Pan Review of Books: The Miraculous

Robert Boyd



The problem with art criticism is that it's a limited genre. It's pretty hard to do something new in art criticism without leaving the genre behind. That's OK for most of us because we have no intention for our criticism to go beyond its primary function--to say something about some art--and it s secondary function--to keep a reader engaged for a brief time. Going beyond that risks turning a functional piece of writing into something else. Literature, maybe.

That's the risk art critic Raphael Rubinstein takes with his new short book The Miraculous.The Miraculous consists of 50 chapters, mostly pretty short, describing the way an artist has come up with a particular artwork--usually a conceptual artwork or a performance. Depending how familiar you are with the world of performance art and conceptual art, you will recognize some of these. And as I read, I noticed that chapter 22 described the bizarre time-passing activity of Percival Bartlebooth, the character from Georges Perec's novel, Life: A User's Manual.That made me smile, because when I read that novel so very long ago, I thought that the fictional Bartlebooth's absurd life-long project was basically an insane work of art. And it was enough that Perec described its execution--it didn't have to actually be done to be real. And that could apply to any number of the pieces or actions described in this book. The fact that they were actually executed is, well, miraculous.

The chapters vary in length, but are usually no more than two pages. Some are quite short, like chapter 37, which reads in its entirety,

In 1979, an artist decides to shake hands with every employee of the New York City Sanitation Department. It takes her eleven months and two days to shake the hands of all 8,500 workers.

You may recognize this as a piece of art done by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has been the artist-in-residence at Department of Sanitation since 1977. There is an index in the back that will help you identify the artists because the chapters never mention them by name. The descriptions are fairly deadpan, but because what they are describing is often so strange, they achieve a kind of poetry. By not naming the artist. Rubenstein forces the reader to think about the work described. No written work is completely neutral, but Rubenstein appears to be going for a journalistic "degree zero" style. No overt opinion is offered by the author, but sometimes his enthusiasm leaks through.

Two of the "fictional" works (works created within literary works) are by members of OuLiPo, a French literary group that was famous for writing prose and poems governed by various constraints. That's what Rubenstein seems to have done here--describe the work, it's creation and execution, but never name the artist, never analyze the work, never contextualize it within the world of art. The constraints he has placed on himself in writing this brief book results in a work that describes a universe of conceptual art in a way that no art historical text could achieve. And it does so with unexpected beauty.

Art Bloggers' Big Score

Robert Boyd


Harbeer Sandhu, Art Writers grant recipient

For the past two years I have applied for the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in the blog category, and I've failed to be picked both times. This year I am especially jealous of Harbeer Sandhu, who won a brog-writing grant for his proposed blog Critical Condition. Why am I jealous? Harbeer Sandhu is (as many of you no doubt know) a Houston-based writer. If that is not enough to turn me green, read the description of Critical Condition from the Art Writers site:

The city of Houston, while offering artists much needed support in the form of work space, free time, gallery space, and even financial backing, lacks the supportive yet critical engagement necessary to fully realize its potential to be a rich arts community. Aiming to provide a local forum for art criticism connected to world literature and international concerns, Harbeer Sandhu will develop a Houston-based art blog featuring weekly posts focusing on the visual art of Houston and Texas in a global context.

I guess the nearly 1000 posts I've put up since September 2009 don't count as "supportive yet critical engagement." Grr. But this jealousy is unbecoming and unfair to Sandhu, who is a good writer and I'm certain will be a good blogger. You can read some of his writing here and here. I hope Critical Condition becomes an important voice for art locally.

This grant is extremely generous. Bloggers get $30,000. Sometimes the blog in question already exists, and sometimes it's just a proposal for a blog. That got me thinking. They've been giving away Art Writers grants since 2006, but have only been giving them for blogs since 2008. So how have Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation done? They have given away 20 grants so far--$600,000 for blogs! (Assuming that the $30,000 has been the amount given out ever year to every blog.) Have they gotten their money's worth? Have these blogs produced? And when I say "produced," I am referring to some mixture of quality and quantity. Quality is something we can all agree is desirable (even if we have disagreements on what it is). Quantity might not seem as obvious a virtue. But in my mind, a blog requires constant posting to be truly excellent.

