Last week, I received a letter from my grandma that included a clipping of this article from the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, several art world bloggers have taken issue with the text accompanying the Whitney Museum’s Biennial exhibition of contemporary art. Rather than criticizing the art, these writers have decided instead to discuss the text written for the show, calling it “impenetrable prose.” The writer of the Journal’s article, Eric Gibson, moves from an overview of what has been said about the Biennial texts into a summary of the history of writing about art, stating that “Once upon a time, art writing was [smart, precise, unmuddled, and enjoyable],” but has since apparently devolved into nonsense like that which supplements the Whitney show.
It is at this point in Gibson’s article that I discover why this particular piece was sent to me. No, it was not simply because I have a master’s in art history and have therefore done my fair share of writing about art. Rather, it is Gibson’s claim that the artist Marcel Duchamp is to blame for today’s art-critical problems. Gibson argues that Duchamp’s readymades “almost required” art critics to turn towards “willful obscurantism” when discussing modern and contemporary art. He bases this statement on the aesthetic indifference Duchamp claimed to have when selecting a mass-produced object to become a readymade, Gibson assuming that art critics would recognize this indifference and therefore “[move] from the realm of visual experience to that of philosophy.”
Having written my master’s thesis on Duchamp’s readymades and Nietzsche, I suppose that I cannot argue with this conclusion. The readymades insist on a philosophical reading because of their inherent questioning of what it means to call an object “art.” What bothers me, however, is Gibson’s next statement, that having once moved into the realm of philosophy, “the writer no longer had to base his critical observations on a close scrutiny of the work of art. He could simply riff.”
During their first semester of the master’s program in art history, all students are required to take a course in Methods. Methods is a horrible class that is dreaded by all, but, in the end, you emerge a better art historian because it forces you to think about how to approach the study of art. There are several methods into which art historical writing can be categorized: style, connoisseurship, formalism, iconography and iconology, structuralism, intellectual history, social history, and artistic biography, to name a few. You can probably figure out what most of these are on your own, so I won’t go into a detailed description of each, but the idea is that if you want to write about art, your conclusions have to be based on something, whether this is the quality of the art in comparison to other paintings or sculptures, a detailed look into the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of a work of art, or the psychology of the artist.
“Riffing,” however, is not considered an art historical method. Gibson has no problem with aesthetic-based categories like Formalism and connoisseurship, it would seem, holding art historians of yore (Ruskin, Panofsky, Greenberg) in high esteem. What he takes issue with are the methods that result when art historians turn to “areas outside of art and aesthetics—disciplines such as linguistics and ideologies such as Marxism and feminism—to interpret art,” concluding that this “drove [a] nail into the coffin of accessible writing.” Ok, fair enough. I took a course on Feminism and Art, and I would be the first to agree that the writing is not always clear. (…neither is the art.) But to argue that Marxism and feminism are completely outside the realm of art is pure nonsense. No one can look at art made in the 1970s and believe this to actually be true. There is no doubt that artists were examining these ideologies through their art, just as there is no doubt that Duchamp was posing philosophical questions in his art. So why wouldn’t a critic consider such disciplines when writing about art that deals with feminism or Marxism or philosophy?
When explaining what art history is like to those who have not studied it, I have been known to refer to it as bullshit. After reading many, many essays on modern art, it sometimes feels as though art historians can write anything they want to about a work of art because who is to say that they are wrong? How can an interpretation of art be wrong? I would not, however, blame this on the entrance of philosophy into art criticism. Nor would I understand art criticism based on something other than aesthetics as the decision of the writer to ignore the art and “simply riff.” (Indeed, I often find that it is art historical writing founded solely on aesthetics that appears to draw much more personal and tenuous conclusions.) My own work on Duchamp has dealt with the philosophical aspects of the readymades, but it has done so in a thoroughly art historical manner. If I had to choose a label from those listed above to apply to my own writing, it would be the intellectual history category. In my thesis, I was not allowed to simply say, “Hey, look at these great comparisons I can draw between Duchamp and Nietzsche.” Rather, I had to examine the historical time period in which Duchamp created the readymades, discovering the importance of Nietzsche’s writings to fin-de-siècle France. This, along with Duchamp’s own writings, provided the evidence on which I could base my arguments. “Riffing” was not an option.
Sure, I understand that the Whitney’s writers did not necessarily have the same constraints placed on their writing as one who was composing a thesis. And, yes, I would agree that sometimes art criticism can often be considered “impenetrable prose.” From the excerpts included in Gibson’s article, it is clear that the writers for the Whitney texts should be ashamed. But to blame their poor writing style on Duchamp and the readymades’ denial of aesthetics is absurd. Duchamp’s own writings may have been “willful obscurantism,” but he was an artist, not an art critic. To determine that the inclusion of philosophy, or history, or biography, in art critical writing has effectively eclipsed the work of art itself denies the fact that many of these methods do much more to enlighten the viewer as to the importance of the art than simple description ever could. Not much is achieved in simply putting into words the visual experience of a painting or sculpture. Rather, I would argue, it is much more central to the role of art criticism to determine what the work of art can tell us about our world, philosophical, historically, and personally.
Posted by katienapkins 
Posted by katienapkins 
Posted by katienapkins 