This is sad...

Very sad news of the death of critic Ed Sozanski...Use code code D37Q to read the story... http://t.co/UjMrJKlevx
— gerardbrown (@gerardfbrown) April 17, 2014

Suggested readings

It's been very busy - too busy to keep up with this blog's housekeeping. I wanted to point to two things that interested me.

One was in the February 24 Washington Post Classical Beat blog. Anne Midgette makes a plea for critics to connect to others idea when publishing on line. This is a great idea - and its value to all of us comes into focus when she writes about how

A new work, in particular, is in the position of the blind men and the elephant: everyone who was there can give his or her own piece of the experience, and readers, seeing them all together, can try to amalgamate them into a larger, and more accurate, picture.

Critics' varying descriptions and assessments can offer readers a multi-dimensional view of a work. And I need that when I read...as I can't get away to see anything these days.

The other thing I wanted to link to is The Guardian UK Theatre Blog, which had an exhortation for artists to write more about their work. Not more self promotional bloggiy crap, but

a messier kind of writing, more vulnerable and yet more declamatory. Writing that is the product of a desire to speak as well as an obligation to communicate. A more restless kind of writing, devoid of neatness, riddled with ambiguities and rhetorical flourishes. Writing that expresses the same wants and preoccupations as that artist's other creative output, without needing to comment on that work. Writing suffused with generosity and fragility. The page as a canvas or a stage, as well as space for programme notes.

I have been teaching writing in art schools for a while, and I welcome this idea wholeheartedly. Writing is not something one does merely to promote oneself - it's something that can explain one's self to one's self. It is the mind at work... and that's a pretty exciting thing to read (whereas boring, jargon-laced, self-promoting 'artists' statements' are not...)

More soon. Really. I want to write about this book club I'm in and the book How Learning Works: Seven Research Based Principles for Smart Teaching. It's been interesting to think about learning instead of teaching...

Sometimes, information doesn't want to be free

(Preface: I should know better to get involved in something like this, but you can call it a weakness. On ArtFag City,  comments from Elizabeth and Ken have been very perceptive and done more than I expect to here. I posted this on a blog I use for teaching graduate seminars, but here it is again...you comments are invited)

So I wanted to talk about writing for a minute. I came across an interesting little kerfuffle online this weekend as I read ArtFag City. It seems that Paddy Johnson has been mixing it up with a writer who posts as Tremblings. At issue is Johnson's sense that Tremblings' writing engages in "linguistic privilege — the practice of using big words as means of ensuring the reader (and typically the author) doesn’t know the essay lacks substantiated ideas".

In an effort to restrain this sort of excessive privilege-taking, Johnson proposes changes, and asks a 'friend in academia' to propose further edits. In the process, words are changed, avenues of investigation are pared down, and whatever they essay's original content was is redirected in the interest of some unarticulated ideal of 'readability'.

Johnson's bias against academic writing is so obvious (the story ran under a headline "The Problem with Academic Writing Isn't Big Words") as to be not worth discussing. What is interesting is the notion - proposed here by a writer in a popular media - that an idea occurring in writing should be accessible to readers. This is opposed to another idea - that what is being written should be understood by those for whom it is written. Tremblings gets at this fine distinction in a very interesting passage:

I have to be incredibly specific in the words I use because remembrance means 35 different things to the scholars in my field. Same goes for memory, repetition, performance, etc. I have to take the time to say more than what might be necessary in some circles in order to not be perceived as misrepresenting the people I cite or the theories I believe in.

Much of this semester, I have tried to wave the banner of readability and be an advocate for prose that engages the reader. I have recited the journalistic dictum, "You are writing for an educated and curious reader who has no idea what you're talking about" as a model to which one might subscribe. But that model applies well to criticism, especially of the journalistic stripe, and not so well to other forms of academic writing.

I spent much of the day fuming about this problem inclusive and exclusive writing because it is so easy to attack exclusive practices as elitist that their value has become obscured. At the end of the day, not everything is for everyone. Some writing is for 35 peers and colleagues who are going to take issue with the ideas it contains and use those as grist to teaching seminars of 10 - 15 graduate students. Subsequently, those 350-525 graduates are going to go into their profession talking about these ideas and their audiences, students, and peers are going to form opinions about them. Gradually, the idea will move through the culture, growing and diminishing in importance as it does. All too rarely, a truly gifted scholar (a Louis Menand or Lewis Hyde or Lawrence Weschler, for instance) will figure out how to communicate directly with a larger community.