The blogs I like best, regardless of genre, are continually updated. It has been said that newspapers are the first draft of history. Art blogs may be in some ways be considered the first draft of art history--except that art blogs are often highly personal. They may contain journalistic information--reviews of current shows (art blogs are virtually the only way for readers to get informed opinions about shows that are still up), reportage about various aspects of the art world, and editorial opinions. But at their best, this kind of information is filtered through a highly idiosyncratic voice; the word "I" is not avoided. For me, this mixture of the journalistic/critical and the personal is what is so appealing about my favorite blogs. Posts are often brief, even curt. The best blogs show the evolution in their author's thinking as well as the evolutions of the artists and institutions they cover. A single blog post may therefore be unmemorable by itself (unlike certain classic magazine articles and books). The blog, however, should be judged as a cumulative experience. But this can't happen if posts are too infrequent.

Therefore, in this post I will score each of the past winners of the Art Writers blog grant, looking at both quality (highly subjective) and quantity (completely objective). I'll grade them for content (A through F) and explain my thinking. Quantity, on the other hand, will be based on posts per month since the beginning of the blog or the date of the grant, whichever came first. I realize this disadvantages writers who write long but infrequent posts, and I'll note when that is the case for any particular blog. But in general, the higher the number, the better. What I hope you will get out of this (beyond a palpable sense of my envy) is an introduction to a bunch of art blogs, some of which I recommend highly.

2008 grantees

Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City. Art Writers picked an obvious winner right out the gate with Art Fag City. One of my chief sources of news and opinion about the art world, Art Fag City is pithy and well-written. And they publish multiple posts a day. Of course, Paddy Johnson couldn't do this solo--she is helped by Will Brand, Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch. GRADE: A, 78.02

Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani, How Is This Glass?. One thing that is really good about Art Writers is that they give grants to highly focused blogs like How is the Glass?, which is about glass art. However, it's not a very good blog. Srinivasan and Otani seemed to use the blog primarily to help in their curatorial projects. The posts were fairly infrequent and tailed off to nothing by 2012. They were divided between posts about individual artists and posts called [theme] which were small essays on certain aspects of glass art. The posts on the individual artists sometimes consisted of nothing but pictures, and sometimes had brief texts. The [theme] posts were the best--there they gave themselves enough room to tackle their subjects. The many pictures on this blog were a plus. The last post went up May 23, 2011. Another way to look at it is to notice that Art Writers paid approximately $326 for every post they posted since December 2008. Nice work if you can get it! GRADE: D, 1.92

2009 grantees

The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research by Greg Cook. It's hard for me to be objective about Greg Cook's blog; I've known Greg since the 90s and have long admired his work. (He actually got his start as a graphic novelist, with the charming Catch As Catch Can). Furthermore, The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research is similar to this blog in its focus on its region. Its slogan is "We proudly offer more New England art news and reviews than anyone else." Cook started the blog in 2006, and it currently is split between reviews, news, and upcoming show listings. Some of the most entertaining writing are his posts on "yokelism," which describes the philosophy of the blog--an intense concentration on locally-produced art--art from Boston in particular. Cook comes from a journalism background, and that tends to give his writing a "just the facts feel." (This impersonal style reaches its apotheosis when he's writing about himself in third person.) Also, I have to note that the blog is somewhat cluttered and navigation is difficult (the "quantity" score is an approximation). Grade: B, 12

Post-Internet by Gene McHugh. This is a perfectly irritating blog. It deals with the way the internet has changed art. In McHugh's final post (September 12, 2010), he writes

“Post Internet” is a term I heard Marisa Olson talk about somewhere between 2007 and 2009.

The Internet, of course, was not over.  That’s wasn’t the point.  Rather, let’s say this: what we mean when we say “Internet” changed and “post Internet” served as shorthand for this change.

All well and good, and the blog discusses issues around this subject and describes individual works of art and the work of particular artists whose work is relevant. But he includes no links, no jpegs, no gifs--nothing that the internet makes so easy for blogger. It's ironic and perverse, given his subject. He might as well be writing for a print journal (except that a print journal would at least occasionally show photos of the work under discussion.) McHugh's ideas are interesting, but the blog itself is not. Grade C-, 3.3 (The quantity score is so low because this blog petered out in less than a year.)


