My good friend Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is yanking my chain:
I disagree with my esteemed AJ colleague Terry Teachout about the lack of usefulness of specialized critical fields. There is value to readers in specialized knowledge, in a critic spending hours and hours studying, thinking about and examining a certain field….what about providing context, insight and original thinking about contemporary art when the premiere of Alias is on at 8 tonight and there’s a new novel to be read? What about doing the legwork to look at all that a critic has to look at in order to speak with some level of insight?
Er, did I really say critical specialization wasn’t useful? Because it is, or can be, for all the good reasons Tyler mentions–but only so long as the specialist remains conscious and appreciative of the place of his specialty in the larger world of art. Critics who lack or lose this awareness become provincial, which is the curse of certain branches of criticism (dance in particular). What do they know of modernism who only modern art know? Answer: not enough.
I don’t offer my own experience as a model for all critics, by the way. I started out years ago as a critical specialist (in music), but gradually began writing about other things that interested me simply because…I wanted to. And I hope I’m properly modest about what I can and can’t do. To quote from my introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader, “I am all too aware that when I discuss any art form other than music, it is as a more or less well-informed amateur, not a practitioner. The only claim that I would make for myself is that because I chose not to remain a specialist, I thereby acquired a feel for the unity of the arts that has had its own value.” At least I think so, anyway!
Yes, I do believe good critics should be encouraged to write outside their specialties. (Bad critics, conversely, should be encouraged to take up other lines of work.) But specialization in and of itself is no bad thing, so long as it doesn’t lead in bad directions. My favorite art critic, Fairfield Porter, was in one sense the ultimate specialist–a professional painter who wrote about art when not making it. He was also a part-time poet and a deeply thoughtful man whose aesthetic interests (and knowledge) ranged very widely. Don’t you wish he’d taken the time to write on occasion about other art forms as well? I do, just as I’m excited that the anything-but-provincial music critic John Rockwell will soon become the chief dance critic of the New York Times. He may be wrong–a lot–but at least he’ll be interesting.
One more quote, this one from the mission statement for “About Last Night”:
This is a blog about the arts in New York City and elsewhere…It’s about all the arts, not just one or two. Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, believed that “in the long run there are only two kinds of art: the good and the bad. This difference cuts across all other differences in art. At the same time, it makes all art one….the experience of art is the same in kind or order despite all differences in works of art themselves.” We feel the same way, which is why we write about so many different things. We think many people–maybe most–approach art with a similarly wide-ranging appreciation. By writing each day about our own experiences as consumers and critics, we hope to create a meeting place in cyberspace for arts lovers who are curious, adventurous, and unafraid of the unfamiliar.
I think that sums up my thinking, and Our Girl’s, fairly well. And I bet Tyler doesn’t really disagree with us, either.
UPDATE: Scroll up from Tyler’s original posting to see incoming responses from his other readers. See also Alex Ross:
I ask this, though: if the ideal critic writes about classical music and nothing but, where would you put G. B. Shaw? E. T. A. Hoffmann? Wagner? The writer who can encompass more than one realm is the one whose words will resonate longest. The best piece of music criticism I’ve read in a decade was Alan Hollinghurst’s TLS review of the Bayreuth Ring in 2000. Why? Because he didn’t write like a parochial expert; he wrote like the major novelist he is. In an ideal world, poets, presidents, painters, and priests would talk about music, and there would be no critics. We’re just filling the void….