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To pick up from last time after the retirement of Roberta Smith and the death of Peter Schjeldahl, “I think if I have any legacy,” Smith said in a kind of exit interview, “it’s teaching people how to look at art.” Now if only The Times agreed.

Even before her departure, it began to cut its art reviews almost to nothing. (While changes at The New Yorker are more modest and far less toxic, it has reduced its capsule reviews across the arts as well.) It still covers museum exhibitions, if not critically and often belatedly. That leaves a huge, glib monthly compendium of “what to see in the galleries.”

It has room for anything but teaching. This is not about expanding minds, but planning your weekend, just as the food section tells you what to cook “this minute”—morning, noon and night. It is about letting you know that you are in the know. It is no coincidence that any remaining longer review is now a “critic’s pick,” and the critics write accordingly. They hardly have time for the art of looking, even if they cared to try, and make up for it with superlatives. I hesitate to call it criticism.

I have left out a still more visible change, as reviews give way to feature articles with the emphasis on the artist. They purport to take you behind the scenes, because real people sell papers. They go far to turn the arts pages into a second style section, with role models and rankings, just as opinion articles more and more take on lifestyle changes, and news articles stress the human angle as well, beginning with anecdotes and ending with catchy quotes.

I started this Web site, then the only Web site devoted to contemporary art and art history, nearly thirty years ago to get away from superlatives, with reviews that tell stories about how to look. I was put off by magazines, with their word counts and the need to pitch articles before I could see the show. I hoped to integrate values, theories, and description into something worth reading. (I have explained what I had in mind here and here.) I could not begin to rival those I admire as much as Smith, Schjeldahl, and many others, but I like to think that they would balk at puff pieces, too. Critics have better things to do than huffing and puffing.

Does any of this matter? After all, mainstream media exist to bring news and features to the general public, and there are others worth heeding. Yet art magazines are changing in much the same way, and magazines everywhere are dying, along with alternative weeklies like the Voice (once a home for Schjeldahl and Smith’s husband, Jerry Saltz, as well). Art in America is now hard to tell from ArtNews, which merged with it in 2015, and the latest cover leads with rankings, for “five trailblazing artists.” Artforum is no longer the house organ for Minimalism of its founding in 1962, which is only right. Yet its Web site, too, leads with “news”—and a “spotlight on select summer advertisers.”

Why, though, does it matter except to curmudgeons young and old like me? I shall not repeat my notion of good criticism, but I still believe it, and I still value those, online and off, who get readers looking and thinking—and, sure, than includes our paper of record and my favorite magazine. Galleries, under enormous financial pressure since the pandemic, need lookers and thinkers more than ever as well. But the new model for journalism caters to the art business in a way that shapes art as well. Shallow writing encourages the dominance of shallow artists, and clickbait translates into attention getting. Maybe Smith knew that it was time to retire.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

These have been tough times for art criticism. Just this spring and just here in New York, Roberta Smith announced her retirement from The New York Times. Not two years before, in October 2022, Peter Schjeldahl died of lung cancer at age eighty.

The double blow means so much more coming from such prominent and reliable writers at essential publications. Smith has been co-chief critic at The Times since 2011, where she has built a top-level roster, but no one cuts to the quick like her. Schjeldahl began writing for The New Yorker in 1998. Each had come to the right place. How many other newspapers have taken daily or weekly criticism as an imperative, and what other magazine would give a critic a two-page spread as often as he liked? The loss of their most influential voices should have anyone asking what else has changed.

They have left behind a changing critical landscape—one that they could never have foreseen or intended. It values artists more than their art, as seeming friends and real celebrities. It covers the business of art, without challenging art as a business. It cares more about rankings than seeing. It gives all the more reason to look back and to take stock. Good critics, when you can still find them, are looking better and better.

Peter Schjeldahl could see his death coming—clearly enough that he announced it himself, in place of a review, as “The Art of Dying.” It shows his insistence on speaking from his perspective while demanding something more, about art and language, and it lends its name to one last book of his criticism. He had been a poet, fans like to point out, and he must have seen the same imperative in poetry as well, just as for William Wordsworth reaching for first principles on long walks across north England’s Lake District. Schjeldahl quickly took back his finality, perhaps overwhelmed by letters of sympathy and offers to replace him. Death was not so easily dissuaded.

He was a stylist, but not to call attention to himself. He was not one to wallow in the first person at the expense of art. Rather, his point of view helped him engage the reader and to share his insights. One essay described his “struggles” with Paul Cézanne, which must sound like sacrilege in light of the artist’s place in the canon. And then one remembers that Cézanne painted not just landscape, portraits, and still life, but his struggle with painting itself—what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Schjeldahl, too, had his doubts, and they led him to unforeseen conclusions.

