Peter Schjeldahl

There has been something of a debate brewing regarding the fall of quality art criticism (and a sub-argument regarding the actual value of art criticism in general). Personally, I believe much of today’s "criticism" has been reduced to: simple, adjective-filled descriptions of pieces of art; feel-good, "everyone’s a winner," vapid writing; or, worse, critics using most of their column’s allotted word count talking about themselves instead of the art. Ugh.

With that said, there is a nice little Q&A by Jillian Steinhauer with New Yorker art critic, Peter Schjeldahl. Read it here. Mr. Schjeldahl is a lyrical writer who balances his candor and honesty with broad and deep context. It makes for valued criticism…. and enjoyable writing. In Mr. Schjeldahl hands, art criticism is far from dead.

From the interview, some of my favorite lines by Mr. Schjeldahl are:

… there’s always a lot of philosophical obscurity around. We have a very specialized civilization where the farther inside anything you go, the less you understand. Take shop talk, which can be quite enchanting. It’s great to hear mechanics talking, or even computer geeks, when you understand every fourth word. There’s a kind of poetry to it.

You don’t prepare to love art. I mean, why would you, in a busy world? And if you love it, if you have a proclivity for it — and not everybody does, and good luck to everybody — you’re going to want information. But you’re going to want it because of your experience, not in order to have the experience. It’s like anything else that exists purely because humans enjoy it. You don’t read the chemical content of candy before you eat it.

…it is a challenge; try writing about music. The thing is, there’s something really easy about art, which is that it holds still. Almost everything else we think of as an art unfolds in time. The task of description is an essential operation of art criticism, and it’s the thing I work hardest at and that I want to go by the quickest. I want to make it seem really easy and transparent.

Image: Photo of Peter Schjedahl by Alex Remnick, courtesy Thames & Hudson

Comments

[Barbara]

Rob:

Thank you so much for alerting your blog readers about Peter Schjeldahl. I was unfamiliar with him and now I have an introduction of sorts. I will pursue his most recent book. Thank you again.

Barbara