Communicate - which is to say, figure out how to make subjects relevant to that larger community so they will engage in discussion. Honestly, when is the art world going to be okay with the fact that there are differences among our interests and that not everything  is okay with everybody? Somethings may never be relevant to some people (I am struggling to figure out why Marina Abramovic, whose exhibit at MoMA started the Johnson/Tremblings argument, matters in the first place).

So what we have in academic writing (aside from the obvious allusion to Cool Hand Luke) is an opportunity to define and address one's audience, to think about community in narrower terms than the art world usually does (a dear friend of mine laments the way the artists always say 'community' when 'industry' is more appropriate) and to speak to the people who need to understand what you're doing because they're invested in the same conversation. Academic writing is not intended for everyone, but when it's done, its ideas can be examined, evaluated, disseminated, or critiqued. It is - in the most real sense - writing for a community because communities have boundaries, shared interests that place them in genuine opposition to other communities' interests. Such writing requires precision, insight, depth, and conviction.

Readability can be helpful, too. But there's a time and place for it.

Artists not writing...

I've done a lot of work on artists' writing, on how as authors artists contribute to the discussion of their work or navigate their ways out of creative or critical cul de sacs (often not ones of their own making, more like ossified inherited critical positions whose dogma is shattered as much by writing as by making) through its use.

I think it's important to point out (as I always do when I'm talking) that I don't always mean writing when I say 'writing'. I'm really talking about anything that requires one to slow down, choose one's words, take advantage of the opportunity to edit for clarity or emphasis...Lately I've been thinking about short films as a way of getting thins kind of 'writing' out to the world.

I'm interested in the one above because it seems like a generative example. If you know of others, please pass them on. I hope to spend some time with this stuff in a seminar I'm doing this summer. Meanwhile, enjoy...

Criticism...continued

A little more stuff on criticism I just wanted to toss up here. First, there's A.O. Scott's piece on film criticism in today's Times. There's also this very interesting piece where two critics, Christopher Isherwood and Alastair Macaulay, talk about a dance piece by Twyla Tharp. It's one of those rare pieces where a critic gets exasperated and says what he thinks his job is...enjoy.

A good week for criticism articles?

Is it that time of year? The time when people start reflecting on criticism?

I ask because it was interesting to see Glenn Kenny's ARTicles piece on criticism today on ArtsJournal.com, especially after the lame-o offering that washed up on the shore the other day. Part of what I like about this piece is that Kenny gets right to why criticism is the most exciting thing to read - because it's about seeing someone deeply engaged in an art form wrestle with a work and learning - through the text - how that mind works...whether you agree with it or not.

Kenny, in fact, makes a great show of disagreeing with certain critics while asserting respect for them, suggesting that what's interesting about criticism is not the judgment it renders, but the process of arriving at a judgment in the first place. Criticism that doesn't validate readers' (or artists') positions has never been a terribly welcome thing, but critics - like the rest of the universe - now and then have better things to do than go along on your ride.

As always, I welcome your thoughts, but would prefer they go here in the comments rather than on Facebook. Those people are close enough to owning everything in the universe already, so why give them your heartfelt respsonses?

An ex-critic discovers Rule Number One...too late.

Love music, hold the criticism - The Boston Globe
(Posted using ShareThis)

I have to admit I was kind of excited when I came across a link to Steve Almond's essay (link annoying formatted above...) but it was, in short, a loser. I keep looking for missing pieces to an essay I've been working for years called "Why I'm not a critic", and all I really learned from Almond was that he should never have been one.

Why not? Rule number of one criticism: it's not about you. It's not about the snarky put downs you come up with, or about how clever you are, or about what you can connect the stuff you're writing about to. Criticism is always best when it's about the work and the world it lives in. When Almond writes about realizing that people were (*gasp*) enjoying a concert he'd already written off, he reveals that he was never qualified for his job in the first place. Criticism, you see, is about love. To criticize, you must be deeply enthralled, infatuated, head over heals with the art form you write about...or else you haven't any reason to criticize it.