He was most at home with someone like Cézanne, at the birth of modern art. Still, his interests ranged from Jan van Eyck, in a memorable article on restoration of The Ghent Altarpiece, to art in the galleries. Roberta Smith, in turn, was mostly content to leave art history to her fellow chief critic, Holland Cotter. I shall always remember her instead as literally climbing over contemporary art, in a photo together with Kim Levin from their days at the Village Voice. It gets me going each year through my own self-guided tours of summer sculpture in New York’s great outdoors. Smith, though, never does get personal, and she is not just out for a good time.

She had a way of landing at the center of things, going back to jobs at Paula Cooper, the first gallery in Soho, and The Times, where she had freelanced before coming on staff in 1991. She promises to keep going to galleries, too, “just to look.” Yet she has a way of expressing her doubts, serious doubts, about what she praises and what she seeks out. All that “on the other hand” can make her a less graceful writer, but it keeps her open-minded and critical. It is particularly welcome at a publication eager to suppress doubts in favor of hit counts. But I return to trends at The Times and elsewhere in a moment.

This could be a time not to mourn or to bury writers, but to celebrate. There have been worse in the past, and there will be strong voices in the future. Those old enough to remember Hilton Kramer at The Times will still cringe at his dismissal of postwar American art. His colleague, Grace Glueck, dutifully soldiered on despite obstacles to women. (John Russell brought a welcome change, and I still consult his survey text in The Meanings of Modern Art.) Besides, no critic can make or break a publication.

Smith had already brought on Jason Farago, who revives an old approach to art history going back to John Canady in the 1960s, walking a reader through a painting one detail at a time. It works well with interactive Web pages in the present. Cotter remains as well, at least for now, free to focus on what matters most to him—diversity in artists, especially gays and Latin Americans. With its typical care, The New Yorker took more than a year to come up with a successor to Schjeldahl, and it did well. Jackson Arn teems with insights, enough to have me wondering what is left for me to say, and, like Schjeldahl, he is not above telling one-liners. And yet something else, too, has changed that could defeat them all—and that is so important that I leave it to a separate post next time and to my latest upload.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Yvonne Wells could have been a classic modern painter and a class act. Well, maybe just once, but a work from 1994 would be eye-catching even if it were not hanging right there over the front desk, at Fort Gansevoort through November 2.

Four rows of red squares run nearly nine feet across, set against black. Simplify, simplify, simplify, it says, not minimally but boldly. So what if each row broadens to include a mish-mash of colors and zebra patterns, and the black has a slim white border. These are her African American Squares.

Wells has a flair for stitching chaos together just long enough to keep it under control. An earlier work has an uncharacteristic lightness, with touches of color running here and there through a still lighter field. Never mind that it may yet unravel, for this is Untied Knots. Still, the two works introduce what may seem at first a welcome change for the gallery as well. It specializes in dense renderings of black and Caribbean culture, in fabric and paint, by such artists as Willie Birch, Shuvinai Ashoona, Myrlande Constant, and Dawn Williams Boyd. Eye-opening as they were, was it getting to be too much of the same?

Wells marks a turn to clarity and abstraction, or does she? She, too, uses “assorted fabrics.” as the gallery terms her medium. Tapestry and hangings serve as painting everywhere these days, so fine. Keep looking, though, and her patterns make a point of quilting, starting with the show’s earliest work, Round Quilt from 1987. She makes explicit her debt to African American craft with her latest as well, The Gee’s Bend Way. Her designs may run out of control even by that standard, too. She does, after all, have Crazy Quilt.

She weaves not just abstraction, but a way of life. That mad design includes a bare branch, a pumpkin smile, and a cross. A striped quilt holds, she says, a sprit face. Wells calls another fabric an apron. A woman’s work is never done, especially an artist’s. You can judge whether she is sincere about either one.

That sounds duly pious in the manner of much of art’s diversity. Maybe so, but another work has half a dozen Crown Royal labels—enough to get everyone drunk, whoever they be. The logo disturbs the regularity of jigsaw shapes in white while anchoring them in black. Once again, Wells is crazy but focused. Unnamed creatures enter here and there as well. When she calls one That’s Me, maybe it is.

