Bad at Sports » art criticism

Hennessy Youngman Shoots Smack!

Claudine Isé — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 15:16:06 +0000

Who’s the most interesting art critic in the country right now? Nope, not Jerry Saltz. I might change my mind tomorrow, but today I’m pretty damn sure it’s Hennessy Youngman. Okay — Hennessy’s not actually an art critic. He’s not an art writer. He’s a thinker of Art Thoughtz who has described himself as “just an American nigga at the cross section of dissonant worlds, and I’m the chaos of those conflicting cultural spheres unresolved in all their wonderful madness.” His stuff takes the form of direct-address video monologues performed by Youngman himself, who sits in a white-walled “alabaster alcove” and proceeds to break down art world rhetoric into its constituent bullshit parts. Have a look at Hennessy’s latest, on Relational Aesthetics:

It’s a truly blissful feeling when someone says straight out loud what you’ve been thinking but were too cowed by your peers to say yourself, no? Youngman spreads this kind of bliss with each new episode of Art Thoughtz. But what he does is not exactly about speaking truth to power – it’s a bit more irony-laced than that. Check out this episode on Curators, for example. It’s pretty sexist (although the observation about Velma hair was frakkin’ brilliant), and I think Hennessey might be confusing, or at least conflating, curator with dealer here….

I love how in my YouTube stream, this episode is followed by a promotional interview with Rhizome executive director and New Museum curator Lauren Cornell (Free). This coincidental juxtaposition sums it up for me: at the same time that the young, blonde, attractive Cornell seems to exemplify the type of curator Youngman is caricaturing, she’s also one of the few out there who is actively thinking-through the social media practices that Hennessey himself is engaging. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cornell wanted to include Youngman in one of her next shows.

Point is, Hennessey Youngman is taking the piss out of everything and everyone; the layers of irony are too thick to fully pry apart and as a result we’re forced to assume a different posture, as it were, in our reception of Hennessy’s Thoughtz. If you read it straight, you’re going to get defensive or pissed off and thus totally miss the point, but if you think it all boils down either to comedy or simply an outsider’s attempt to take a giant shit on the art world, you’re not listening carefully enough. It’s one of those both/and kind of things that pushes us into areas that make us feel uncomfortable. And in my book, that is always a good thing.

Henessey is already something of an internet phenomenon, yet there’s surprisingly little out there about who this guy actually is, where he comes from, etc. I like that he’s a man of mystery and hasn’t yet been included in one of Ms. Cornell’s exhibitions. The dominant culture always manages to absorb its critics, though, so I don’t hold out much hope that he won’t be, sooner or later. I do know that in this interview Hennessy Youngman had the balls to respond to the question “Can you be successful if you’re a Muslim artist?” thusly:

Are you serious? Have you ever heard of this artist collective known as Al-Qaeda? They did this performance piece called 9-11. That was absolutely jaw dropping. They only performed it once, but luckily it was very well documented and can be seen pretty much anywhere on the internet. Highly recommended. Way better than anything them Fluxus or Dada motherfuckers could come up with.

So I’ll hold out just a little bit of hope that Hennessy never cleans up his act enough to grace the museum’s white walls.

New Guest Blogger: Thea Liberty Nichols

Guest Blogger — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:30:04 +0000

Our big thanks to Julia Hendrickson for last week’s superb series of posts on printmaking and print curators, Sonnenzimmer, Spudnik Press and Corbett vs. Dempsey. This week Thea Liberty Nichols, a Chicago-based arts writer and arts administrator, is guesting on the blog. Starting today, she’ll bring us a series of posts exploring issues in contemporary arts writing.

For these posts, Nichols conducted interviews with friends and colleagues, all of whom are either artists, art writers and/or art administrators and who shared their insight on the various forms their writing takes. They’ll talk about how they define their written work within the constellation of their expansive practices, and how writing can be a tool for expressing themselves and also engaging with others. Chicago folks will remember that Nichols recently organized a panel on the form and content of arts writing in conjunction with Nomadic Studio – an audio recording of that conversation will be available later this week, so check out Thea’s posts for the link when it becomes available.