I say this after a day of giving crits at an art school in town, a day in which I asked no fewer than a half dozen times (in increasingly impolite terms), why am I expected to care about this? Too often we expect some inherent quality in the work to make it matter...or else rely on the charitable disposition of an audience to accept an expression as 'interesting' (the Siberian chill of criticism). In these cases, I felt more engaged in the artists' work than they were. A sad state. What Almond realized is that when an artist (yes, he's talking about MC Hammer, but you work with what you've got) actually freakin' cares about something, it starts to matter to other people. Criticism isn't the judgment of authority passed on art (or music, or literature, or food, or movies, or whatever) by timeless authority, it's the battleground on which competing visions of the world are articulated. And to play in that arena, it's got to matter to you.

So I am so glad I never actually saw Almond's criticism when I lived in Boston and read the papers there...I'm so glad I had the chance to read people like David Bonetti writing about art, and Lloyd Schwartz writing about classical music. Writers who disappeared into the act of describing and evaluating what they wrote about. Wait...none of them were at the Globe? Hmmm...go figure.

Toward a comprehensive history of criticism

Last week, Columbia Journalism Review ran an interesting article by Robert Seitsema on the evolution of restaurant reviewing in New York papers. Touching on how reviews have changed from extensions of the 'women's' section of the paper (where recipes might be reprinted), to consumer advice, to a baroque form of descriptive literature, to how reviews are changing in the digital age, the article introduced readers to a number of important figures, from Craig Claiborne to blogger Danyelle Freeman. It also vividly laid out the terms of ethical debates in restaurant writing, making such industry-specific and arcane controversies relevant to readers to whom they might otherwise seem obscure or arbitrary.

It's hard for me to read such a piece without thinking of art reviewing (okay, it's hard for me to read much of anything without thinking of art reviewing). By the nature of their subject, art reviews cannot be part of the consumerist movement that restaurant reviewers might belong to (though I've seen sales happen in relation to art reviews, it's so unusual that it qualifies as an exception that proves the rule). At most, an art reviewer can tell you whether your time would be well-spent at this gallery or that museum, and as busy as we all are, a risk-taking member of the art audience doesn't really need a journalist to be her filter.

Art criticism is a heavy subject (I've just been asked to another seminar in it this summer), but food criticism is not afforded the same cultural weight (compare the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to..what?) Is there something we can learn about writing about art from writing about food, or perfume?

I say yes. We can recapture some of the enthusiasm for our subject that it deserves. We might even be able to do this without slipping into flagrant partisan behavior, though I think that's beyond me. We can stop strangling our prose with academic distance. We can begin to write as if what we were writing was mean to be read.

Personally, I would be greatly interested in recommendations for things to read about the history of criticism of all sorts of cultural output. Some years ago, I put together a reader on art criticism that was broad and deep, but I've not kept it up in the last year. And interesting articles - like Seitsema's on restaurant reviewing - cast an indirect light on the practice of writing about art. Please send your favorites to me here...

Once again, I have students writing about art. I hope you'll check out the comments my Tyler graduate students are making on the PrintSeminar blog. Art that's worth showing is worth writing and talking about, so please keep reading.

The law of unintended consequences

Things go where they aren’t expected to.

This ought to be a universal law, up there with a-body-in-motion-tends-to-stay-in-motion, but it seems to get forgotten a lot. I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately. In part because of coming changes at the Pew Fellowships that people seem to think will ruin the art world, and in part because, as a teacher, I fret about doing more harm than good. Maybe I was clueless as a young man (okay, I was clueless) but I don’t remember thinking that what a course taught had to be contained within the fourteen or sixteen weeks I was taking it. I thought it was all about what happened afterwards, when things go where they aren’t expected.

But some of the unintended consequences I’ve observed in the last few years have me especially worried. When I heard conservatives employing the kind of theoretical architecture that makes my work interesting as justifications for their actions, I wonder about that genie getting out of his bottle. But the one that keeps me up at night is about the art world, and how it’s moving in so many interesting directions. Or should I say, so many directions I should find interesting but don’t. They don’t interest me. They worry me.

The latest example comes from the Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post. He describes going to an exhibit of Chinese terra cotta figures at Washington’s National Geographic Museum. You know the sort – thousands were buried in imperial tombs 2,000 or more years ago. The show, as Gopnik describes it sounds like a nightmare:

Overall, visiting this exhibition feels like walking through a pop-up version of a fascinating article in National Geographic magazine -- one of those photo spreads that have more sidebars than text.

Gopnik, like a good college-educated critic, goes off on Benjamin and the idea of the aura, but misses the real horror of what he’s just written. What one sees when one sees this exhibit is not the things one went to see, but the idea and history -- embodied in writing -- that surrounds them.

