So, A Chair or Shoes?

by Matthew Parrish

Art critic James Panero said the following (in an article titled, "Criticism After Art" from the New Criterion, Dec. 2005):

A world of difference separates those who criticize art from those who seek to know about how art criticism is done, because art criticism is done by doing it. To ask after the details beyond the most practical ones is already a step in the wrong direction. Art critics who make the "criticism of art criticism" their business do not stay in the business of art criticism for long.

As most thinking creatures do, I turned inward after the dawn of my age of reasoning (12). From the outside, I might as well have been an invalid and my ventures into art-making and art theory didn't do anything to alter that state. As an amateur artist and theorist, I just fed into the cycle of make-think, think-make and stockpiled jargon which I thought was necessary to my understanding of art like "simulcra" and "rhizome." Very impressive, huh?

Occasionally, if it was convenient, I would observe actual art in other places. If the art was bad, I was happy because I was superior. If the art was good, I was jealous.

It wasn't until I actually started writing about other artists' work on a regular basis from a relatively disinterested perspective that my mind was opened to the world of art criticism. "Oh! So art does exist outside of books and computers!" I thought. Then I found James Panero's articles in the New Criterion. As a critic, he's too conservative for my taste but his style was a revelation because he relocated the discussion of art from academia to gallery-hopping:

In New York, the good gallery critic is set apart from the bad by how efficiently he steers a course from Chelsea to Fifty-seventh Street to the Upper East Side with a stopover in Williamsburg. How he finds shows to write about. How he calculates (as in my case) a way to feature exhibitions, with a three- or four- or five-week run time, that will still be open once the magazine comes out.

In Panero's reviews, there's none of the intellectual jargon found in most published writings about art. Not that "artspeak" or theoretical terminology are inherently bad or useless--the truth is far from that-- they just aren't everything. There's a way out of discussions about "the postmodern sublime" and that is to live by the anonymous art critic's statement, "I see art...and I write about it!" (Panero's quote)

Since I've put down the books and laced my shoes, a whole world of art has opened up to me. I can't wait for First Fridays and opportunities to experience art directly, talk specifically about that art and issues relevant to it, converse with gallery owners and artists about their ideologies, and bump into hundreds of lively, talkative people.

The art world exists outside the studio, beyond books, away from the keyboard, and in local galleries.

"He who experiences [artistic] impressions strongly and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere." -Walter Pater from Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).

[Matthew Parrish is a grad student attending the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.]

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