Seven Days in the Art World (19 page)

Crow doesn’t see himself as a critic and is resistant to adopting self-conscious, high-style writing. “I just try to keep myself out of the text,” he tells me. “Half the battle is in the description. If your material is vivid enough, you don’t need to adopt an ego-driven voice where you’re always reflecting on your own formative experiences or your own complexity of mind.” Crow taps his conference schedule of events. “I don’t like cults of personality, even minor cults,” he adds. “It gets in the way of observation and learning. Your material should be out in front, carrying the weight.” Crow rises to refill his mug at the self-service bar. The two women to my left are having a cheerful conversation about the use of lapis lazuli in early Italian Renaissance altarpieces, while the grave man to my right is quietly relating what is evidently an enthralling tale of hirings, firings, and “alleged sexual harassment” to an attentive friend.

When Crow returns, I ask him to expand on the issue of self-restraint. “Many of the artists who are ruling the roost at the moment—Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin—exploit constructed personae,” he says. “Cults of personality are realities, people are attracted to that, but there has to be a space between you and the people that you’re writing about, so you’re not just echoing the situation that you’re trying to analyze.” Although art historians are always making judgments about what is worth their time, Crow believes that “severe attitudes and extreme judgments are a bit out of place.” For weekly columnists who are read for their consistent taste, “their readers enter into a regular relationship with them. They want to know whether they thought it was phony or great.” However, “If you’re an art historian, you can’t just decide that you like this little bit of history because it appeals to your self-regard. A real historian doesn’t do that.” On this count, Crow laments aspects of the textbook
Art Since 1900
by the powerhouse academic quartet Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. “If you read the little chapter on Californian assemblage, for example, Ed Kienholz is written off as a bad artist. It creates confusion that is counterproductive. I would hate to see students reading that chapter and not looking at Kienholz again.”

I thank Crow for his time, squeeze into a crowded elevator, and descend to a café off the lobby to interview a younger art historian, Tom McDonough, who teaches at Binghamton University and writes for
Art in America
. As we line up for tea, the tall, pale author of a book on the “language of contestation” in post-war France defends
Artforum
’s linguistic convolutions. “You need to have a complex language to analyze complex ideas,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “So there is a justification for all that footnoted, highfalutin claptrap. Obviously, we—I have to include myself here—are also performing a set of competencies. We are assigning ourselves a peer group by using a certain language. It’s code. It signals an in group.”

McDonough believes there was a time when people were convinced that the role of criticism was to advance culture. “Now, instead of moving culture ahead, it’s about finding a group of people you can promote,” he explains. “They promote that work not because they think it is the most important work being made or because it is a do-or-die issue, but because it’s a little corner that they can own.” McDonough pauses and adds, “Not that I haven’t found my own niche as well and mined it for all it’s fucking worth. I’m not excluding myself from this tenure-seeking game.”

Still, McDonough is disappointed that
Artforum
has “settled into predictable formulae,” and he condemns its “rapid turnover” of Top Ten lists and its “cycles of obsolescent previews.” (Three times a year, but not in February, the magazine runs blurbs about upcoming shows.) But the worst thing about
Artforum
, according to McDonough, is that it offers “no controversy, no real debate. It’s a comfortable world in which people basically all agree with one another. That concept of a
forum
—a public sphere in which ideas could be discussed—has disappeared.” Although
Artforum
makes a point of including contrary opinions, it does rely on a small cadre of historians and critics. McDonough is not alone in seeing its debates as narrow and elitist.

At 5:30
P.M
., I leave McDonough and, as I’m crossing the academic-infested lobby of the Hilton, I bump into Jerry Saltz, who is on his way to the ballroom where the CAA is holding its awards ceremony. The event is supposed to be “as close as art historians get to the Oscars,” and Saltz’s column in the
Village Voice
is being honored with the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Saltz tells me that the Mather is nothing to sneeze at either. “Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Roberta—the big guns—along with some other idiots have won it,” he says, referring to the dogmatic formalist Clement Greenberg, his ideological archrival Harold Rosenberg, and Saltz’s wife,
New York Times
critic Roberta Smith.