It’s easy to believe the exhibit is a kind of elaborate magazine article. The vast majority of exhibits I see are like heinous, overwrought term papers, made without love or enthusiasm, as if because of the existence of a deadline. (Worse yet, they're statements...what could be more bloodless and bureaucratic than a statement?) And the killer is that I used to think of exhibits as arguments or essays, and that I must have said this a million times in classes and crits. That I didn’t mean bloodless, boring things that bypass what really matters or subjugate the act of looking to the act of reading was a given. But perhaps it wasn’t heard that way. Perhaps I’ve unintentionally contributed to the mess we find ourselves in now.

Now I know the National Geographic Museum is not an art museum, and that exhibits all have different purposes, variously didactic or sensuous (and wouldn’t be friggin’ cool if they could be sensuously didactic or something? But that’s another thing…). But what bothers me is that as the pendulum of exhibiting swings toward greater intellectual engagement (yum..after all, the eye is a part of the mind) it’s swinging away from the pleasures of objects, preferring to ‘reference’ them (or some equally hideous, stale action as arid as 'reference').

One cannot practice art education like one practices medicine (above all, do no harm) because moving students out of their comfort zone is a huge part of the job and it may be unexpectedly dangerous. But one can certainly try to do more good than harm. I am generally optimistic about change. It stirs things up. But soon after change, artists and designers will learn to read the system and will undermine the positive effects of transformation and turn it into a new and dull status quo. Maybe the thing to do is try to teach people never to be satisfied with what is out there…

Winner take out

My seven year old son thinks McDonald’s is a toy store.

He thinks this because every time he goes there, he gets a toy. That’s not why I take him there – I take him because we can get something to eat. Because the meal is so forgettable (mere nutrition – such as it is at fast food restaurants) is not a big concern to seven-year olds. It’s all about the toys.

I bring this up because Ed Sozanski’s rant about the “sudden efflorescence of art competitions”, focusing on the West Prize, the Wolgin Prize, and ArtPrize, with occasional swipes at the Pew Fellowships in today’s Inquirer made me think of it. Just like my son and I think of McDonald’s differently, artists and audiences approach the question of prizes differently. I wouldn’t want readers to think Mr. Sozanki’s was the only way to consider the problem of art prizes, so I wanted to address a few points in his column.

As anyone even remotely acquainted with this history of criticism might expect, Mr. Sozanski lamented the selections for these awards. Wolgin winner Ryan Trecartin was “visually bizarre, and cacophonous to the point of felonious assault”. The Dufala brothers possess a “novelty quotient [that] was off the charts”. Reasonable people can disagree about such things, and do so without mentioning how familiar one another’s arguments for or against certain art are. Dead end – next topic.

“Giving a quarter-million dollars, or even $150,000, to a single person is inherently ridiculous and risibly unfair to the thousands of talented artists who are equally deserving of recognition and support,” Mr. Sozanski writes. Such Palin-esque populism might play well in an election, but the art world has never been a democracy. As Wolgin-finalist Sanford Biggers pointed out when speaking to Tyler students, $150,000 isn’t a lot of money in today’s art market, though it means a lot for artists who have little commercial viability (read: people who don’t make paintings or photographs). Spread that over the years of work the finalists – including Trecartin – have invested in their production and it begins to look like a barely break-even proposition. More than a few recipients of large fellowships have told me that what looks like a huge amount of money…let’s use $50,000 as an example…doesn’t have the enormous impact one might expect it to when it’s taxed at an extremely high rate and spread over two years. Even the largest awards basically allow artists to give up one of their many jobs…temporarily. The amount of ink wasted fretting over the scale of prizes acknowledging years of artistic labor that hardly amount to a year’s bonus on Wall Street indicates little more than the laziness of the media.

Where I can agree with Mr. Sozanski is on the way prizes have adversely affected artists’ lives by rewarding careerism…and weirdly, here’s where large juried prizes can make a difference. These days, nearly every art school has to offer a ‘professional practices’ course to help its students write the statements and prepare the slides (...or CDs of jpegs) required by granting agencies. It should come as no surprise that some students (and artists) excel in such clerical tasks while others are more adept in the studio, making work. The shift from application-driven processes to jurying for large awards may indicate a seismic shift in professional practice. Artists may actually be recognized for the work they do, not for their ability to get an application in on time. Exhibitions might start matters as much as or (gasp!) even more than the documentation of them. Artists might forced to become genuinely articulate about their work because the conversation they have about it might be with someone who can recommend them for an award.

