paper that wanted a Detroit stringer. I went around to various exhibits--photography, painting, sculpture--and wrote up to 250 words per article on what I saw. It was fun for awhile, and I ate a lot of cheese and crackers and drank my share of cheap wine and more than my share of green grapes and watermelon squares (my then-wife was mortified that I hung around the food table all the time), but then reviewing became an onerous task for two reasons.
(Maybe three: the food was always the same.)
But first (and more importantly, of course, since I could eat at home), in 250 words, you use up everything you have to say on the specific exhibit, but you can never really develop any ideas meaningfully on a broad scale. Then I realized I didn't care about that, and decided my career as an art critic should come to an end.
But the other reason was this: I didn't see any way to continue without compromising either friendships or honesty. As soon as local artists discovered I was writing reviews, I noticed a tendency for them to want to get acquainted with me, tell me about their work, let me know where they were exhibiting. Some of them were already friends; some became more friendly. I was especially troubled when a friend lobbied on her husband's behalf. I did not like his work, and I did not want to be in the position of saying publicly what I would have to say if I were being honest. So, I stopped.
But not before doing a more fully developed article on photography in Detroit. I sent in one draft, and got it back with the comment that it didn't have enough of an "opinion." I presumed they wanted something more confrontive than a neutral overview of what people were doing, so I rewrote the article, calling it "Photo Faciticity in Detroit." The point of the article was that, to judge from the work of most of the photographers on the art college faculty at that time, as well as others I knew in the area, photographers in Detroit were under the sway of what I considered an antiquated idea: that photographs are facts about the world. This was before Photoshop, obviously, but not before there was plenty of discussion about how photographs can be made to misrepresent the world, and indeed, plenty of discussion--if one were reading in such discussive places--of how who knows what a fact is anyway?
The spokesperson for this philosophy (and he may have changed later, but his photography continued to reflect that notion) one day--before the article was written--kicked me out of his classroom for speculating, in a casual conversation, that Brassai's photographs of Paris night life looked like dream images in some respects. I thought the guy was kidding, but he was seriously ordering me, in a raised voice, to "Get out of my classroom!" In front of students. I don't know whether he thought my ideas were contaminative, or whether he just didn't like them. But out I went. He had a non-arrogant demeanour most of the time, but he was arrogant under his mild exterior.
Perhaps it was with some sense of satisfaction that I later wrote the article and used it as a platform to debunk the idea of photo as "fact."
I'm not sure how many of my acquaintances actually read the article, since it was in a Chicago-based arts paper, but my art critical career came to an end. I still have copies of my reviews, perhaps even of the "Photo-Facticity" article. I haven't seen copies on Ebay yet.
The next time I wrote something on photography, it was a fictional piece that got published in the Journal of the Society for Photographic Education, or SPE. Even now, I consider it funny--I think the title was "Steiglitz in Heaven," where Stieglitz, like God, gets to make the ultimate judgment about which photographers gain access to the Pearly Gates, and which don't.
(Maybe three: the food was always the same.)
But first (and more importantly, of course, since I could eat at home), in 250 words, you use up everything you have to say on the specific exhibit, but you can never really develop any ideas meaningfully on a broad scale. Then I realized I didn't care about that, and decided my career as an art critic should come to an end.
But the other reason was this: I didn't see any way to continue without compromising either friendships or honesty. As soon as local artists discovered I was writing reviews, I noticed a tendency for them to want to get acquainted with me, tell me about their work, let me know where they were exhibiting. Some of them were already friends; some became more friendly. I was especially troubled when a friend lobbied on her husband's behalf. I did not like his work, and I did not want to be in the position of saying publicly what I would have to say if I were being honest. So, I stopped.
But not before doing a more fully developed article on photography in Detroit. I sent in one draft, and got it back with the comment that it didn't have enough of an "opinion." I presumed they wanted something more confrontive than a neutral overview of what people were doing, so I rewrote the article, calling it "Photo Faciticity in Detroit." The point of the article was that, to judge from the work of most of the photographers on the art college faculty at that time, as well as others I knew in the area, photographers in Detroit were under the sway of what I considered an antiquated idea: that photographs are facts about the world. This was before Photoshop, obviously, but not before there was plenty of discussion about how photographs can be made to misrepresent the world, and indeed, plenty of discussion--if one were reading in such discussive places--of how who knows what a fact is anyway?
The spokesperson for this philosophy (and he may have changed later, but his photography continued to reflect that notion) one day--before the article was written--kicked me out of his classroom for speculating, in a casual conversation, that Brassai's photographs of Paris night life looked like dream images in some respects. I thought the guy was kidding, but he was seriously ordering me, in a raised voice, to "Get out of my classroom!" In front of students. I don't know whether he thought my ideas were contaminative, or whether he just didn't like them. But out I went. He had a non-arrogant demeanour most of the time, but he was arrogant under his mild exterior.
Perhaps it was with some sense of satisfaction that I later wrote the article and used it as a platform to debunk the idea of photo as "fact."
I'm not sure how many of my acquaintances actually read the article, since it was in a Chicago-based arts paper, but my art critical career came to an end. I still have copies of my reviews, perhaps even of the "Photo-Facticity" article. I haven't seen copies on Ebay yet.
The next time I wrote something on photography, it was a fictional piece that got published in the Journal of the Society for Photographic Education, or SPE. Even now, I consider it funny--I think the title was "Steiglitz in Heaven," where Stieglitz, like God, gets to make the ultimate judgment about which photographers gain access to the Pearly Gates, and which don't.
posted by Vibistry at 9:26 AM
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