Let’s get right to it: how does it feel to be retiring?
ARTIST & CRITIC (in unison): I’m not. Most people think I’m kind of loud and overbearing. Sorry, bad joke.
But seriously …
CRITIC: It feels a little weird, frankly. My wife and I were once told when our daughter was early on in grade school that she didn’t “accept transition well.” When the class was cutting little fishies out of colored paper and it was time to move on to something else, she wanted to keep on with the fishies. Maybe that was genetic, from me. A big part of me wants to keep on with the fishies, which means being a staffer. Also, the word “retiring” has a certain unsalutory ring to it. It implies that everything in your professional life is now cast in retrospect. I’m one of those people who, following the advice of the great baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, doesn’t want to look back because somebody might be gaining on me.
How did you get into this dual role-some might say a schizophrenic one-of artist and critic?
CRITIC: Back in the antediluvian year of 1965, when I was barely out of graduate school (with a master’s degree in painting), I got a job in a small municipal museum in California where there was a requirement to reside within the city limits. I needed the job, so I made the move. Suddenly, I found myself 30 miles away from the Los Angeles gallery scene. Now, I’d started in college thinking I’d be an English major, and always did well at writing papers in art-history class. So I walked into the offices of Artforum magazine, which was then headquartered in L.A., and offered to write reviews at the going rate of five bucks a pop. Reviewing gave me a good reason to make sure I visited the galleries at least every other Saturday. And it paid for the gas.
And almost 40 years later, at NEWSWEEK?
CRITIC: I take a lot of kidding, especially from my colleague Jeff Giles, for being the village explainer of what a lot of people see as an arcane, elitist, pretentious, B.S.-infested sector of our culture.
Is that the sector you inhabit as an artist?
ARTIST: I’m an old-fashioned artist-many in the art world would say I’m a conservative artist-because I make objects, I work alone in a studio and I don’t participate in the rather more team-oriented art activity (lots of assistants, lots of consulting techies, lots of dealing with bureaucrats) of constructing complex, “neoconceptual” installations and video environments. But yes, what I do-abstract painting-is still construed by many as pretentious and elitist, etc. Working a split shift, so to speak, as a critic actually helps a little, logistically. To gouge out some weekday time in the studio, I have to get over there very early in the morning. The “early-bird special” is a retiree’s strong point, isn’t it?
What’s been good about working that split shift, as you call it?
CRITIC: Undoubtedly getting paid to go see what I would have gladly paid to go see. I got to see the once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer show not only in Washington, D.C., but in the Hague, too. I’ve seen Rembrandt in Berlin, Giacometti in Paris, heretofore concealed impressionists in Russia, Emily Carr in Canada, Eva Hesse up at Yale, and all kinds of things, like the Matisse and Pollock retrospectives, right here in New York. Plus, I had wonderful opportunities to branch out: reviewing “The Lion King,” profiling Eddie Izzard, doing a Milton Berle obit, etc. The other great thing has been the sort of water-cooler culture (although we don’t actually have a water cooler) in the Arts & Entertainment section, the cross-disciplinary conversation with my colleagues-even if a lot of it has been Giles ragging me about the silly, pretentious art shows that are out there. Last-and I should never admit this where an editor can see it-going through the NEWSWEEK does-this-track?, can-you-find-a-better-word editorial mill a couple of times a month has made me a better, clearer writer.
And what’s been the downside?
ARTIST: My paintings are often seen through the lens of my criticism, as if they’re correctives to things I’ve complained about in reviews. Sometimes other critics who don’t like my criticism-in this era of artistic grade inflation, I’ve got a reputation as being a little negative-have taken it out on my art.