It is fashionable right now to fear juries, to think of them as cabals of insiders who will reward only other insiders. The fact is that application-driven processes discriminate against a number of artists who look at the outcomes of major competitions and say, “Well, if that’s what wins, I’m not even going to apply.” Responsible juries that include artists can remedy that.

Because at the end of the day, these prizes exist to help artists and audiences. They support artists (however incompletely) and recognize both genuine achievements and the potential in emerging talent. For audiences, they bring artists into regional – even global – spotlights while placing them under the lens of criticism where they can succeed or fail. Mr. Sozanski challenges us to look up Ryan Trecartin in five years, implying that he’ll be serving lattes someplace. Has the writer looked at the roster of emerging artists, alums of Vox or Nexus, who have gone on to outstanding careers? Did they do that because they got prizes or fellowships? No! They succeeded because they worked like mad and have talent. The prizes didn’t hurt, though.

I got out of criticism for two reasons. Jousting with Ed Sozanski quickly becomes dull. But the main reason is that after a few years in journalism, I found it hard to avoid making stories into binary constructions – pitting two opposing forces against each other and (if I was fair minded) letting readers decide for themselves. The truth is that things – especially when it comes to art - are always a lot more complicated than that. It’s never either/or…more often both/and. When we go to McDonald’s, my son eats, gets a toy, and we spend time together. It’s food, prizes, and a whole lot more.

What makes a critic?

This is a perennial debate and one that I have tried to clip comments on and keep track of. I have to say this latest exchange (between the Guardian's Johnathon Jones and Minnesota Orchestra's Sam Bergman) is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it's because it happens in blogs, where so much is truncated or overly general to start with. (How's that for general?) But perhaps it's because neither of them appears to be advancing an especially interesting argument.

Jones seems to think that trusting his gut and being loud is enough. Bergman is content to point out that it may not be in this polyphonic age. But neither of them seems to get at the reason there might be criticism in the first place - because art and music and theater and cinema and all manner of cultural production are things to talk about. The most interesting things in such conversations are often said by those who are deeply knowledgeable of the history and traditions of the area, invested in maintaining a high level of quality (or in attaining one), and thoughtful and attentive about the specific work under discussion. That doesn't discount the possibility that a newcomer to the conversation might have something insightful to say, or that someone from outside its usual boundaries mightn't have something to offer. I think those things happen all the time (that's why I talk to anybody who wants to talk about art). But those are unusual events that depend on an individual's sensitivity and eloquence, whereas knowledge, investment, and attentiveness are skills that can be sharpened.

I am interested in circulating one idea of Jones - in his blog posting he writes:

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised [sic], mediocrity triumphs.

This is an interesting notion. One that hints at a 'proper' way to criticize art that could be beneficial to artists (it wouldn't be construed as mere opinion) as well as audiences (who suddenly have a responsible role in making art better by criticizing it).

For a few years, I've taught graduate seminars in criticism. Every time I teach a studio class, I stress to my students that its' not enough to make your own art - you must contribute to the discussion of others (that, to me is how art is made out of mere images and objects...but talking about them as if they were important). I would be interested in anyone else's thoughts on what constitutes "proper" criticism...

On Recieved Wisdom

I read a lot of students' writing and patterns start to emerge. One of the most prevalent is the confusion between real experience and received wisdom. Almost every semester, there's a class discussion in which we need to separate what it's like to see a picture on a website or a book or a magazine from seeing it at a gallery, or a museum, or in a studio or someone's home. There is always that student who sees these things as fundamentally similar, and I'm always a little confused about that. Hughes is talking about his relation to Abstract Expressionism, but what he said was immediately applicable to the German art that was so hot when I was in school in the 80s.

So I wanted to share a passage from an essay by Robert Hughes that helped clarify this problem some years ago.

Thirty years ago, Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style. We in Australia looked at it with awe. The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores (since the paintings themselves did not cross the Pacific) was the magazine ARTnews. Its hagiographic tone was clear. Except for the titans of the history books, whose work we hadn't seen either - from Michelangelo and Leonardo down to Picasso and Matisse - we had never read the kinds of claims made for any artist that Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess made for Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. They were grand enough to stifle aesthetic dissent. Only contact with the originals could have tested them, and we could not see the originals. Thus, although we didn't know it, we were in a situation of man American artists outside New York in the 1960s - flat on our backs, waiting for the missionary.