Here’s the bio scoop on Ms. Nichols, the woman who I’ve always said has a name befitting a rockstar superhero fighting machine – which no doubt she is, in her spare time:

Thea Liberty Nichols is an arts administrator, independent curator and freelance writer. Formerly, she served as Director of 65GRAND gallery and Study Center Manager at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Presently, she works for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visiting Artists Program which selects, hosts and facilitates opportunities to engage with dozens of international contemporary artists via lectures and symposia.

If you want to comment on yesterday’s post….

Claudine Isé — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:55:59 +0000

I was wondering why I was getting some strange Facebook and Twitter friend/follower requests from the NYC-area….I’m sort of (okay a lot) embarrassed, but Jerry Saltz put a note responding to yesterday’s “Superstar” post on his Facebook page. Our blog doesn’t get tons of traffic, so when I write here I feel like it’s aimed directly at the ten or so people I know for sure actually read it. Suffice it to say, it was kind of a shock to see that Mr. Saltz had read it and responded (I learned of it via someone else’s Twitter). I appreciate that he took the time to do so. Now it is out there in a format where people can respond to it–and at least the people who participate in Saltz’s Facebook discussion don’t seem to be the troll type (I’m pretty sure). Dear God, though, many of them sure are the fawning type. One comment in particular made me laugh; it was something along the lines of, ‘maybe Claudine should actively post on Jerry’s wall for six months or so before commenting on what’s happening here!” Um….wait, wasn’t the importance of NOT doing just that pretty much the point I was trying to make, and the crux of James Panero’s New Criterion critique of Mr. Saltz’s Facebook exchanges too?? Plus, I would never get anything else done if I spend the next six months hanging out on Jerry Saltz’s page.

He really does seem like a nice guy though – but what the hell do I know? It’s a frakkin’ Facebook page, we all put on our best Faces there.

Anyway. I’m going to resist the temptation to get all defensive and just not say anything further. I don’t want this blog to become all about Jerry. But now y’all have chance to respond…if this is an issue you care about, that is.

Jerry Saltz: Superstar

Claudine Isé — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 20:57:48 +0000

(This one’s for Dmitry).

Okay, yeah, I know — to describe Jerry Saltz as a “superstar” as I just did is to engage in more than a bit of hyperbole. But when it comes to Jerry (since everyone seems to feel like they’re on a first-name basis with him, I guess I can be, too), “superstar” doesn’t seem all that off-the-mark, given Saltz’s relative media fame versus the utter obscurity within which most art writers/critics labor. This has always been the case, even in the days when art critics actually played a hand in shaping the discourse–and they haven’t done that in quite awhile. So, you know, we should be happy that there is at least one art critic famous enough to hobnob with Sarah Jessica Parker and her ilk. Jerry seems like a genial guy and a kind enough spirit and so personally, I don’t begrudge him his fame.

I was surprised, however, that Ben Davis (newly of Artinfo) didn’t mention Saltz at all in his column on the state of art criticism. Asserting that “art criticism isn’t dead, it’s just in eclipse,” Davis argued that

“If you had to name the major development in art discourse during the 2000s, it would undoubtedly be the ascent of “art news,” which has definitely replaced “art criticism” at the center of discussion. There’s been an enormous proliferation of writing about the art scene. Artforum.com’s “Scene and Herd” was founded in 2004. Artinfo.com, the publication I write for, was founded in 2005. And of course, there is the tremendous excitement generated by the art blogosphere, which draws its strength from attitude and outrage.”

Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City, who’s a pretty good examplar of the developments Davis is describing, didn’t seem to think much of Davis’ analysis. Responding to his post on her own blog, Johnson wrote,

“I feel like I’ve been reading about the problems of the 24 hour news cycle for fifteen years or more, and the problems are the same. Davis’s piece doesn’t bring much new to the table past what we already know: news is a large component of many blogs and websites — particularly the ones he’s worked for — and criticism isn’t doing that well.The trouble has less to do with news per se than the reality of publishing: it’s a volume industry and professionals need more time than we’re given to produce good work. But there are some ups to these downs, so I don’t believe it’s been as eclipsed as Davis thinks — it’s just not where he’s looking. Some of the best criticism on this blog appears in the comments section, and it’s no different for other blogs or even Facebook pages like that of Jerry Saltz.”

Johnson made good points. Like Saltz or hate Saltz–or rather, like/hate the style of critical engagement Saltz represents–you cannot ignore the behemoth that is the Saltz/Facebook/Social Media machine. His Facebook groupies, his TV stint as a judge on Work of Art, his “Ask a Critic” column for New York magazine–all of these represent fairly radical shifts in the relation between critic and audience. One that is more open, more “radically vulnerable,” as Saltz himself has so memorably put it, and one where, to some greater degree than before, the art critic must answer (and answer and answer and answer) to the statements he puts out there via his reviews and other published pieces.

The problem is that all of these radical shifts in the critic/audience relationship apply only to Jerry Saltz. Saltz hasn’t changed the state of art criticism one bit – he’s just upped his own name-recognition value within it. To be fair, Saltz has argued repeatedly that his own experiments with open-ended interactions with his readers, “friends,” and “fans” is something that can and should be duplicated by others. And that’s certainly true. It’s just that most art critics are way more boring than Saltz is and nobody really cares enough about what they have to say to want to have an ongoing conversation with them, virtual or otherwise.

James Panero, writing in the New Criterion, has described his own “Jerry Saltz problem.” To my mind, Panero’s critique is the most persuasive I’ve yet read, though I could have done without some of his prose, which seemed to border on jealous personal attack. I think this is the strongest section of Panero’s argument:

Another problem with Saltz’s “accidental criticism” is that he has not leveled the playing field at all. He has instead flipped the traditional critic’s role from peripheral character to central actor. His comment writers, many of them wayward artists, are now the critics, while he has become the new art star around which they circulate. Jerry Saltz has become “Jerry Saltz,” a socially networked performance piece of art criticism. His online work is not unlike the performance art of Tino Sehgal, who took over the objectless Guggenheim rotunda earlier this year to ask questions like “What is progress?”

The lure of interactive performance art is that it shares the stage equally with the viewer. Marina Abramovic’s staring contest at moma became a sensation because it felt like we were the art, just as online comments make us all feel like we are the writers, or through Facebook we have 5,000 “Friends.” Following Andy Warhol’s dictum that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” and Joseph Beuys’s pronouncement that “everyone is an artist,” Saltz has wondered “if all of our interconnectivity and social networking also made everyone a critic.” But this fame game can become a pyramid scheme. In exchange for the brief rush of recognition that you might feel sitting across from Abramovic or posting to Saltz’s Facebook page, you grant them much more than their fifteen minutes. You end up ultimately diminished—another brick in a 250,000-word wall—while adding to their cumulative luster. You “need to partake of the blood of others to grow,” Saltz writes. And he should know.

(Oof! That last line had to hurt, didn’t it?).

I find the notion of the critic-as-performer to be a really interesting one. I’ve always been an advocate for a criticism that incorporates the subjectivity of the writer into the form and content of the critique, in certain appropriate contexts. Jerry Saltz now does this in every context, and that’s no doubt why many observers have grown weary of him. It’s too much Jerry. In the same way that Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and, ugh, even Sarah Jessica Parker can’t be considered real actors anymore–they’re merely celebrities, whose every new role offers a new format in which to play themselves–Jerry Saltz has become a celebrity critic who’s finding it difficult to talk about anything but himself, even when he truly does want to be talking only about art.