One of the eye-opening facts about the small world of contemporary art is that two of the most influential critics in America, Jerry and Roberta, as everyone calls them, are married to each other. The previous Saturday, I had met Smith for lunch at an old-style New York deli. We sat across from each other in a brown vinyl booth and ordered chicken soup with rice and grilled cheese on whole wheat. Smith is a fresh-faced fifty-nine-year-old with thick red hair and multicolored eyeglass frames. She did a master’s in art history and then became “obsessed” with
Artforum
. “That was where everybody wanted to be,” said Smith, who went on to write reviews for the magazine between 1973 and 1976. “When I set out, my goal was to do criticism as a primary activity and not get a hardening of the arteries. Most critics have a great deal of difficulty developing beyond the art that was their first love.” These days, Smith always looks at
Artforum
, but she rarely reads it. “The ads are great. Everyone has to look at it to see what’s there. It’s really snobby, like Anna Wintour.” Smith can’t imagine going back to a specialist art monthly. “Writing for an art magazine is like recording in the studio, whereas writing for a daily is like doing nothing but perform onstage. Which do you think is more fun?”

Many believe that no one critic wields quite as much power as Smith. “You draw attention to artists and give people ways of thinking about them,” she explained with a graceful wave of her hand. “Power is something that you have because you’ve earned it. It ebbs and flows with every piece.” Integrity is fundamental. “That’s why you don’t buy art and don’t write about your best friends,” she continued. “That’s why you keep your eye on the main subject, which is art. You need to handle whatever power you have in a responsible way if you want people to listen to you.”

Smith believes that it is essential, but not always easy, to be honest about your experience. “You have to be prepared to let your taste betray you,” she explained in a sisterly way. “When you are writing, you have a lot of white noise. Doubt is a central part of intelligence, and doubt is hard to control. What I do is I write first and question myself later. After my deadline, I have a little whimper session: I feel bad about something; it could have been better; certain people are going to hate me the next day.”

When I wondered aloud about the relationship between art criticism and art history, Smith offered a range of lucid answers. “Art criticism is done without the benefit of hindsight,” she said. “It’s done in the moment. It doesn’t involve research. It is out in front, giving some reactions.” As art objects move through time and space, people “throw ideas, language, all kinds of interpretations at them. Some of it sticks and some of it doesn’t.” Smith always hopes that her ideas will be “useful and accurate enough to get used.” She took a bite of her sandwich and tilted her head. “Art accumulates meaning through an extended collaborative act,” she said. “You put into words something that everyone has seen. That click from language back into the memory bank of experience is so exquisite. It is like having your vision sparked.”

As we were draining our soup bowls, Saltz arrived and took a seat next to his wife. Jerry and Roberta are about the same height. They don’t look alike—she has brown eyes, he has blue—but they match perfectly. Despite the years of mirroring, however, they have markedly different voices. Saltz is a critic-boxer; he writes about the art world as well as art and often picks fights on matters of principle. Smith, by contrast, is more of a figure skater. She glides in and out of arguments before her readers notice she’s had them. When I asked the pair how it felt to be the king and queen of criticism, Saltz declared, “We’re just a couple,” while Smith confessed, “We have an amazing time. We’re able to do as much as we do because writing doesn’t mean we have to be alone. We’re just totally in it.”

Do your deadlines coincide? I asked.

“He has Monday and Tuesday. I have Tuesday and Wednesday,” replied Smith.

“But we don’t talk about a show if we are both writing about it,” said Saltz. “That is an absolute rule.”

How often do you write about the same thing?

“Not so often,” said Smith. “Our method of keeping out of each other’s way has evolved over the years. We almost never overlap anymore where galleries are concerned, unless it is an artist whose blue-chip status is beyond dispute. In certain cases, each of us will warn the other off a show that holds a special interest, on a kind of first-come, first-serve basis. It is somewhat different where museums, especially big museum shows, are concerned.”

“I feel that artists deserve exposure in the
New York Times
,” affirmed Saltz. “Sometimes I’d like to review the show, but I think it is unfair, especially to a living artist, to take the
Times
away from them.”

