snobs and art critics
The Accidental Masterpiece On the Art of Being an Art Critic
From the Slate Book Club: exchange of letters between critic and author. Below is an excerpt from the response of Michael Kimmelman, author of the recent The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa.
“…the world is not divided so strictly between philistines and snobs.”
Art, like Washington and Wall Street and old I Love Lucy reruns, has increasingly become the province of wonky specialists and private interest groups. There are many good writers who love art, but it used to be that great writers wrote often about it: Proust, Diderot, Baudelaire, Zola, Balzac, Tolstoy. They wrote in the spirit of the amateur—that is, for the love of it, because art, like other rich social and cultural topics, provided them with the necessary tools: good stories, characters, dramas, philosophy.
…I've found that good art is, by its nature, generous. It's about opening our eyes—about encouraging people to look more closely at what's around them.
Art is too important and interesting to be left to the art world. This is why I am frequently attracted, as you are, to serious obsessives…They throw themselves into their work, for its own sake, and are willing to fail.
You mention, for example, Dr. Hicks, the Baltimore dentist who collected 75,000 light bulbs and opened the erstwhile Museum of Incandescent Lighting in his basement. In that same chapter I recall my late friend Alex. He was an aspiring novelist who lined his tiny, roach-infested studio apartment (in one of those vanilla brick buildings near the United Nations) with bookshelves stuffed to capacity, so that whenever he bought a new book he had to dispose of one of equivalent width. Most of us just make piles. Precarious ones are even now threatening to topple over onto my laptop.
By tending methodically to his books, Alex, I came to realize, was devising a kind of evolving self-portrait, a shifting, surrogate literary identity. He turned something utterly mundane and routine into an artful act. I hadn't thought anybody else noticed what he was up to. Then after he died, I visited his father in London, and as I was leaving his house I spotted Alex's whole dog-eared collection, including his cheap pine bookshelves. His father had shipped everything across the Atlantic and recreated the library as a kind of memorial and a homespun work of installation art.
…in terms of critical attitude I imagine my job is to find ways to explain what it is that we're all looking for when we go to museums, myself included….Is it beauty and cultural instruction, or good air-conditioning and an amusing crowd?
From the Slate Book Club: exchange of letters between critic and author. Below is an excerpt from the response of Michael Kimmelman, author of the recent The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa.
“…the world is not divided so strictly between philistines and snobs.”
Art, like Washington and Wall Street and old I Love Lucy reruns, has increasingly become the province of wonky specialists and private interest groups. There are many good writers who love art, but it used to be that great writers wrote often about it: Proust, Diderot, Baudelaire, Zola, Balzac, Tolstoy. They wrote in the spirit of the amateur—that is, for the love of it, because art, like other rich social and cultural topics, provided them with the necessary tools: good stories, characters, dramas, philosophy.
…I've found that good art is, by its nature, generous. It's about opening our eyes—about encouraging people to look more closely at what's around them.
Art is too important and interesting to be left to the art world. This is why I am frequently attracted, as you are, to serious obsessives…They throw themselves into their work, for its own sake, and are willing to fail.
You mention, for example, Dr. Hicks, the Baltimore dentist who collected 75,000 light bulbs and opened the erstwhile Museum of Incandescent Lighting in his basement. In that same chapter I recall my late friend Alex. He was an aspiring novelist who lined his tiny, roach-infested studio apartment (in one of those vanilla brick buildings near the United Nations) with bookshelves stuffed to capacity, so that whenever he bought a new book he had to dispose of one of equivalent width. Most of us just make piles. Precarious ones are even now threatening to topple over onto my laptop.
By tending methodically to his books, Alex, I came to realize, was devising a kind of evolving self-portrait, a shifting, surrogate literary identity. He turned something utterly mundane and routine into an artful act. I hadn't thought anybody else noticed what he was up to. Then after he died, I visited his father in London, and as I was leaving his house I spotted Alex's whole dog-eared collection, including his cheap pine bookshelves. His father had shipped everything across the Atlantic and recreated the library as a kind of memorial and a homespun work of installation art.
…in terms of critical attitude I imagine my job is to find ways to explain what it is that we're all looking for when we go to museums, myself included….Is it beauty and cultural instruction, or good air-conditioning and an amusing crowd?
posted by montalut @ 9:01 PM
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