Critics as Artists
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring artistic efforts by art critics such as Clement Greenberg and Robert Storr. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (September 1995).
Exhibit at the Andre Zarre Gallery, New York
Of course every critic is a failed artist, bitterly transforming his resentment and disaffection into superfluous analytical bitchiness. Those who can, do, and those who can't, write criticism. We all know it, just as we know that welfare mothers are lazy and blondes are dumb. Critics as artists? The show has to cut in one of two directions, either shoring up or blasting apart the stereotype. By and large the works in the exhibit demonstrate about the same level of quality as a collection of thrift-store paintings — if you're looking for technical virtuosity or aesthetic vision, don't look here — although taken as a whole they would have comprised a great conceptual maneuver a la Jim Shaw. To be fair, a few critics/artists don't embarrass themselves (Peter Plagens, Robert Storr), and many of the works in the show are small in scale, tentative, private, experimental, indicative more of learning by doing than tilting at Art windmills. Surely critics shouldn't take a beating for having their training wheels forcibly entered into the SoHo grand prix — then again, though we rarely have to draw pictures to accompany our texts, we do like to pick apart those awkwardly written statements extorted from non-verbal artists, so maybe we deserve it.
One of the show's avowed aims is to enable us to compare a critic's verbal and visual work, to see how he puts the proof in the pudding. This aim is undermined by the fact that few of the critics are exactly household names, so you're left comparing, say, Vivien Raynor's watercolor doodling A Size 8 Cat in a Size 7 Box with thin air — or worse, with a preconceived notion about what bad artists critics are. To this end, a presentation of some biographical or critical information would have been helpful. In the case of better-known critics such as Clement Greenberg, the compare/contrast exercise still seems relatively pointless: Greenberg exhibits two weekend watercolors of Cape Cod that bear little or no relevance to his modernist theories of art. It's not even a matter of putting the proof in the pudding, since it would be overdone to say that his well-executed if conservative and non-descript watercolors contradict his championship of Abstract Expressionism — the simple phrase "For Vera," inscribed at their bottom, situates the works better than Greenberg's exegetical oeuvre. And in the final analysis, the relations between Greenberg's (or anyone else's) art and criticism may be less significant than the underlying question: can someone who excels at a verbal medium master a visual one, or vice versa? Are there different mental faculties at play in the two different kinds of work? It's a question that has drawn theories from philosophers as great as Spinoza, although it seems to have become today the province of child psychologists and now curators: "Critics as Artists" makes a case for the separation of the faculties, since it gives a sort of statistical proof to the idea that those who prevail at one tend to fail at the other.
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