Critical Mass

Peter Schjeldahl is the only art critic writing today whom I read for pleasure, and the only one whose brief jazzy essays, which regularly appear in the New Yorker, rise to the level of literature. These 75 essays, originally published from November 1998 to June 2007, detail his smart, witty, passionate encounters with gallery and museum shows here and in Europe, as well as with such art events as the installation of the Gates in Central Park by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in February 2005. Here’s how Schjeldahl sums up the last occasion: “The overall social effect, which was something like that of an electric blackout or a major blizzard, minus the inconvenience, was weird and terrific.”

Schjeldahl is, with Bill Berkson, the last of the New York poets who were also brilliant art writers—John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara most prominently among them—and his voice is that of a nightingale amid the academic crows who jargonize and ideologize in prose as uningratiating as the art they advocate. “Poetry,” he writes, “gave up on me in the early 1980s. I never had a real subject, only a desperate need to be somehow glorious.”

But the poetic soul did not wither. It survives in the way he trusts his responses, which is what one reads him for. He has no agenda beyond sharing those responses with us in language one wants to memorize, and no faith beyond that evidenced in a passage about Vermeer. “I think Vermeer’s ideal,” he writes, “was a classless, timeless truth that is returning to the fore in contemporary culture: the essential role that aesthetic pleasure must play in any seriously lived life. Each of us is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision.”

It is that capacity that Schjeldahl expresses and addresses in his readers. It hardly matters whether one agrees with his judgments. Each of the essays vibrates with the joy he takes in feeling, and even if the art that occasions his emotion leaves a lot to be desired, he finds a way of redeeming it with bright thoughts and surprising language.

What especially impresses me is that Schjeldahl is able to exercise what he calls the “tools of participatory imagination” in an art world that is not particularly lavish in inducing aesthetic pleasure. In a 2002 essay, he writes, for example, that “there is more raw aesthetic potency in many of the objects at the American Museum of Folk Art... than one encounters at most shows in Chelsea of hot young artists, who could learn a lot from this new museum, starting with the indispensability of delight.” But he has none of the conservative acidity one finds in such sour ball critics as Hilton Kramer or Robert Hughes. Schjeldahl always manages to locate something to rejoice in having seen and written about, something that elicits a sharpened phrase and a way of shaping 2,000 words, more or less, into an essay that will take you there and give you something to remember.

And like Miss Marple, he never flinches. He does not hesitate to confront issues that one cannot imagine seeing addressed in the leading critical periodicals, as when, in discussing the grids of the severe abstractionist Agnes Martin, he writes about “the value, for life, of spirituality as a secular discipline.” He continues, “I thought about this at lovely, light-drenched Dia:Beacon, a place that devotes a terrific amount of real estate and remarkable architectural skill to implementing little hits of pure aesthetic emotion. An antichurch, it offers, in place of religion, beneficent addiction. . . . This may be the upward limit of what liberal culture can provide for the common soul.”

As a critic, I look for something more conceptual from art than pure aesthetic emotion, but this collection makes me appreciate afresh the joy that art writing can provide, and how graceless most such writing really is. It is what the French call a livre de chevet—a book to keep on a table by one’s bed, to end the day with something spirited, informative and gay.

"Critical Mass" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.