A Year of Positive Thinking by Mira Schor. This is a case where a well-established art writer decided to take up blogging. Aside from the length of her posts, she's done a great job and obviously gets a lot out of it, since she has continued long past a year. Apparently it is a continuation of something she sent out to subscribers via email. This is not so much a newsy blog as it is a personal blog. But by personal, I don't mean that Schor is writing a journal of her everyday activities. Instead, she is responding to art she has seen, books she has read, events she has witnessed, etc., in a personal way. Her primary concerns are feminism, painting and sculpture, and her own art, but she will write about anything that draws her attention. She is not prolific--her last post comes from October 13, 2012. Grade B, 1.58

2010 grantees

greg.org by Greg Allen. This is a blog that was already in existence when it won its Art Writers grant. In fact, its first post was in July, 2001, which surely makes it one of the oldest art blogs in existence. It also has the virtue of being broad, personal and pretty snappy. Some posts are quite brief, but occasionally Allen spreads his wings with a longer post. I like this variety. Allen is a prolific blogger. greg.org is very well illustrated and often includes embedded video. In short, a very good art blog. Grade A, 20.33

Our Literal Speed by Matthew Jesse Jackson, Andrew Perchuk, and Christopher P. Heuer. This can't be judged as a blog. It appears to be an art project of some sort. Maybe it was a blog at some point, but if it was, I can't find a trace of its old existence. Grade incomplete.

The Silo by Raphael Rubinstein. Rubinstein is a well-known art critic and a professor at the University of Houston. The Silo isn't really what I'd call a blog (but then again, if it's not a blog, I'm not sure what else to call it). Rubinstein's project is to write essays about overlooked artists who aren't discussed and are in danger of being written out of art history. (However, he occasionally writes about well-known artists like Cindy Sherman.) Most of them are living artists or artists active since at least the 60s. These short essays are excellent and quite illuminating. He doesn't post frequently, but I'm delighted when he does. I particularly liked his posts on George Sugarman and Daniel Spoerri. Grade A, 1.54

16 Miles of String by Andrew Russeth. Andrew Russeth started his blog in 2006 and his most recent post was October 20. His posting in 2012 has been very light, but this can be forgiven. His gig as editor of and contributor to GalleristNY likely keeps him pretty busy. I quite like GalleristNY chatty, newsy style. It's very different from 16 Miles of String which is simultaneously much more text heavy and includes many more photos. 16 Miles of String is also more personal, often recounting his own experiences attending openings and performances. It would be unfortunate but understandable if 16 Miles of String was now a defunct blog, but GalleristNY is a worthwhile if different endeavor. Grade B, 3.83 (the post-per-month score would be much greater except that once GalleristNY got underway, 16 Miles of String's posts got much less frequent. )

2011 grantees

Art Vent by Carol Diehl. I wrote about Art Vent last year. The only thing I have to add is that I wish she was a little more prolific. Grade B, 3.5

Art in Common by Jason Farago. In terms of quantity, you can't say Art Writers got their money's worth from Jason Farrago (15 posts since December, 2011). However, Farago makes up for it in quality. Except for the first post, in which he outlines a bit of his philosophy for the blog, each post is dedicated to a single piece of public art in New York City. He researches each piece and has something to say about its particular history, its location, and its place in the artist's oeuvre. He is also a sensitive critic. But beyond all that, each essay is personal--these aren't mere encyclopedia entries. As a blog, it doesn't quite work because the posts are too long and too infrequent. But as a collection of writings--as a book (which seems like the probable end-point for these pieces)--Art in Common is exceptionally good. Grade: A, 1.25

The Performance Club by Claudia La Rocco. I find this blog unsatisfying for a variety of reasons. It's a little hard to navigate. It skimps on photographs (one thing that blogs have over magazines is an infinite amount of space to reproduce photos--it seems like a waste for an art blog not to use this). And I don't find the writing particularly compelling, although it's not bad. But if you have a strong interest in the intersection of dance and performance art, this might be the blog for you. Grade C, 9.25

