If its title were Art Baloney/Art Brilliance Blog, I’d be such a fan. (Previous post here.)
Well, a fan, anyway. The site’s obsession with critic Karen Archey seems wide of the mark.
Recently posted under the category, Critics Gone Wild is a sentence from Archey’s review of Rebecca Morris:
Pollock-esque
metallic circles paired with feminine bleeds antagonize each other
formally while other paintings play with positive and negative space.
Sorry, Art Baloney Blog, but I love that. Pollock’s drips struggling with feminine bleeds is bingo for me. It zings the strings of Morris’ work.
And this, also ridiculed, from the lowly and anonymous form of a press release (Banks Violette at Team Gallery):
Violette’s drawings are always coming together and falling apart in the eye of the spectator. Soft edges, hardened into image through cognition, vanish into nothingness and slip from legibility. Violette’s work, sometimes crushingly monumental and brutally hard-edged, always so present, is actually, delicately, about the ‘after’ of things.”
The after of things? Were it not for his unfortunate encounter with a laundry truck that took him out of this world, Roland Barthes would surely take this press release writer out to lunch. I read these two sentences, and Banks Violette clicked in my head.
In response to my first post about the site, Art Baloney quoted Wittgenstein:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. (our emphasis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, introduction to Tractatus logico-philosophicus)
I wrote back:
Ludwig is a tough act to follow. I can’t imagine him being much of a fan of any art critic, unless maybe Meyer Schapiro, especially if Ludwig went to the lectures at Columbia or happened to catch Schapiro on Cezanne’s apples.
Way downhill from that is where most of us work. Writing for us is practicing, over and over, trying to get something right. A rhythm, a coherent thought, an image. Only by doing it again and again and seeing it printed or published somewhere and having people react one way or another is there any chance of getting close to the clarity you seem to demand first time out.
In other words, I’m typing this in my sack of flesh with my fingers stiffening at the knuckles, past several deadlines that haunt me like bill collectors and with no confidence that any minute now I’ll solve the writing problems that beset me. When I turn in my essays, will they be perfect?
Hell no.
I think I appreciate what the ArtBaloney blog wants to do, but so far it’s not very successful and frankly it makes me, of all people, want to take back everything I’ve said about creating an approachable language around art.
It’s fine to throw quotes up in the air (I’m visualising skeet here – pull! boom!) but perhaps it would be more interesting to throw and dismantle? Otherwise it’s just finger-pointing and mockery. That’s nothing new.