New York Times art critic Roberta Smith is at the Venice Biennale this week, and the paper has launched an interactive web feature for the trip called, not surprisingly, “Everyone’s a Critic.”
It’s rather fun to see, even if it doesn’t quite work as well as it should — at least not on my computer. (It’s organized as a book, and you turn pages by clicking on the arrow below the book.)
The deal is this: Smith is posting a picture and short commentary about works in Venice “that stuck with me.” Then, she challenges readers, “take a look, see what you think, and add your own impression” in, here’s the catch, “six words.” Readers can click on words in her commentary or add their own. For example, so far 495 readers (as of Monday night) have left comments on Maurizio Cattelan’s We (left). You can either read all the comments, or take a look at the most common words — which in this case include “bed, dead, death, looking, beautiful, enigmatic, paralyzed, crisis…” etc.
Smith has chosen six works so far, and it looks as if there will be four more.
I’m not sure what this proves — I didn’t find the commenters’ word choices enlightening — but it’s all part of the trend to engage people with interactivity, an attempt to get more people to view contemporary art, and try to understand it. Smith’s choices, so far, haven’t made the task easy. But who knows, it may “work.” And as an aside, it may well prove how difficult it is to write about contemporary art in an intelligent way.