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In his 1978 parody ‘If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists’, Woody Allen captures just what makes art so different, so appealing, so exceptional:
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Dear Theo, Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding. Mrs Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth. That’s right! I can’t work to order like a common tradesman. I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing and wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won’t fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her. I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a starburst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can’t chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can’t go on like this much longer! I asked Cezanne if he would share an office with me but he is old and infirm and unable to hold the instruments and they must be tied to his wrists but then he lacks accuracy, and, once inside a mouth, he knocks out more teeth than he saves. What to do? Vincent.
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Vanessa Crofskey just published an op-ed on The Pantograph Punch site, ‘There’s Something Wrong with Art Writing’. It’s been enthusiastically shared and has been promoted by Radio New Zealand. Crofskey rails against art writing for its pretension and exclusive jargon—that old chestnut. Many will agree, including plenty who haven’t read much art writing and don’t much care.

Surprisingly, Crofskey is an insider. Her opening line sets the scene in a ‘master’s critique’ she’s attending (she assumes her reader knows what this is). She’s chosen to spend five or six years in an art school, where art is recognised as a specialised area of inquiry taught by experts, where disciples leave with degrees and doctorates, and yet she suggests that the litmus test of successful art writing is whether it makes sense to her mother (who I assume is not Rosalind Krauss). Isn’t it perverse to devote years to a specialist area of inquiry if you believe it can all be effortlessly explained to those who come to it cold, without doing the hard yards? In what other area would this make sense?

Crofskey’s examples of bad writing are limited to online sites EyeContact and Panto, which are hardly representative of art writing’s bandwidth, and to relatively obscure writers, Robyn Maree Pickens and (my pal) Terrence Handscomb. If I was making a list of the most visible New Zealand art writers, neither would figure. Crofskey’s not talking about Anthony Byrt or Sally Blundell; about Megan Dunn, Andrew Paul Wood, Damian Skinner, or Justin Paton; about Lana Lopesi or Francis McWhannell—all committed, lucid, patient explainers. Indeed, Byrt writes for both the elite international art mag Artforum and the mainstream local rag Metro.

The idea that art writing is generally highfalutin has to be questioned. Most serious art writers I know come through journalism, teaching, and museum work—boot camps for accessibility. We are trained to boil things down for broad audiences. As for jargon, it’s not the end of the world. Explanatory shorthand emerges in any specialist field; it helps us to communicate. Imagine trying to teach someone to drive without using technical terms like ‘accelerator’ or ‘clutch’. Sure, wording needs to be appropriate to the readership, but readers also need to meet art and art writers half way.

Turgid writing is a drag, but it’s too easy to disparage the whole endeavour of art writing by pointing to bad examples—throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Given that art is a complex and specialised discussion, isn’t it instead laudable that so many New Zealand art writers work so hard to make it accessible to broad readerships?
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On Sunday, City Gallery is screening one of my favourite films, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I picked it because it resonates with the art-science dialectic and mystic minimalism in our current shows, Semiconductor: The Technological Sublime and Eva Rothschild: Kosmos. In googling the film, I came across a toxic review from the day by the brilliant film critic Pauline Kael. It has such brio, I need to share …

‘The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. 2001 is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab.’

Ouch. As Quentin Tarantino describes Kael (enthusiastically): ‘The greatest shit ever and she’s just being so fucking mean.’ Can we love Kubrick and Kael? I find it hard not to.

Catch 2001 at City Gallery Wellington, Sunday 9 June, at 2pm. (And check out my blog.)
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