Blaming the artist for the art world

Peter Schjeldahl knows his way around a sentence. His appear tossed off but take their place in the deep end of the pool. In spite of their brilliance, however, some drown there, sunk by writer’s contempt for his subject.

I hope to see Urs Fischer at the New Museum but haven’t yet. Has Schjeldahl? He wrote his paragraph review to bury Fischer, not consider him. It’s brilliant as writing but inert as criticism.

“Why must the show go on?” Noël Coward wondered. The question recurs apropos a desperately ingratiating Urs Fischer exhibition at the New Museum. Frail japes by the mildly talented Swiss-born sculptor–the international art world’s chief gadfly wit since Maurizio Cattelan faded in the role–are jacked up to epic, flauntingly expensive scale. There are huge aluminum casts of tiny clay lumps (you can tell by the giant thumbprints), walls and a ceiling papered with photographs of themselves, and big mirrored blocks that bear images of common objects. When a hole in a wall is approached, a realistic tongue sticks out of it. A faux cake is suspended in the air by hidden magnets. It’s all nicely diverting–but from what? If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star.

Schjeldahl could be a broker glancing at stock results – who’s up, who’s down – or an insult comic, his quips his weapon. Almost any artist can be made to seem ridiculous by describing the work in this kind of seen-one, seen-all tone. Schjeldahl’s real target is the New Museum. I love this phrase – “a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star” – but isn’t it possible that a suspect platform can still deliver a real thing?