Peter Schjeldahl on Criticism and Context

NEW YORK—Peter Schjeldahl didn’t set out to be an art critic, but somewhere along the way he found his calling. Having moved to New York in 1965 as a poet and college dropout, he started writing art reviews because that’s what poets did to make some extra money in the ’60s, and, in his own words, “it took.” His career began at ARTnews, but soon enough he was writing for Seven Days, Vanity Fair, and The Sunday New York Times as well. In 1990 he became the art critic at the Village Voice, where he stayed until 1998, when newly appointed New Yorker editor David Remnick called him up and stole him away.

Schjeldahl’s style is unabashedly lyrical and frank. His candor sometimes comes off as scathing, and yet his honesty often balances itself out: He will write openly about his dislike for a work of art in one sentence but remind readers of the larger context for that opinion in the next. His reviews betray his poetic roots through their use of rich adjectives and metaphors, making him perhaps the only art critic who could get away with comparing the 2008 Whitney Biennial to “the muttering of a cast awaiting the inexplicably delayed rise of the curtain.” Schjeldahl’s reviews take his audience on a journey, and reading them, you never quite know where you’re going to end up.

In addition to receiving the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association in 1980, this April Schjeldahl was announced as the winner of the 2008 Clark Prize for excellence in art writing from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. He has also published a number of books of art criticism — all collected essays and columns — and several volumes of original poetry. His latest book, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (see Arthur C. Danto's review from the May Art+Auction), comes out May 27 courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

ARTINFO recently spoke with Schjeldahl to discuss his upcoming book, the job of the critic, and the value of humility.

First of all I was wondering how Let’s See came about, and how you selected pieces for it.

Well, I’d been sort of shopping manuscripts around for some time, and discovering just how thrilled publishers are by the idea of books of essays by art critics — it was humbling. But then, by way of the writer Sarah Thorton it got the attention of Gordon Brown at Thames & Hudson. I hadn’t had a book since a 1994 collection, and I was planning to include a lot of miscellaneous pieces and Village Voice columns. He persuaded me that it would be neater and niftier to just do New Yorker things.

So you just felt like it was time?

Yes, you know, one wants a book. And publishers are always eager to have you write books that you don’t want to write, and I don’t write books. I mean, I’ve tried, but I find that I’m not a book writer.

There was a recent article by Eric Gibson in the Wall Street Journal about the lost art of writing about art. He was talking about how he felt like criticism has sort of fallen into philosophical obscurity. Do you think that criticism today is inaccessible?

Well, I guess I would leave that up to the judgment of readers. I mean, there’s always a lot of philosophical obscurity around. We have a very specialized civilization where the farther inside anything you go, the less you understand. Take shop talk, which can be quite enchanting. It’s great to hear mechanics talking, or even computer geeks, when you understand every fourth word. There’s a kind of poetry to it. But, he said art criticism. Does he have me in mind?

Actually, he wrote not just about criticism but also about the wall text at the Whitney Bienniale—

Oh yes, curatorial babble. My distaste for that is well known. But you know I think there’s been a trend recently against that. I think there’s a lot less of that than there was, and it’s interesting, the New Museum has almost no wall text. Art comes to you through self-education and not education, which I think rather distances it.

Do you think there’s any sort of obligation for the museums, and the critics, to educate viewers, at least a little bit?

I guess what I object to is the implication that education is preparation for something, like you prepare to be a doctor. You don’t prepare to love art. I mean, why would you, in a busy world? And if you love it, if you have a proclivity for it — and not everybody does, and good luck to everybody — you’re going to want information. But you’re going to want it because of your experience, not in order to have the experience. It’s like anything else that exists purely because humans enjoy it. You don’t read the chemical content of candy before you eat it.