Reader's Digest: December 8, 2022
If a theme has emerged in my reading over the past few weeks, it is criticism—literary, auditory, visual, even gustatory—a feast for (almost) all the senses. (There should be more tactile art.)
When the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl died two months ago, I resolved to read his catalogue more methodically, with the help of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light. The man could write. His prose swings; its personality is big.
On Willem de Kooning in the Village Voice, 1994:
Like the bus in the thriller Speed, this masterpieces-only retrospective never slows down and thus is hard to board. … The effect was like a plane taking off, when the acceleration presses you against the seat. … If something similar doesn’t happen to you at the Met, either you are distracted by personal woes or the art of painting is wasted on you.
On Henri Matisse the same year:
The Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art is a controlled orgy. It will let you know how much pleasure you can stand.
When Schjeldahl moved to the New Yorker, he became more sober and more sedate, his prose more stately. Returning to Matisse in 2010, his opening sentence has a different pace and poetry:
Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917, a power-packed show at the Museum of Modern Art, which surveys the most adventurous phase of one of the two greatest modern painters—still tied with Picasso, in overtime—offers me a chance to ruminate on why I habitually say that one particular painting, MoMA’s own The Piano Lesson (1916), is my favorite work of twentieth-century art.
The moderation is evident in loathes as well as loves. From the Village Voice:
A lot of people need Lucian Freud to be a great artist. How else to explain the furor for the pretty good English portrait and figure painter? … To tax Freud with misogyny seems pointless, given that he obviously despises and in some sense wants to fuck everybody, himself included.
And the New Yorker, fifteen years on:
Francis Bacon has long been my least favourite great painter of the twentieth century. My notes from a visit to the new Bacon retrospective, which is very handsomely installed at the Metropolitan Museum, seethe with indignation, which I will now try to get over.
Schjeldahl is amiably modest. In the essay that closes the volume—“Credo: The Critic as Artist,” revisiting Oscar Wilde—he calls the “critic-as-artist”
a fictional being, mysteriously hell-bent for cultivation and never tired or confused. No one knows better the flimsiness of that illusion than any actual writer, who is often tired and regularly confused.
If the spark of criticism flares from the friction of the artist’s work with the critic’s personality, it is partly fictional, too:
Not many of us have personalities that are integral and robust enough to carry the full weight of an argument. So we must pretend that we do.
It is left for others to trace the history of academic criticism, in which the dead weight of argument leaves the critic gasping for breath. A good point of entry: Stefan Collini’s admiring review of John Guillory—“the deep man’s deep man”—in the LRB.
Both critics complain of the political pretensions of academia: the (alleged) tendency to “[treat] teaching and writing about Marlowe and Austen as a form of radical politics in itself.” I want to object that this exaggerates a malady more-or-less cured two decades back—which I think it does—when I run into this paragraph, about a book on NASA’s “Sounds of Earth,” launched into space in 1977:
The problem is that [the authors] never attempt to explain how a Lacanian real at the center of a Foucault-inspired analysis of discourse networks can be consistent with a new materialist model of ecological justice that so strongly rebuffs postmodern moral relativism.
That would take some explanation.
Perhaps I am being unfair. What one finds pretentious depends upon one’s range of reference. Here is Hal Foster on T. J. Clark on Paul Cézanne:
Clark pushes uncanniness in Freud towards estrangement in Marx to get at the particular weirdness of the Cézanne world: a piece of fruit that is a ‘non-pear [and] non-apple’, a surface … that is a ‘non-wall and non-window’, folds of cloth that are ‘liable to take on a life of their own’ …
Pretentious? Maybe. But illuminating, still—as the paragraph about Lacan, Foucault, et al., above, sheds light, perhaps, for those with eyes to see.
Like artists, critics have audiences, as do critics of critics, and what makes sense for one may not make sense for others. Hence the shift in Schjeldahl’s style. His prose in the Village Voice is demotic, irreverent, hip; he says frankly what he loves and loathes; his point of reference is Speed. The New Yorker Schjeldahl is respectful, if wry; he’s more show than tell; his point of reference is King Lear.
If the critic’s personality is in part pretense, is he more or less pretentious than he pretends to be?