Presence Documents by Sohrab Mohebbi. Right now, Mohebbi is writing about the Syrian civil war through a lens of theory, particularly in discussing the photos and videos of "citizen journalists." In fact, one might say the Syrian civil war is his main subject--it more-or-less coincides with the blog and he has been posting about it from nearly its very beginning. The multiplication of images, particularly via the internet, is his subject. Occasionally he talks about artists and art, but often as not he'll be talking about the media or about amateur visual content on YouTube and elsewhere. His writing is fairly impersonal, dry and matter-of-fact, and sometimes heavily footnoted. Mohebbi is quite prolific. He includes photos, but fewer than I'd like, and they are irritatingly small on the blog. (You can blow them up by clicking on them, though.) So, not exactly a blog that's fun to read, but a serious effort and one that looks at images--so ubiquitous in modern culture--as more important than art per se. This is a position I ind myself increasingly drawn to. Grade B, 5

beyondasiaphilia by Valerie Soe. Another blog I've written about, it continues to cover Asian film (and occasional other subjects). A worthy subject but not one I have an interest in following so deeply. That said, it seems like a fine blog if you are an aficionado of Asian film. Grade B, 2.08

Art and Shadows by Meredith Tromble. Tromble hasn't been terribly prolific since she was awarded the grant last year--15 posts total. However, her posts are long meditations on the subject at hand. She may be writing about a particular artist, but the posts ramble over related subjects in a pleasant way. I don't want to say that she is unfocused, but instead to suggest that the subject of a given post might not be the art she opens the post with. It may be an idea that this art suggests. Her most recent post was in September, so Art and Shadows may be an ex-blog at this point. Grade B, 1.25

Printeresting by Jason Urban, R.L. Tillman, and Amze Emmons. I also wrote about this blog last year, and I want to add that it has been one of the most consistently excellent blogs I have read over the course of the year. Grade A, 21.67

2012 grantees

I won't write about the 2012 grantees yet, especially since two of the four grantees haven't started writing their blogs yet. But let me acknowledge them here. Caryn Coleman writes The Girl Who Knew Too Much, a blog about contemporary art and horror films--an intriguing combination!

Farrah Karapetian will be writing Housing Projects, which will track some specific house-based art projects in Detroit as well as generally covering art that uses the house as its basis. Seems pretty specific, but timely.

Black Visual Archive by Meg Onli documents and reviews contemporary black and post-black culture. Sounds like a mighty tall order for one little blog, but a project worth undertaking.

And as mentioned at the top of this post, Harbeer Sandhu will be writing Critical Condition.

You're Reading the "Best Arts Blog" in Houston

by Robert Boyd

Pan by Ron Regé

The Houston Press's readers have voted The Great God Pan Is Dead as the Best Arts Blog in Houston in the Houston Web Awards. I'm grateful for the honor, but it got me thinking about the "competition." It's funny to even use the word "competition." Bill Davenport, who writes the news for Glasstire, occasionally expresses mild disappointment when I scoop him on some bit of news (a rare event). But I never call Dean Liscum and Virginia Billeaud Anderson into the boardroom and say, "Crush Glasstire!" while pounding my fist on the conference table. I just don't see myself in competition with other arts writers and arts blogs in town. We're all colleagues.



In any case, I consider Glasstire to be a different beast than Pan. I see Glasstire as a full-fledged magazine that happens to live on the web. It has different departments--it has feature articles, reviews, columns (which they call blogs), news, classifieds, a calendar, etc. Very unlike a blog, which is highly linear--one post after another. Glasstire is not linear--like a print magazine, it is multidimensional. The reader can enter it at various points depending on her interest. And it has a fairly large stable of writers. And I have to add that Houston is really lucky to have Glasstire around. I know I depend on it.



What else is there? Well, there is The Silo by Raphael Rubenstein. This blog won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2010. Rubenstein is a critical studies professor at U.H. and edited a book about art writing that I really like, Critical Mess. The Silo is " a personal, revisionist 'dictionary' of contemporary art. Its primary aims are to challenge existing exclusionary accounts of art since 1960 and to offer a fresh look at some canonical artists." And this is part of the problem--at least in terms of local popularity. Rubenstein isn't reviewing current exhibits. In fact, it is pretty much impossible to see many of the artists he writes about locally. The whole project--which I love--is about constructing an alternative, highly personal art history of the past few decades of art. Another problem with The Silo is that Rubenstein is not terribly prolific. Popular blogs get updated constantly. In short, The Silo is not the kind of blog that is likely to ever win a local popularity contest like the Houston Web Awards. But it is a great blog if you like diving deeply into the obscure corners of contemporary art--which I do.