The Art Critique: Its History, Theories, and Practices Panel at The New School

Claudine Isé — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:00:17 +0000

I’m off this week on vacay to sunny Sarasota, Fl., hometown of the Ringling circus and Pee-Wee Herman, too. Someday, there will be a museum dedicated to Pee Wee, and its curators will write sober wall text on the semiotics of the Big Shoe Dance and the erotics of chairy. But not today. Today, I bring you this video, which hopefully will not feel too much like a homework assignment. I personally was psyched to find it, anyway. Over the weekend, that ol’ leftie-pinko group the Platypus Affiliated Society sponsored an all-day conference called What Is Critique? Two School of the Art Institute critical-types, James Elkins and Chris Cutrone, were on panels, and though the ensuing discussions were predictably jargon-ridden, they were also pretty meaty. How do I know this? The organizers were nice enough to put the second of the panels on U-Stream, which I’ve embedded for your link-free viewing pleasure directly below. Enjoy. A brief description of the event follows.

What is Critique? is an all day symposium that consists of panel discussions with artists, critics, teachers, and students city-wide that investigates the role that art critiques and criticism play in art production. The first half of the day will focus on the nature and function of art critiques as a form criticism and pedagogy. The latter part of the day will be a panel discussion addressing the relationship between critical theory, art production and art reception.

Participants include Jay Bernstein, Tom Butter, Chris Cutrone, Simone Douglas, James Elkins, Lydia Goehr, Gregg Horowitz, and more.

Notes on the Studio, from a Visitor’s Perspective

Claudine Isé — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:51:57 +0000

I’m always really pleased but also sort of baffled, too, when an artist invites me over for a studio visit. Once, when I had an institutional career, it was pretty obvious why an artist would want me in his or her studio, and what the stakes were: at minimum, the promise to ‘keep them in mind’ for some vague something in the future, and the best outcome, definitive inclusion in an upcoming exhibition I was planning. Now, not so much. I don’t have anything to offer an artist other than my words, so I’m all the more touched when they make the effort to invite me over.

This morning I was musing about the different forms of engagement that a studio visit versus an art review or some other type of written assessment represent. For me, not for the artist. I can’t speak for the artist. Which is why I think that studio visits are such charged experiences for me. I have to warm up for them – not by reading up on the artist’s work or anything (although I guess that would be nice, huh?)—but by getting into a certain kind of flexible brain state of mind. I have to start stripping away at some self-protecting and thus extremely comfy walls around myself, and that takes work.

Studio visits require me to be even more open and in-the-moment and attuned to the kinds of all-body awareness that every instance of looking at art requires, but since I’m also being watched by someone else and engaging in a conversation with them, I need to be equally open to the experience of radical vulnerability. When I write, I’m alone, and I can compose and then revise my opinions until I think they’re ready, or ready enough, for public viewing. When I’m in the studio, face to face with an artist, I don’t have the luxury of crafting my words. Since I almost always have no idea what I’m going to see when I get there, a studio visit means I’m going to have to think on my feet. But since I don’t really believe that an artwork has an essential “meaning”, only meanings (and, old-fashioned though it now may be, I retain much suspicion about the whole authorial intent thing too), I also have to be willing to say lots of things that, were I writing about this work instead of talking about it, I would have eventually come to erase or re-word or recalibrate.

The most intimidating thing about studio visits for me is that sometimes, the artist seems to be expecting me to respond to something on the spot. It takes me days to write an art review, days of slapping little black symbols onto white space (because that’s how most of us write now—I don’t inscribe my thoughts with pens and paper, it feels more like conjuring: I think, my brain makes my fingers jiggle and jerk, tiny words appear on the big, blindingly white screen before me, I look at those words and sit back and try to figure out if they work. If they do the work they are supposed to do. And if one or more of those words doesn’t, if it’s being stubborn or recalcitrant, I need to sit back somehow and figure out why not, why isn’t that word saying what it’s supposed to, god dammit, is it because it’s really supposed to be this, not that, or maybe it’s more like that, not this?

From that place, for me, meaning arrives. If I’m lucky. Sometimes, pretty rarely now but still sometimes, I am not so lucky, and everything falls apart.

