(Ancient Egypt on)

K. A/A Ms. DR. JANET
MCKENZIE

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/04/08/1363363/bechtler-museums-gifted-curator.html

I read your book “Wolf at the Door” and appreciated it very much!.
It read like long poem.
I am currently having an exhibition of my work here in Berlin at the Emerson Gallery on Gartenstrasse 1 and would like to invite you to see it.
I return to New York on the 26th of October.

Warm Regards,

Ellen Sylvarnes

Thank you for writing. I’m not sure how much of my art criticism you’ve read, but I think that saying I’m hardly ever negative is a gross misstatement. If you browse through the archives on this site, you can find a review where I state that Jeff Koons is the worst living artist. More recently, I wrote a candid review of Stephane Pencreac’h's Berlin exhibition that was hardly flattering. Elsewhere, I’ve been extremely critical of Terence Koh, another living artist I don’t care for at all — considering the fact that he is one of the darlings of the art world, I hardly see how my criticism of his work could be construed as career lip service. The fact is, I don’t make a living writing art criticism — it’s nearly impossible to do so — so I have no real motivation to be unnecessarily flattering. If you read more of my art writing — that collected in my book Disorientations and on this website — I think you’ll find that I agree with most of the opinions you’ve expressed above.

You do bring up a good point about the current state of art criticism, however, and I think a lot of art magazines are afraid of publishing negative reviews out of fear that it will drive off advertising revenue. This is clearly frustrating for people like us who understand the value of honest criticism.

I think, like art, criticism is too subjective and wildly individualistic for any one system (such as the one you propose) to prevail — or at least it should be. With the banalization of critical language across the board — which can be blamed on the market or academia or (fill-in-the-blank) — the descriptive, PC pandemic has endured for some time. This is one of the reasons why not so many people read art criticism anymore, but also the reason wherein there lies a possibility of there being a renaissance in art criticism — though I’m not going to expound on that here, because I don’t want to repeat myself — I discuss all this in the first two chapters of the book Disorientations.

And I have to ask myself if you do not also simply suffer from one of the symptoms of contemporary etiquette. If you find language crippling, then how does peer pressure fit into the equation? The question arises because:

(i) of the frustration I feel regarding this modern social imposition, this almost PC straight jacket that makes one act in such a way as to avoid saying or doing anything that will attract the kinds of inevitable abrasive reaction that negative criticism of anything attracts nowadays. I can’t help feeling that in all your critiques there is an undercurrent of what you really think, and that the rest is career lip service and has little to do with real perception. Its almost as if all Art now produced is perfect. It isn’t. It is the same as for any industry produce; ie, the efficiency of light bulbs: it’s quality can be measured on a guassian curve where failure or malfunction is quantified …. and admitted, ….. but not for Art.

(ii) when I was prolifically exhibiting ‘Art’, these descriptive, rather than critically honest considerations of my work kept me complacently producing mostly crap onto which art writers would project all sorts of insights which just weren’t there. [The good stuff they would simply ignore and never comment on.] ‘They’ would have produced better Art by saying my work was crap. I am thankful that at least one critic, John Hughes has the guts to say that both Basquiat and Hirst are crap

(iii) As a result I feel an urgent and subversive need to establish some kind of metrics system for Art literacy, so that everyone can understand Art. A kind of outrageous measuring system that would discredit everyone’s work once everyone could not only understand all Art, but also why it was important. (A total orphan departure point in some ways: despite knowing that such a thing is somehow impossible.) Why should this be done now? Because we are heading towards an Arts based society anyway, but one where brands such as Basquiat and Hirst will be the “Artists”, and where the implication is that real Artists will be obsolete.