The show does not run in anything like chronological order, but then Wells does not change all that much over time. While the choices become increasingly representational, she sticks to her guns. Still, she can seem to take the easy way out. Her abstraction does not sit still long enough to create a signature image, and representation does not settle firmly into a culture or a myth. Still, she bridges boundaries between both worlds, with a degree of skepticism about both. She also has those reds.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

At his most deadly serious, Rodney Graham plays the artist and the clown. Perhaps he never could distinguish the two, and he dares you to try.

He photographs dead flowers in his studio, prints it as large as life, and calls it art. He saves a photo of a pipe-cleaner artist in Amalfi for more than fifty years before printing it again as a diptych, running seven and a half feet across. He must have loved the artist’s dedication, ingenuity, and, when it comes down to it, serious child’s play. Italian sunlight cannot make it past the studio window.

If the colors of Graham’s flowers look vivid, even pleasing, they are still the colors of death. So is the white of the stool on which they rest—the same white as his easel in a Studio Construction, framed and mounted behind glass. Another construction saves some of those pipe cleaners from the trash, as a white shroud. Still, he is clowning around while making art. The most recent work in a gallery career survey, at 303 Gallery through October 24, turns to acrylic and sand. One painting adds seeming eyes to the abstraction. It has an equal debt to Cubism and to a clown face, but then artists from Antoine Watteau to Pablo Picasso have no shortage of harlequins.

Graham has his clown face, too, on video, where death is a mere vexation. He lies on the sand as if dead, in Vexation Island from 1997. Strong winds blow through the palm trees, and a barrel rests at his feet. Somehow he draws the attraction of a colorful parrot, the mark of a pirate, and dresses in the red vest and stockings of an ancient mariner, only cleaner. The camera closes in on a serious gash on his forehead, which looks more and more deadly as the camera lingers and his eyes open. But then they are the black eyes not of a fight, but of a make-up artist.

For all his media, he made his name as a conceptual artist. He brought glitter to the 2006 Whitney Biennial and upside-down trees to the Fisher Landau Center, as if the bright lights of the club scene were not serious enough. The gallery links him to other Canadian artists, Stan Douglas and Jeff Wall, as the Vancouver school. One may want to dismiss them all as a one-joke affair. Still, Graham has more than one trick up his sleeve. He could teach a whole course.

And so he does, as Media Studies ’77. Once again he recycles or appropriates an old photo. He has wheeled in a VCR, at left in again a large diptych. Someone might as well have wheeled him in, too, on the right, where he sits at ease on a desk, cigarette in hand. He must enjoy prompting viewers to complain about the dated media studies. They could almost forget the work’s actual medium, its color and resolution rooting it in 2016, though the classroom clock is frozen in time.

The lecture has begun, but the monitor remains black, and the cigarette has not a puff of smoke. Perhaps the past is as dead, for Graham, as the present—lingering on just long enough to provoke you. Surely the blackboard is not part of the class, but it, too, looks suspiciously like a work of art. Chalk has smeared out into what could be layers of abstraction—or waves lapping at Vexation Island. You may never know when to admire a series for its dark humor or to write it off as glib. Better wait, though, until the lecture is over.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Paul Paiement paints in the open air in the great American west, Hilary Pecis in the sunlit yards and floral shops of Southern California. Paiement returns to a studied realism for an age that has seen it all come apart. Pecis may remind you more of pattern painting and the comforts of home.

Which is closest to the promise of landscape painting and a bicoastal art world? I bring this on Paiement together with my recent report on Pecis as a longer review and my latest upload.

Paiement is a plein air painter, and you know what that means. Such an artist works on the spot, for the freshness of the afternoon, the freshest of impressions, and, tradition has it, the freest of brushwork. He is also a photorealist, for crisp, glistening, painstaking surfaces that record every detail and thrust it in your face. And then he is a trompe l’oeil painter, who can fool you into taking collage for paint and painting for the thing itself. If that seems a lot to handle, he keeps finding new ways to say “you are there”—and dares you to tell one from another. The labels can come later, if they apply at all, at Ethan Cohen through November 23.

Of course, those things cannot all be true at once, not for the most marvelous of painters. Paiement is not taking advantage of a glorious afternoon to take you up the Seine with Claude Monet and a boatload of the French middle class. Nor does he leave anything about the handling of his brush to chance. But Paiement does work outdoors, in the sun-baked American west. Impressionism led directly to the uncanny precision of Georges Seurat and Pointillism, but not even he would go there. If that sounds a bit forbidding for all its familiar glory, Paiement is all about bringing you close and standing apart.

He could be measuring out the distance. Where photorealism tends to mean portraits, including nude portraits, he has no obvious signs of life—not so much as the shadow of the artist or the feet of his easel. And where trompe l’oeil means still life, this is still landscape, and titles specify the location. It looks like collage all the same. Paiement paints on wood panels, leaving much of the grain exposed. He layers plywood strips and Plexiglas patches on top.