Things are always falling apart in the studio, though, and that’s what I find so exciting and energizing about engaging with artists and their work in that space. Conversations can flow between the artist and myself as if we were old friends, even though we’re not; they can also be halting or spurting or circuitous and even more meaningful because of that. Sometimes there’s that panicky feeling you get when it sounds like you’re engaging in a conversation, one where we think that we understand what the other person is saying, and vice-versa, but then you start to realize that perhaps this is not at all what is happening, that you’re actually speaking two different languages that sound alike but are, in fact, nothing alike.

In the artist’s studio, I have to be willing to grope for words and say the wrong thing and/or be misinterpreted and just generally come off as totally stupid – and hey, let’s face it, not just to look stupid, but to actually reveal myself as the stupid human being that I am. This is easy to do but hard to accept. I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that I have managed to be stupid successfully, over and over, actually pretty much every time I have visited an artist’s studio. I think that’s something. Maybe it’s everything. Right?

Dana DeGiulio, 2010. *Stolen from the artist's website.

Karl Haendel. Double Scribble #5, 2008. Pencil on paper.

Martin Creed. Work No. 340. 2004.

Nomadic Studio’s “Form and Content of Writing” Panel at DePaul University Tomorrow Night!

Claudine Isé — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:01:44 +0000

Hello again – I’m back with another quick plug for y’all. Tomorrow night, Chicago arts writer/administrator/curator Thea Liberty Nichols has organized a panel on the “form and content” of arts writing as part of Nomadic Studio, which is presented at DePaul University Museum and organized by the Stockyard Institute for the yearlong collaborative Studio Chicago project….jesus I can’t keep up with it all. Anyway…here is the pertinent who, what, whys and whens of this particular panel, which I think should be really interesting and if it isn’t I will be partly to blame because I will be on it, along with Patrice Connolly, Abraham Ritchie, Bert Stabler and the aforementioned Ms. Nichols, who IMHO has the one of the best names in the world.

Come see us discuss, and participate in the discussion! Also, please check out the whole slate of programs that are part of Nomadic Studio at the Stockyard Institute! And you can read more about the Nomadic Studio project on ArtSlant, right here.

6-8pm –Thursday, September 23rd

DePaul University Art Museum; 2350 N. Kenmore Ave., Chicago IL 60614 | 773-325-7506 | Directions |

Form and Content of Writing w/ Thea Liberty Nichols, Patrice Connolly, Claudine Ise, Abraham Ritchie and Bert Stabler

Panelists will engage in a casual discussion that examines the form (newsprint, published monographs, online journals or blogs) and content (criticism, interviews, exhibition reviews, press releases or scholarly essays) of their writing. Their individual practices, including the texts that inform and inspire them, will be examined alongside the colleagues and organizations with which they collaborate. In conjunction with Studio Chicago, the ways in which their studio environment, and indeed the city itself, contextualizes their practice will also be explored.

Abraham Ritchie is a writer as well as the Editor for ArtSlant: Chicago, the creator and administrator of The Chicago Art Blog on the ChicagoNow network and WordPress, and also writes for NewCity. He has previously written about art for Madison Newspapers, Inc.

Thea Liberty Nichols is an arts administrator, independent curator, and writer who lives and works in Chicago. Along with managing Intuits Study Center, she also acts as Co-Director of 65GRAND

Patrice Connelly is the Curatorial Associate for BMO Financial Group’s Corporate Art Collection where she crafts catalog texts describing and contextualizing the art works in their holdings. She has been contributing freelance art exhibition reviews to Newcity since 2008.

Bert Stabler is a teacher, writer, curator, and artist living in Chicago. He feeds on the living.

Claudine Isé has worked in the field of contemporary art as a curator and writer. Isé was Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and an art critic for the Los Angeles Times. She currently writes for artforum.com, art:21 blog, ARTnews, New City, and badatsports.com.

