Good Thinking About Art

Critics write about music, books, theatre, and art, and they write using ideas and words particular to those fields and to ongoing developments in those fields. A review written using eigtheenth-century terms and concepts about a contemporary play would sound odd to us. But when writing about art can highlight one of two contemporary, but quite different, approaches, issues about art and writing can become confused with each other.

Eric Gibson, in his article in The Wall Street Journal - "The Lost Art of Writing About Art" (April 2008) discusses what he and others saw as the abysmal writing for the Whitney Museum's biennial exhibition of contemporary art (2008). He laments the change in critical writing about art since the 1950s and quotes other artists and critics who see it as "impenetrable" and insulting.

Gibson cites Richard Lacayo who writes in a blog for Time magazine and wants to ban five words from the critical lexicon because they are meaningless - "interrogate," "problematize," "references" (used as a verb), "transgreessive," and "inverts."

These five words exemplify the move away from earlier times when critics dealt with "art and aesthetics," to the present, when they "simply riff..." on philosophy. Art and aesthetics have been overtaken by discussions based on Marxism and feminism. (The Horror! The Horror!) Duchamp's Readymades inaugurated the shift.

The problem with impenetrable writing about art is not the real issue here. Bad writing is bad writing wherever we find it and is not acceptable. Good writing about art can and should include words that reflect how critics approach art. Gibson himself says that from Duchamp on, art required a different kind of writing.

Gibson's article should be titled "The Lost Art of Writing About Lost Values in Art." The issue here is nostalgia for a time when art was believed to be purely aesthetic and "real" critics knew how to write about it from the correct perspective. Gibson seems really to want a ban on a contemporary way of thinking about art, a way of thinking that needs its special words.

Feminism and Marxism both "problematize" the purely aesthetic approach to art, a change which, as Gibson points out, began with Duchamp and his contemporaries.

Whether one prefers the purely aesthetic approach to art or is an afficionado of conceptual art, appreciation increases with well-written criticicism. Well-written criticism requires the words and ideas appropriate to each approach.

Round and Round and Round in the Plato Game

Artists do it. Literary critics and academics do it. Museum curators and investors do it. They play the Plato game.

The Plato game has been really hot for about thirty years. In fact, there are no signs of its demise.The stakes are very high: Careers are made and broken over it; millions can be made and lost because of it.

The Plato game is the ongoing argument between theory and practice and is based on Plato's Theory of Forms. In roughly twenty- or thirty-year cycles, one comes to the forefront, while the other recedes.

Academics in English departments frame the game as one between literary theory and literature. Literary theory has been winning since the eighties, but signs of a turnaround are subtly surfacing.

For artists and museum curators and investors, the game is played between artistic technique and artistic concept.

Denis Dutton, in his article " Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?" in The New York Times (October 15/09), writes about the supremacy of conceptual art in today's museums and markets:

Sophisticated gallery owners or curators normally respond with withering condescension to worries about the lack of craftsmanship in contemporary art... What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.

Dutton believes the supremacy of the concept is temporary and argues that across time and across cultures we do, we have, and we will admire artistic technique, "the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances;" whereas concepts become dated and stale:

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.

Aesthetics last, concepts fade. Investors in conceptual art may be left holding the bag when the context for a particular concept is forgotten,and there is no longer anything about the work that speaks to anyone.

So which will it be? Theory or practice; concept or object? The ongoing Plato game is our attempt to answer.

Denis Dutton is professor of philosophy in Christchurch, New Zealand, at Canterbury University. He is the author of The Art Instinct (2009).





I would like to invite Denis Dutton to my soiree.









(with thanks to Joni Mitchell for song The Circle Game)