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99/03 - New York Art: Behind the Scene
Critical Thinking
By David Salle
ART ON THE EDGE | THE PERILS OF PUBLIC ART | THE PASSION OF A COLLECTOR | CRITICAL THINKING | NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT | VIEWS: IF NOT NEW YORK, WHERE?
-- Arts criticism is not the same as journalism, or reviews, covering the arts. Journalism creates news; criticism creates continuity.
-- News journalism looks at a system and slices it into “current events.” A life of current events is trivial—you don't want to think of your yesterdays as yesterday's news.
-- We recognize the tedious predictability of news grammar—that's why it has become a mainstay of the sort of parody exemplified by television shows such as Saturday Night Live.
-- Journalists take for granted the rule “bigger audience equals bigger story.” This categorization by size is lethal for the coverage of art by the media. Art can't survive in a climate in which anything that has a big audience is meaningful.
-- Criticism's role is not so much to level the playing field for the artists as to level the stands for the viewers.
-- The popular press has the wrong relationship to novelty. Or, rather, the relationship the popular press has to novelty is the wrong one for art. The popular press works to erect and maintain icons. Why should we care what Madonna thinks about anything? Icons only have a few textures— glossy, broken up, partially shadowed (the physical descriptions yielded by a coarse sieve). Art has myriad textures. It's a shame when the method of the instantly memorializing popular press is mimicked by the art press.
-- We live in a cynical age, with little or no agreement on the canon. To the extent that we have one, who is included is a matter of what image of the artist can be pushed, phalanx-like, ahead of the work itself. -- Art journalists overrate content; it becomes a conclusion about iconography or subject matter or even pictorial attitude (that is, a declaration that an artist's style is “expressionistic” or “minimal”). It's like calling architecture “bricks.” Although God is said to be in the details, it's not in those details. More interesting is the pursuit of relationships—how to stand in relation to something, yet remain inside the work.
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