Replace "art" with "literature" --

-- and you get all the insights you need about literary criticism, litblogging and the state of book reviewing. It's Adrian Searle's wise yet acerbic essay in the Guardian about how art criticism has fared against the flood of money in the art world:

Some critics think that the fact that there's so much bad art around means that it is a great time to be writing about art, which is like saying that because of the plague, what a great time the 14th century was to be an undertaker. Critics aren't doctors. We can't fix things. We are not here to tell artists what to do. They wouldn't listen anyway. Maybe the word criticism has become part of the problem. Or the problem is that we are asking the wrong thing of the critic: critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren't any). Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable. Criticism might blow the whistle on overhyped art, flabby curating, moribund institutions or the odd fly-blown administrator, but that is because you cannot divorce art from its context....

Being iconoclastic, slagging off artists and institutions, gets a critic noticed. Anger, undeniably, is also a good motive for writing in the first place. Controversy, the smell of blood, the whiff of scandal - this makes careers. It also sells newspapers and magazines. Of course it is the duty of the critic to be iconoclastic, and to be reckless; but critical terrorism is no good as a long-term strategy. It becomes predictable, and the adrenaline buzz soon wears off. It is also disingenuous, and ultimately a false position. There is such a thing as bad faith, and lousy opinions....

Writing about art only matters because art deserves to be met with more than silence (although ignoring art - not speaking about it, not writing about it - is itself a form of criticism, and probably the most damning and effective one). An artist's intentions are one thing, but works themselves accrue meanings and readings through the ways they are interpreted and discussed and compared with one another, long after the artist has finished with them. This, in part, is where all our criticisms come in. We contribute to the work, remaking it whenever we go back to it - which doesn't prevent some artworks not being worth a first, never mind a second look, and some opinions not being worth listening to at all.

Well worth reading the whole deal.

March 19, 2008 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Books I'm currently recommending . . .

Richard Price's best novel since Clockers, Lush Life is a slice of life on the Lower East Side, complete with the ghetto kids, the new bohemians, the old Jews -- and the cops. A restaurant manager at 35 fears he's no longer the wannabe artiste, the one he always thought would turn into a full-blown artiste. When he sees a younger version of himself get shot during a mugging (and then gets blamed by the cops), he comes apart. Price takes these cultures, generally oblivious to each other, and stares through all of them. Lush Life is a crime novel, a terrific literary thriller, a sampler of Price's namebrand talents with dialogue and deadpan humor. Price is after more than just law-and-order, crime-and-punishment, justice-is-served. This is a portrait of big-city America in the past decade. You think The Wire, Law and Order, the old Homicide series are the best TV has to offer? This is all that -- between covers.

In Life Class, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker returns to World War I, the setting for her magnificent Restoration trilogy. Where those novels followed shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen through their convalescence and return to combat, Life Class follows three painting students (based on real Slade School artists Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash) as the war approaches and they avoid it or embrace it. Elinor wants little to do with the war or with men: They're distractions from her art. Kit, a hot, young futurist, is primed for the war's industrialized destruction, while Paul flees his working-class background. As usual with Barker, the sexual relationships and war-time atmosphere (and gruesome battlefield details) are brilliantly conveyed: Her prose is lean but lyrical, compassionate yet cool-headed. No character is quite as compelling as Regeneration's bitter bisexual, Billy Prior, but the Great War's upheavals in art and combat, sex and class, provide Barker with material for truly exceptional historical novels. A new trilogy? One hopes so.

THE REVIEWS:

Pat Barker, Frankenstein, Cass Sunstein on the internet, Samuel Johnson, Thrillers, Denis Johnson, Alan Furst, Caryl Phillips, Richard Flanagan, George Saunders, Michael Harvey, Larry McMurtry, Harry Potter and more ...

ESSAY:

Big D between the sheets -- Dallas in fiction

ESSAY:

Reviewing the state of reviewing

ESSAY:

9/11 as a novel: Why?

ESSAY:

How can critics say the things they do? And why does anyone pay attention? It's the issue of authority.

The disappearing book pages:

Papers are cutting book coverage for little reason

Thrillers and Lists:

Noir favorites, who makes the cut and why