CRITIC: Also, the pressure for boosterism, for criticism to function as advertising copy, is always there. It often causes, for example, the last two sentences in the majority of art reviews in the art magazines as well as in the popular press, to be not only vaguely upbeat but-if you adjust for the name of the particular artist being reviewed-almost interchangeable with the last two sentences of any other review. The second thing that boosterism does is to cause a lot of museum officials-not the press people, who make my job easier, but directors and trustees-to speak like those State Department folks who have to stand behind a podium in front of the inquiring press and explain some international-relations screwup. They utter a lot of $10 words that don’t say anything. Getting a good, candid quote is like, well, pulling teeth. I think it’s because one false step and there goes the $20 million donation for the new wing.
Is has there been anything especially difficult about writing art criticism for NEWSWEEK?
CRITIC: Only that the majority of museum exhibitions-the meat and potatoes of my beat-are historical, i.e., about dead artists whose work still speaks to us as forcefully as most contemporary art does. (That’s why they show it.) This doesn’t interface all that well with the mission of a newsweekly, which is, to invoke the comedian Flip Wilson, a kind of Church of What’s Happening Now. The endless parade of disposable rock bands, special-effects movies, potboiler thriller novels and TV sitcoms makes me think that Andy Warhol was wrong about everybody getting 15 minutes of fame. It’s more like seven minutes and 30 seconds.
Are you glad to be getting out from under that?
CRITIC: I’m glad to be getting out from under some of the responsibility for covering some of the newsier aspects of the art scene that I don’t think are worth much, artistically. We live in an age of calculated controversy. When “Mirroring Evil” (the exhibition about Nazi imagery in contemporary art now at the Jewish Museum in New York) follows so closely on the heels of “Apocalypse” (at the Royal Academy in London), which was a quickie sequel to “Sensation” (the show that came to the Brooklyn Museum where Rudy Giuliani tried to shut it down), I feel like I’m supposed to jump just because some press-savvy curator has said “frog.”
ARTIST: And I’m glad to get back into the studio more.
What’s it like?
ARTIST: A largish, grubby room with minimal amenities (a cheap, small stereo with some strange CDs that I like-Remy Zero, and the Frank and Walters-and a little espresso machine). I’ve had one most every place I’ve lived-L.A., Texas, New York. It’s rather a paradise for me: walking in early in the morning with a cup a deli coffee, a muffin, switching on the jazz station. I can go all day, easily. As a fairly rich, successful San Francisco painter I used to know once said to me, “I don’t belong to a country club. This is my country club.” Plus, there’s the possibility that an artist can, if he’s lucky, go on almost forever and die in bed doing cut-outs, like Matisse.
Is there any downside here?
ARTIST: Not really. Except, sometimes, hob-nobbing with fellow painters who are given to bemoaning that today’s art world is not like the old days, when there were giants-Giants!-bestriding the scene.
But you’ve bemoaned the current scene yourself.
ARTIST: Guilty. But as an artist, I think you’ve just got to get on with it. The British Empire has seen its heyday come and go. So, probably, has abstract painting, as a cultural force. That doesn’t mean it can’t be rich and fulfilling to live in contemporary Britain. And it can be rich and fulfilling-in a larger way than just therapeutic-to paint abstract paintings in 2002.
Any other overview changes?
CRITIC: Once you’ve seen, a masterpiece by, say, Jasper Johns, exhibited fresh in a gallery, bought into a collection, then later auctioned off to another collector, and eventually given to a museum, you realize how inconsequential everybody but the artist is, compared to the painting. After a while, you get an idea of art like the American Indian is supposed to have had about the land: it abides and people just squat on it temporarily. Nobody ever really “owns” it. Likewise, art abides and people-especially the people I call collectively “brokers,” i.e., dealers, collectors, curators, and yes, we critics-just smack up against it temporarily and then disappear.
Any concluding words?
ARTIST & CRITIC (in unison): I loathe what NEWSWEEK people call “kicker quotes”-wrapping up a piece by borrowing somebody else’s profundity. But I’ll make an exception here and quote the contemporary painter Vija Celmins, who said when asked what the art world needs now: “Less Duchamp, more Cezanne.”