Another local arts blogger is Theodore Bale. He writes a blog called Texas, A Concept which is hosted on ArtsJournal. Bale has a music background and writes primarily about music and dance. His writing is thoughtful and incisive. But as a blogger, he has the same problem as Rubenstein--he is not very prolific. Or, to put it another way, he is not a prolific blogger. As a freelancer, he writes quite a lot for other publications, especially CultureMap. I think it's hard to be a professional freelance writer and a blogger. A freelancer needs to be continually seeking out paying work--the best paying work he can get at any given time.

There are local art blogs that are really personal blogs which have a heavy art component. One of these is Neon Poisoning by Robert Kimberly. The value of such a blog is that it has no agenda, and because of this, it can surprise you in delightful ways. For instance, this post noting the relationship between the work of Miina Äkkijyrkkä and Daniel Anguilu.



Lots of local artists have their own blogs. I've linked to Professor Art, Earl Staley's blog, many times. I like it because he frequently takes the reader through his creative process on his paintings, showing us works in progress. Brian Piana's blog, Art Falls Out, is primarily images (lucky for me he saves his writing for Pan). Some of the images are his own work, and some of it work he likes. This is a good approach for artists--showing images of work that is meaningful to them, whether their own or other people's work. But you don't need a "blog" to do this--a Pinterest board or a Tumblr work just as well. There are tons of Tumblrs that show nothing but jpegs and gifs that their author finds interesting. Another local artist, Alexandre Rosa, does this kind of thing on his blog Fiery Laundry. But the champion artist-blogger is Stephanie Toppin, who essentially has five simultaneous blogs, including Art Keeps Me Poor, fabric+lines, Obey Crochet, Hello Very Much, and Very Dead Toys. Each one more-or-less focuses on a different interest of Toppin's.

I don't know much about local blogs dealing with theater or dance or art music. I'm a visual arts guy. If you blog about art or music or dance or theater, leave your link in the comments. I'd love to read your blog.

Recently Read Art Books

by Robert Boyd

Here are a few art books I've read this year. Most of them are several years old--I tend to prowl the shelves of used-book stores like Kaboom. 


The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq. A very interesting novel about a contemporary artist, Jed Martin. The novel starts with Martin destroying his latest painting, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Divide the Art Market. It was to be the last painting of a series depicting people in the context of their professions. This scene is followed by a flashback that describes Martin's upbringing, education, and progress as an artist. What I liked very much was that Martin was thoroughly modern. I know a lot of older painters who look down their noses at non-traditional mediums. But people of Martin's generation see photography (and computer programs like Photoshop) as being as legitimate as painting and fundamentally interchangeable with painting. So Jed goes from being a pure photographer to being a photographer who digitally manipulates his images to being a painter. (Later he does video with the aid of custom-designed software.) In his mind, he is adjusting his mediums in response to changes in subject matter, which have different requirements.

But the novel surprises you suddenly when Michel Houellebecq himself becomes a character--and a major one. I won't write more about it lest I spoil the plot. The focus is Martin and his parallel life's journey and artistic journey. I'd like to know what artists make of him. So often when an artist is depicted in a film or a book, the depiction rings false. But in The Map and the Territory, I was convinced.


Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story by Amanda Vaill. I read Calvin Tompkins' Living Well Is the Best Revenge, which was written while Gerald and Sara Murphy were still alive. It's good, but Everybody Was So Young is better--it carries them past their golden decade in France to the more difficult 30s and 40s until their deaths. (That golden decade was fictionalized in Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald--the protagonists, Dick and Nicole Diver, are loosely based on the Murphys.) Murphy was a serious amateur painter whose work is now rightly considered among the best American painting of the 20th century. But his painting was not the couple's primary gift to culture--it was being the hosts for some of the greatest writers and artists of the 20th century. When I imagine how an artist gets to be great, I first think of the artists themselves, and then about the gate-keepers and promoters--the gallery owners, the editors, the curators, the impresarios, etc. But the Murphys were not gatekeepers, and yet they contributed much by virtue of their enthusiasms and friendships to literature, to painting, and to ballet. By covering their post-"Lost Generation" years, Vaill lets us see the tragedies of their lives alongside the golden peak.


