Q&A with VV art critic Christian Viveros-Faune

When I read Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune's review of the Lawrence Weiner show at the Whitney, a couple lines jumped out at me. I referenced them when I linked to the piece on Monday: For the second time Viveros-Faune did something that New York critics rarely do: He went against the Roberta Smith-penned conventional wisdom. By the standards of the go-along-to-get-along New York art world, Viveros-Faune was throwin' down.

So I emailed him and asked him if he'd sit for a MAN Q&A. He said yes. On Tuesday we talked about a range of topics, including the Jerry-Roberta critical axis, negative reviews, and ethical responsibility. I'll run this in three parts: Two today, one tomorrow.

MAN: Realizing you've only been in the job since about August, do you know what you want to do with your bully pulpit. Do you want to 'make' artists? Do you want to point out structural issues, or....

Christian Viveros-Faune: There's this sort of Kenneth Tynan thing, this sign that he had sort of pegged over his desk: 'Be light, be stinging, be melancholy.' 'Lacerate, goad, raise whirlwinds.' It seems to me that the mission of the critic is to do that, to a great degree. To provoke positively and also sort of negatively. To be able to point out serious lapses in general judgment and also to be able to celebrate things that require celebrating whether they're discoveries or not, in fact, even if there the most obvious thing in the world. That always seemed to me to be the point of being a critic.

Bob Baker... at the Voice weirdly concurs with me on this. We're one of the few folks that I know anywhere who like Robert Hughes. [Hughes] has very little to say about art past 1985, but he's encyclopedic before that, and he's a guy with an opinion. He knows where he's coming from. I guess my mission -- and to be honest I have not been around at the job long enough to articulate it properly -- but if I have one it's to make sure that I'm imparting some sort of insight and also judgment to a readership both wide and specialist.

MAN: To be the anti-Kimmelman, to write more than mere hagiography.

Viveros-Faune: It's wanting someone to actually make up their minds on the page. Someone like [NYT chief art critic Michael] Kimmelman is the one at the Times to provide the contrast with Hughes because he doesn't seem to have opinions that distinguish him from anyone else and I find that problematic.

MAN: There has been much hand-wringing about art criticism, particularly by NYC critics, about how art criticism is allegedly dead. Do you subscribe to any of that?

Viveros-Faune: Yes and no. What a cop-out answer. I do realize that some of these issues that have been diagnosed are real. But does anyone really want to play the role of kingmaker anymore? Do we need a [Clement] Greenberg around? And it seems to me that we don't.

I suppose that I sort of got to hang around with Peter [Schjeldahl] quite a bit when I was doing this profile of him and he does have this certain catholic way about him, and he seems to take the good with the bad pretty evenly.

But it does occur to me that when you're faced with mountains you don't try to move the mountain, you try to go around it, and I think there are ways to make criticism important (from one particular desk) without really trying to engage some of these issues -- like the market -- head on. I've been involved in the market as a dealer and I've been disinvolved with it for some years now and the stuff I like writing about has nothing to do with the market and I still think there's a lot of room for that.

MAN: I've been complaining about that on MAN for a while now, that critics such as Jerry Saltz complain about the market instead of taking advantage of their bully pulpit. And that the NYT for a while couldn't write a review without hand-wringing about the market.

Viveros-Faune: I don't mean to say that folks shouldn't write about the market. The market is relevant, it definitely is. But it still seems to me that the critic's job is to talk about art, you know? I like Jerry, I respect what he does, but if you keep harping on the same notes, there's an aspect to a one-note song that one begins to hit.

What's the line about a broken clock? It basically strikes the right time twice a day. If you keep on saying the market's going to go, the market's going to go, of course it's going to go. It's a law of nature: Things that go up must go down. These things must be talked about, these are important things. I think in the NYT you find that art writers and the critics share a platform. Like you, I'm sure I read both, and I'm interested in both but the stuff that tends to matter, aside from the 'Damien Hirst sold for $100 million' is the stuff that gives you a sense of what is out there beyond just regular life. Ways in which a general reader can engage something that can give him and her meaning.

I hope I'm not being naïve in saying this: This is part of what we're supposed to do, to entertain ideas to the degree that they're imminent in artworks, to try and sort of get those across to a general audience in a way that's meaningful.