On Lee Siegel's fall

UPDATE: Modern Kicks makes many excellent points, including this one: Art writers were the first to gripe about Siegel.

In case you missed it: The New Republic has terminated Lee Siegel's blog and is reviewing whether or not he will remain with the magazine. I think Grammar.police was first with the news.

More than once I've called Siegel one of America's worst art critics, a guy who was in over his head writing about something he didn't seem to know much about. (For a publication, Slate, that has the ethical compass of a noodle and the arts-related editorial judgment of a wet noodle. It'll be interesting to see what they do with Siegel -- if he's still with them.) As I've said plenty of times before, I think his review of the 2005 Whitney Twombly show is one of the most ignorant, cliched, uninformed, and almost bigoted reviews I've ever read of a major art exhibition. Had I thought Siegel was worth the energy I could have written similar takedowns of his Basquiat review or plenty of others.

Siegel's self-implosion isn't being celebrated in the blogosphere because he was a clueless critic. Blogs such as Ezra Klein's, Kriston Capps', DailyKos, Obsidian Wings, and, well this clever creation, are reacting because of the way Siegel treated people who dared to challenge his ideas. Lots of bloggers -- including me -- knew that if we disagreed with something Siegel wrote that we'd be in for a nasty, threatening email from the great man himself. I have an entire file of Siegel emails. Sounds like Malcolm Gladwell does too. (I'm also pretty sure that several pseudonymous/anonymous emails I've received in the last year or so were from Siegel.) In not one email to me did Siegel take on points I made in disagreeing with his ideas. He simply spewed invective. (For the record: For 15 months I've offered him space on MAN to refute what I wrote about his Twombly piece. He hasn't responded, let alone accepted.)

TNR's reason for dumping Siegel's blog isn't a surprise given Siegel's previous behavior: He couldn't handle the comments on his blog so he created an alter ego behind which he attacked and sniped at people who dared to disagree with him. That same how-dare-you 'tude is in pretty much the tone of every email he's ever sent me, too.

Siegel failed to appreciate -- let alone remember -- that critics place their thoughts and arguments in the marketplace of ideas. Chances are that someone's going to challenge those ideas. Lee Siegel has no respect for the ideas of anyone not named Lee Siegel. Here's what I'll take from Siegel's self-destruction: I hope that when people say or write intelligent, thoughtful things in disagreement with my opinions that I treat them respectfully. I wouldn't want anyone to compare me to Siegel.