Recently I was at a couple of friends’ house for dinner. We sat in the kitchen as she was finishing the fettucine with vegetables. He asked me about writing art criticism. Here’s the conversation, as near as I can remember:
He: What do you need to know about a particular artist to write on their show?
Me: I found that what’s most helpful is to know who they particularly love, and who they especially hate. So suppose I learn that the artist loves Matisse and hates Picasso. I’m looking at the pieces in the show, and ask myself: What aspect of Matisse are they oriented themselves to? Color, saturation, space? And what is in these, modeled in a particular way, understood in a particular way, and used to orient in a particular way, would be something of which Picasso was incapable, and where he went in a different way, a way that couldn’t occur in these works . . .
He: But how do you know that you’ve figured out the relevant particular right and wrong ways?
Me: The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim once said to me: ‘Paintings have a way of teaching you what you need to know to understand them.’ It’s a matter of whether a way is rewarding, where ‘rewarding’ means offers pleasure and leads to something. The works offer rewards if seen in this way, and maybe also this other way and that way . . .
He: But it’s all subjective, isn’t it?
Me: Well, uh, yeah, but what isn’t? The criticism is something you offer to another, and they take it up, or they don’t, and they find it illuminating, or they don’t.
He: But still, how do you know what to write about?
Me: Well, when I wrote art criticism, I would always see the show at least twice. I’d see it once, and just, you know, look; then I’d go off for a few days and think about it, read about it, the artist, and whatever seemed relevant. Then I’d see it again and look until I saw something, had some insight, or seeming insight. And that [claps hands] is the piece: I describe the works in light of the first viewing, and then try to write something that will lead the reader to the insight.
He: How do you lead someone?
Me: I think of it as starting from something that the art historian Michael Baxandall said. Think about what you say when you’re looking at a painting with a friend. There’s a lot of pointing and grunting. You point there, and say something like ‘See what she did, with that color’; the friend says ‘Huh’, then says, ‘Yeah, and there’s that same green over there, but look . . . “; you say, “Yeah”; the friend points at a different area, moves their hand back and forth, and says “Huh”; etc. etc. So we’re typically quite inarticulate in front of a painting. What we seem to be doing is trying out ways of looking, of noticing, and of grouping. Why? Well, there’s a ‘reward’ as order, I mean the understanding of order, emerges. And for anything that’s more than mediocre, it’s a non-finite process. If the work is great, the process is non-finite and profound. Further: the language of art criticism is like an elaborated way of pointing and grunting. If the criticism succeeds, if it communicates, it’s helping induce the relevant process.
He: So it is a kind of knowledge?
Me: I think of it on analogy to song-writing. Hey She, do you remember that book I was reading at the café when you and the Lesser She sat down with me? The book about songs? I was telling you about the incredible analysis in it of Feste’s song in Twelfth Night, you know [sings tunelessly], ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy,/With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,/A foolish thing was but a toy,/For the rain it raineth every day.’—‘The rain it raineth every day’: that’s my favorite line in a song—It’s a bit fractured in the syntax, parts of it are borrowed, but it speaks to you, even though you don’t quite know what it means. It’s about having lived, and there’s a bit of rain in every life every day, and you sing about it, for others, or so you hope. And that’s art criticism as I understand it and tried to practice it: you take whatever you find, from platitudes to epiphanies, and you speak to someone in the presence of this beautiful thing. You communicate, or you don’t.
She: Dinner is served.
References:
Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985)
Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (1981)
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will