American Art Since 1900 edited by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi and Kelly Baum. Don't be mislead by this title. The American art in this book is all chosen from the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Like most small or medium-sized museums (and like some large ones), the Blanton's collection has its idiosyncrasies. In this case, the big idiosyncrasy is that a majority of the post-war American art in their collection was donated by a single collector, novelist James Michener. Michener was a major collector who bought 297 works between 1959 to 1975 which he subsequently donated to the Blanton. He had a pretty good eye and advanced tastes--quite surprising given that Michener is the quintessential middle-brow novelist. The Blanton really lucked out. He only bought paintings, though, which leaves out a lot of important work, especially in the 60s. And he mostly avoided Pop art (one Robert Indiana painting). But he bought lots of abstract art by key artists: Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, Brice Marden, etc. By basing so much of their collection on Michener, it means that the Blanton has no Warhol, no Rauschenberg, no Johns, and many others of that generation. (At least I assume they didn't have work by these artists--if they did, they would have included it. This show dates from 2006, so theyt may have filled in their collection subsequently.) The other idiosyncrasy is that there is a lot of art by Texas artists here. This is not art that would normally be included in a survey exhibit of 20th century American art. That said, I'm glad for the inclusion--especially Jerry Bywaters' Oil Field Girls. Each work gets its own essay, and there are longer essays in the back by such writers as David Hickey and Raphael Rubenstein. There is also an amazing essay by Robert Kushner about Michener's collecting habits, where he critiques what Michener bought year by year.


No. 1: First Works by 362 Artists by Matthew Rosenzweig and Francesca Richer. This book has an intriguing concept. They asked artists the question, what do you consider your first work of art? 362 answered. Some gave them the oldest work from their childhood. A few gave them the first work they made after they had formed the ambition of being an artist (often a work from adolescence). Most gave them the first work that they considered a mature work--work that was no longer the work of a student, or the work of a young derivative artist. With 362 artists, working an a very wide variety of media, and from several generations, you get an interesting view of art today, as well as a sense of how artists of different generation and different countries view the process of artistic maturation.

Is There a Crisis in Art Criticism?

Yes.

This has been another episode of "Concise Answers to Obvious Questions."

But to avoid being a total asshole, I'll elaborate. For criticism to have a purpose, it must help readers identify and understand significant art. Practically speaking, critics should collectively be part of the larger group of people who decide what is good art. This is not an act of Olympian judgment (necessarily). It's just that for a given artist or a given work, the opinions of other artists, of curators, of gallery owners, and of collectors somehow coalesce into a vague consensus. Critics should be part of that consensus-making apparatus. A big part. But at this moment in history, critics are pretty much irrelevant to the process. (By the way, when I write "consensus," I mean that a situation in which broad disagreements can exist--even opposing camps. In such cases, there is nonetheless an agreement that a certain artist is worth having an opinion about. Most artists don't ever get that far.)

The view on the irrelevance of art criticism is expressed by two non-critics pretty forcefully--the economist Don Thompson in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark and sociologist Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. A good book where critics address the crisis of criticism is Critical Mess, edited by Raphael Rubinstein.

Rubenstein wrote an essay on the failures of criticism in 2003. Around the same time, James Elkins published a similar short book (excerpted here). Rubenstein also includes an edited speech by Thomas McEvilley from 1994 that seems to anticipate many of the issues discussed, including the big one, the issue of judgment. Rubenstein basically portrays the argument (and it is an argument with basically two sides) as one between whether critics should offer judgment on art or not. McEvilley, a thorough-going postmodernist, basically says no--that's not the main purpose anymore, even though, of course, some judgment can hardly be avoided. Others disagree. The book hardly settles the issue, and many of the positions are quite nuanced (Arthur Danto and McEvilley especially).