How do your tastes differ? I asked.

“Taste is a hard one,” replied Smith. “We both tend to see it as inherently polymorphous and fluid, but I think our approaches to art differ, and this probably affects the kind of art we’re drawn to. Mainly, I’m more of a formalist. I’m more concerned with materials and how they’re used. I’m probably more interested in abstract painting. Jerry has a much keener sense of psychological import—deep content and narrative—than I do.”

“I’m interested in all those formal things,” said Saltz, “but I came to art through a different door. In Chicago, where I grew up—a world away from the New York discourse about abstraction—I remember being in the Art Institute with my mother and seeing two paintings of Saint John the Baptist by Giovanni di Paolo. I was ten years old. I kept looking back and forth. On the left, Saint John was standing in a jail cell. On the right, his body was still in the cell, but a swordsman had just cut off his head. Blood was spurting everywhere and the head was in midair. Suddenly I understood that paintings could tell a very complete story.” Saltz scratched his head. “As I’ve gotten older, the telling part has gotten more layered. I’m looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is accidentally saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive. I love abstraction, but I even look at that kind of work for narrative content.”

Saltz looked affectionately at Roberta to see if she wanted to add anything. She returned his gaze with a smile.

7:00
P.M.
I’m stuck in slow traffic on my way to Chelsea, the gallery district that Saltz refers to as “the trenches.” Not long ago I had a conversation with Jack Bankowsky, the editor of
Artforum
between 1992 and 2003, now an editor at large. Dressed like a dandy in a jacket, vest, and tie of remarkably well coordinated plaids, he has a style that contrasts markedly with Griffin’s. Bankowsky became editor of
Artforum
shortly after the art market collapsed in 1990. “It was close to the bone when I took over,” he explained. “The health of the magazine was in question. We all worked on the assumption that no money was being made and that we were benefiting from the largesse of Tony” (Tony Korner, the principal owner). By the time Bankowsky stepped down,
Artforum
was no longer operating in the red, but a “hard times” mentality nevertheless pervaded the corporate culture of the magazine. “It has always been grueling to produce
Artforum,”
said Bankowsky. “People work extremely long hours and they’re always on the edge. I had this fear when I was the editor that it was my fault, but now that I’m gone, producing the magazine is just as much like passing a stone as it ever was.” In fact, Bankowsky may have inherited the magazine’s extreme work ethic from his predecessor Ingrid Sischy, who was notorious for conducting all-night editing sessions.

In describing his editorial approach, Bankowsky spoke about the importance of being a connoisseur of art criticism. “It’s typical for people who are interested in theorists like Rosalind Krauss to abhor writers like Peter Schjeldahl, but I like the best work from the warring camps and attempted to court them both,” he explained. Even though the supplementary status of criticism makes it a “fraught enterprise,” Bankowsky believes that criticism influences the way people think about art. “Trickle-down criticism plays a big role in the market and the way art moves through the world,” he said. “Someone like Benjamin Buchloh—counterintuitively, given his leftist disposition—has an enormous amount of influence on the way art is validated in the marketplace.”

The power of
Artforum
, according to Bankowsky, lies in its seriousness. “You have to understand the pieties,” he told me. “Seriousness at
Artforum
and in the art world in general is a commodity. Certain kinds of gallerists may want the magazine to be serious even if they have no real coordinates for distinguishing a serious article from the empty signifier of seriousness abused.” Bankowsky implied that mainstream New York intellectuals’ disdain for “art world yahoo faux scholars” was often well founded. “I was always trying to combat art world quackery, but I found that it was next to impossible,” he said. “There are structural things about the magazine that make sustaining basic professional standards tough. Its internationalism necessitates reviews in translation; they’re often delirious and/or wacky and present editorial difficulties that you just don’t get in a mainstream magazine. And
Artforum
’s relationship to academe means that some contributors are trafficking in academic lingo but don’t know what they’re talking about, while others have an important point to make but they’re accustomed to contributing to specialized journals that don’t put a premium on graceful essay-writing.” Either way, art criticism’s “weird lingua franca” was at its worst when played back in gallery press releases.