Hot (okay maybe only lukewarm at the moment) Topic Alert: the Crisis in Art Criticism

Claudine Isé — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:05:01 +0000

This week New City published an essay by its arts editor Jason Foumberg on the state of art criticism amidst the rise of blogging, online websites, and other forms of interactive media titled The State of the (Visual) Art. I didn’t read this as a piece on the status of art criticism in Chicago per se, as I think some may have, but rather as about the difficulties of defining (much less practicing) this thing called ‘criticism’ at all in online, social-media driven contexts. Foumberg’s essay is part of a larger series of articles at New City that are exploring the state of criticism in the age of Yelp!, Amazon book reviews, and other online social feedback devices. The other pieces can be found here, here, and here (this last one is about Yolp!, a Jersey Shore parody of Yelp that’s really funny). The comments that ensue are interesting, but there aren’t a lot of them and there’s not too much back-and-forth…yet. But today Christopher sent me a link to Michael S. Thomas’ blog Stagnant Vowels, in which he’s posted a response, of a sort, to the New City article, which immediately bumped Mr. Foumberg’s piece up to “hot topic” status in my mind. (Thomas’ response might itself almost qualify as a good old-fashioned Rant, and as I’ve said before, I am to rants as a moth is to a flame….Jason, in contrast, doesn’t rant: he muses.).

In his post, Mr. Thomas, who was the director of the well-respected and now defunct Dogmatic Gallery in Chicago, calls us out over here at Bad at Sports for basically being slutty opinion mongers on a par with t.v. talk show pundits. He writes:

“The flux or crisis isn’t with experts or authority per say, its in the distribution of opinion as though it were reasoned discourse. It’s in the ongoing creation of model’s for the dissemination of hyperbole without rational checks or balances. Whether it’s Glenn Beck, or Jon Stewart, or Bad at Sports these models can do much to obfuscate legitimate dialogue if not entirely cripple its formation.”

I have to assume he’s talking about our blog in particular, as the podcast’s one-on-one interview format is pretty much the antithesis of opinion journalism. But I want to know — where is all this ‘legitimate dialogue’ (emphasis on the word ‘legitimate’) that we in particular are guilty of obfuscating? Tell me where it’s happening, and I’ll gladly get the hell out of its way!

In all seriousness, though, I don’t at all disagree with Thomas on his larger point. In fact I think most of his post hits it right on the mark, particularly in his assessment that lack of editorial oversight might be precisely what makes online art criticism so problematic (I’m paraphrasing his argument, but that’s what I took away from it). Thomas finds fault with the recently launched Chicago Art Magazine for precisely these reasons, and although I shall remain neutral on the matter of his specific target, I tend to agree with many of the larger arguments he’s making. Such as this one:

“But I would argue that without editorial oversight or a progressive long term vision for growth, an endeavor such as this one is hopelessly mired. After all criticism and opinion are not the same. Amateur criticism is little more than the ALL-CAPS and bold fonts version of a comment roll, and paying said amateur is in no way a transformation of this reality. So what makes a misinformed critic not, a knowledgeable and, or an opinionated amateur? Time, energy, condensed thoughts, research, an apishly large library surrounded by lovely black and white photographs of water fowl, and other bric-a-brac? No its constancy and persistence in the pursuit of understanding and conveying the qualities that define the arcane and metaphorical reality of objects and their surroundings.”

The fact is, art writers need editors. Scratch that — ALL writers need editors. Nowadays, due to all of those economic reasons of which we’re all well aware, writing for a publication that actually employs an editor to analyze your work before it’s posted/published has become a luxury that only the luckiest of us is afforded from time to time. On a purely pragmatic level, writers need editors to ensure quality of output. We need copy-editors to fact-check us and remind us about the proper usage of its and it’s. Editors to keep us from veering into self-indulgence and unsubstantiated argumentation. And yes, editors to help keep our word count to a reasonable, readerly length. On a content level, Thomas’ argument for having a progressive long-term vision is also relevant, although he’s a little too vague on this point – does a ‘progressive long term vision’ imply some sort of overarching ideological or political stance with regards to the art in question (i.e. ‘we are pro-social practices, suspicious of art objects for sale,’ or some such?)? Some form of group-think? Or does it simply mean establishing a set of critical guidelines and standards for approaching a work of art (guidelines which would, themselves, be inherently open to critique?).

