10.28.24 — The Art of Reviewing
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.