At any rate, I think so, because he can indeed fool the eye. One might mistake the painted areas for prints, torn freely and mounted on wood. Their edges look that dark and real. Even now I probably underestimate just how much is a single field of paint. Nor can I say for sure when clear Plexiglas allows a cloudy look at the surface and when Paiement continues to paint over the Plexiglas. Nature and handiwork come together.

Ultimately, he is painting, building an image of intense sunlight and measured shadows. Distant hills fade into the haze of saturated color, leaving that much more to move forward into the picture plane. The cloudiness of Plexiglas could be part of that haze. The wood grain in unpainted areas can seem part of the scene itself—or the same scene in a different season or under a different light. It is palpable but visual. It just may not be what you expect.

Paiement has worked closer to home, but always in sunlight. Past work in his “Nexus” series has included offices and industry in its imagery and architecture. Nature’s pillars in his new work look almost manmade as well. Still, that kind of architecture is notoriously distancing. It is hard to imagine living in his work or escaping it. Painting has its illusions, its categories, and its myths.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Some might weep for men thrown to the lions. Walton Ford thinks first of the lions. His works on paper delight in their pleasure, at the Morgan Library through October 20. Is this nature in captivity or set free?

After two thousand years, the cruelty of ancient Rome still inspires sadness and terror, but Ford is not cowering or crying. Nor will he waste his art on prisoners and gladiators sent to their fate. He pictures instead creatures raised in captivity to face a violent, unnatural death. What should they care about blood, bread, and circuses? What good does it do them if a lion roars at the start of an MGM movie? William Butler Yeats wrote of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” but not even that might help.

Ford imagines them in the wild, if only for a moment and far from their native habitat. Does he himself exploit nature’s resources to his own ends? What if the whole idea of a savage beast is a human fiction? Yet that is precisely his theme, and it takes him not to Africa and Asia, but to the zoo and to countless hours in the American Museum of Natural History with its preserved beasts and created habitats. There, he points out, they have nowhere to hide. His watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink will not become children’s books as for Beatrix Potter or Wanda Gág, but it tells a story all the same.

He is drawn to real-life narratives from the past, like the Barbary lions in Rome. They are stories of escape, recapture, and death, although his work skips over the ending, because he cannot stop for death. A black panther escaped Zurich’s zoo in 1933, surviving ten days in the alpine snow before a farmer cooked and ate him. A trolley crashed into a circus caravan in 1913, setting lions free from their cage, and do not ask what happened to them. Oh, and MGM kept a real Barbary lion as a mascot. Ford titles it after the studio’s motto, Ars Gratia Artis, but this is not just an act, and it refuses to roar.

He can work large, on the scale of a mural, and he calls it painting. One work not on display runs across several sheets and thirty feet. More often, he works small and fast. The show celebrates his gift of sixty-three studies—all tied up in his favored narratives. They climax with single set pieces, on loan, of the lion and panther. He is thinking what could have happened to the animal on the loose, not perfecting a portrait or a story.

The panther prowls the snow with the still-quaint village behind him in the dusk, thinking perhaps of home in India. He sets upon a goat, and who knows? It might have happened. He had to eat something in ten days. He leaps upon the bare branch of a tree bending away from its narrow trunk, but never coming into flower. Blood might have dripped on the ground and colored the sky, unless its red is merely his shadow in the snow and sunset in the clouds.

Vistas may open up all to one side of the snowy hills, but the action is all in the foreground, right before one’s eyes. Ford is not above observation, as of a lion’s whiskers. Yet creatures take on almost human personalities, for the viewer to put in words. The large portraits are sedentary by comparison but no less human and no less concerned with artifice. The MGM motto means art for art’s sake, as if Hollywood ever thought that way, but it could well be speaking of him. The show’s subtitle speaks of “Birds and Beasts of the Studio,” and the studio is surely the artist’s.

Born in 1960, he found his subject in the 1990s, but the work is mostly recent. The curators, Isabelle Dervaux and Christina M. Pae, also give him access to the Morgan’s collection, and his selections speak of him, too. They run to observers like John James Audubon and Edwin Henry Landseer, but also such literary types as Potter and Edward Lear. Audubon has squirrels climbing a tree much like the panther, and Indian art has an elephant turning on its trainer. Could Rembrandt, as Ford thinks, have prepared his etching in the open air, the better to observe? I cannot swear that Ford respects animals half as much as his imagination, but they are still ready to pounce.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.