Not surprisingly, what is interesting in a book like this is not the main argument, but all the little side arguments and observations. I've complained of my own tendency to be a "booster." Rubenstein in his introduction writes that this is a common attitude--given the relatively indifferent or hostile environment in which art (especially contemporary art) exists, art critics around the country feel obliged to be boosters--to talk art up. Rubenstein imagines an earlier, less pandering age. But, he writes:

It seems that the booster critic is central to modern art. Making the rounds in Chelsea not long ago I ran into Irving Sandler, who has been a tireless critic and chronicler of the New York art world for fifty years. [...] Sandler said something that surprised me: that in the '50s criticism in New York's Abstract-Expressionist milieu was almost wholly positive because critics like him felt they had to argue the case for what the artists were doing, to promote the cause of modern art in the face of a philistine or conservative audience. The image of the evangelical '50s critic was at odds with my picture of a more honest, judgmental critical practice, back when artists and critics were slugging it out at the Cedar Bar.

Elsewhere, contributors write about how intellectuals and academics (art historians, for example) don't take art criticism seriously--and Rubenstein's anecdote suggests one reason why.

Mentioned several times in the book is a round-table discussion put on by October (the journal founded by renegade, theory-steeped Artforum critics). One of the big arguments was against the notion of "bellelettristic" writing--essentially the fight between the theorists and the poets. Nancy Princenthal writes:

The problem with the contrast between defensible, systematic analysis and unapologetically writerly subjectivity is [...] a specious opposition. On one hand, there is no self-evident reason to make the linkages between art and theory that have been argued over the past twenty years, productive and often fascinating though they have been. Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist economic theory, structural anthropology--these are all fascinating fields, but they have no more compelling claims as explanatory systems for art criticism than do theology, mathematics, or the physics of color (to name a few heuristic precedents). 

On the other hand [...] good fiction and poetry can be every bit as lean, incisive and informative about actual experience in the real world, as any cultural or political theory.

Princenthal is writing about this roundtable, but her descriptions of the arguments allow her to make her own points. She discusses Marxist criticism and institutional critique, the province of one of a the roundtable participants, Benjamin Buchloh. As interesting as this kind of criticism can be (and Buchloh is definitely an interesting critic), there are multiple problems with it.

And since, as everybody knows, the great majority of art critics makes very little money writing art criticism, there is the danger that a kind of sanctimony can creep into the practice. Disinterestedness is actually, in some ways, a handicap. [...] At the same time, money is not the only register of power. In response to Buchloh [, Robert] Storr eventually responded, 'I find it curious that those currently engaged in critical activities (such as "institutional critique") seem to think everything is fair game except the academy. It is a dubious exception.'

Is it any wonder that many people resent the blithe Marxism of academics? This is not to say that Marxism isn't an interesting analytical tool, but I think there is a problem when almost all economic analysis of art or art institutions comes from that place. At this stage in my reading life, I would rather read The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark--a non-Marxist economic analysis--than another puritanical critique of art as commerce.

Princenthal is not the greatest writer, but she is a good thinker about critical writing and is capable of great pith. For example, "In critical writing, clarity is close to an ethical imperative. It enfranchises readers." This is one reason I have always preferred McEvilley over all the other theory slingers.

Carter Ratcliff's essay starkly defines the conflict as being between poets and theorists, and comes down firmly on the poet's side. He even gives us a little history. ARTNews had historically been the home of poet-critics--Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, etc. Artforum was formed in response to ARTNews, and it was where the theorists wrote. While the Artforum guys excoriate Clement Greenberg, Ratcliff accuses them of wanting to be Greenberg in the sense that thier work would have "rigor." But he criticisizes them for their potted theory, which for the most part takes bits and pieces from earlier writers (Walter Benjamin, for example), and decontextualizes them in service of this new rigorous theoretical criticism. In short, Ratcliff inverts the judgment argument, saying that it is not the poets and belleletrists who are imposing Olympian judgments, it is the theorists with their pretensions of quasi-scientific analysis. Ratliff knows that when he makes a judgment, it is inherently conditional. "Artworks are fictive, so is any account of the true nature of art. The best criticism feels at home with this uncertainty, or at one with it, and wants to illuminate it."

There is much more in this book worth reading, and all sides represent themselves pretty well. The essays are (surprisingly) readable, as if they each took Nancy Princenthal's admonition to heart. Personally, I found the book useful. It will probably have an effect on my own writing--not the least of which is to make me more self-conscious.