The copy of ARTnews would arrive and we would dissect it, cutting out the black-and-white reproductions and pinning them on the studio wall. One was, say a Newman. You had just read one of Thomas Hess's discourses on how Newman's vertical zip was Adam, or the primal act of division of light from darkness, or the figure of the unnamable Yahweh himself. How could you disagree? On what could you base your trivial act of colonial dissent? A mere reproduction, two inches by three? But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings. And if you got to see the paintings, what if you didn't see it? Did that mean that his terrible and sublime visage was not there either? Of course not; it meant that you had a bad eye; or that Yahweh doesn't show himself to goyim in the South Pacific. And since it is difficult for the young and otherwise uninitiated to avoid, still less be skeptical about, the language in which peak experiences are offered to them, you were apt to assume that it was your own unpreparedness or sheer obtuseness prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman's zip or Rothko 's fuzzy rectangle.

...which is a round about way of retelling the emperor-has-no-clothes story, but not just that. Images are used in arguments as evidence, to be persuasive. If they're included, it's because they're persuasive...a truism that's too seldom open to critique. What I think young artists writing about their work in relation to others sometimes forget is that the image is evidence in someone else's argument, not the argument itself. To cite a painting or sculpture (or whatever) without having really looked at it is too often to try to bring, whole cloth, the value of that object to your writing. And how can you really look at it without, well, really looking at it? And to what extent are we really looking at things when what we see is what another writer has written? Or what a photographer has framed, excluding all else?

Art surprises us. It is, in spite of the cliche, in some fundamental way, both window and mirror. We get a view to something else while the art works simultaneously tells us something about where we stand (and whether we are funny looking or have bad hair). Seeing in art what you're told by historians and critics should be as much a cause for alarm as for celebration. It's great to have the validation that comes with having your unfocused, unspoken impressions converted into language, but it's an act of robbery if that language gets between you and the object you're interested in.

Works Cited

Hughes, Robert. “The Decline of the City of Mahagonny.” Nothing if not critical: selected essays on art and artists. New York: Pengun, 1990. p.5

Turn it up.

Maybe it's just that seeing MFA shows puts me in a frame of mind that seeks underlying aesthetics that could unify disparate artists, but I was amused to read Jerry Saltz Village Voice reviews of Mike Kelly and Jon Kessler's exhibits. Like a scientist diagnosing a new strain of art virus, Saltz whizzes through a flurry of names for the syndrome he’s trying to articulate – “the New Cacophony or the Old Cacophony, Agglomerationism, Disorientationism, the Anti Dia, or just a raging bile duct” – before asserting that “terms that describe this sculptural strategy include grandiose and testosterone-driven.” (italics original)

Hmmm. "Testosterone-driven?" I wonder what Erin, whose thesis installation was conceptually and structurally a whirlwind would say about that (and I'll invite her to respond). I wonder what Vanessa, who expressed such keen interest in the Swarm Exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum would say. Or Terri, whose work may not manifest clutter in the way Kessler or Kelley do, but who pours references from the body to Beslan into her work. Or anyone who is a little curious about the ease with which such approaches are regarded as "strategic" rather than "tactical" or even in non-oppositional terms all together. But let's save that for another posting.

Before asserting that the "new cacophony" is "very gendered and very male", Saltz did offer one interesting read of the shows, which went like this:

Nowadays this all-at-once gambit can be seen as a way to compete with the paranoia and havoc of everyday life; a homeopathic dose of poison whereby ruins are created to counteract ruin; a manic-depressive panic attack in the face of information overload; a rejoinder to minimalism; a way to fill space and get attention.

Which put me in the mind of the Ellen Harvey show I was able to run in and see while in Philly. If you've not seen it yet, get off yer' ass and go(there's tiny picture above. It's tiny to frustrate you into going to see the real deal...). The four large mirrors are, on their own, enchanting enough to hold the space without the video elements of the show. But this notion that the image of a ruin of the Academy within its walls might constitute some form of inoculation rather than assault (Alex Baker's essay on the show was stunningly confrontational, wasn't it?) is an engaging notion, and perhaps one that deserves more thorough and consideration than the latest incarnation of bad-boy art.