I think we also need to remember that art blogs — which are the context in which much of the ‘unsubstantiated commentary’ type of arts writing takes place — are an altogether different beast from newspapers, magazines, or art journals. From their inception blogs have always been about commentary derived from a personal standpoint (which is why Museum and institutional blogs are often so boring to read). It’s not really fair to criticize art bloggers for their lack of objectivity, or for not holding to certain journalistic or critical standards. Now, websites that self-consciously follow the model of a magazine or newspaper are a different story.

Oops. My own internal editor just told me it’s time to shut up now. Just go on over and read, and rant about (or maybe just muse on) the above-linked posts. ‘Nuff said.

Forget the Olympics. What the Second City Really Needs is First-Class Art News

Claudine Isé — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:31:26 +0000

Last week was, by many accounts, a humiliating one for Chicago, ending as it did with the announcement that the Second City had been knocked out of contention for the much-coveted 2016 Olympics–in the first round, no less. Given that Chicago had already beaten out numerous other international contenders to reach the final four in the first place I don’t exactly see why it’s considered such a crushing embarrassment to have come in fourth but, whatever…I have no dog in that fight. It’s probably just one of the many “Chicago things” that I’ll never fully understand. As an art person, however, I’m far more interested in looking at the blows to civic pride that were delivered earlier last week in the wake of the Tribune’s story on the positive public reaction to J. Seward Johnson Jr.’s outdoor sculpture “God Bless America.” Yeah, you know the one. This one:

Written by Trib reporter Steve Johnson, the article was framed by this headline: “What does popularity of God Bless America sculpture say about public art in Chicago?” This, I think, was precisely the wrong boldfaced header to attach to an article about a sculpture that has been borrowed from the Sculpture Foundation and is not, in fact, meant to be a permanent part of the city’s landscape of public art. Although the Trib’s article does make passing reference to this fact, the headline seems to imply that “God Bless America” somehow holds similar status as the Picasso, Calder or Kapoor pieces do in the city’s world-class lineup of public art.

For better or worse, Steve Johnson’s story gained a degree of national attention, not as much from Chicago’s art crowd as from arts writers elsewhere in the country. On September 30th the L.A. Times’ chief art critic Christopher Knight linked to the Trib article on his Twitter feed with the comment: “Is J. Seward Johnson trying to be America’s Worst Artist?” A few days later Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City wrote a post titled “Bad Public Art Finds Audience in Chicago” containing a point-by-point takedown of Steve Johnson’s main arguments, which he set up as follows:

“Critics can wag fingers at it — and some do — but God Bless America meets some of the fundamental tests of public art. It is noticed, it is appreciated, and, in many cases, it provokes reflection on what makes an art work original.”

I drove by “God Bless America” last week. Parking is monstrous downtown so I couldn’t stop to get out and walk around it, which is too bad, since public art–like all art–needs to be experienced in situ in order to be fully understood and appreciated. Nevertheless, I can’t offer any viable counter-arguments to Knight and Paddy Johnson’s assertions that the sculpture makes for some pretty bad art. Sure, I could attempt some sort of cultural studies-style analysis of how people actually relate and respond to the sculpture in real life (a more populist form of which Steve Johnson was basically attempting in his Trib article) but my heart wouldn’t be in it. Knight’s snarky question was a valid one, and Art Fag City’s post was in keeping with its editor’s ongoing deconstructions of the more egregious myths about contemporary art and its reception–the Trib’s article, sadly, providing a prime example of just the sort of superficial arguments that so often inform those myths.

As far as I know the Trib’s Steve Johnson isn’t an art critic or an arts journalist. He’s a thoughtful and smart culture reporter who was interested in the popular reaction to a popular work of public art in his city. My beef certainly isn’t with Mr. Johnson or with the quality of the article he wrote. It’s with the fact that Johnson’s was one of the rare “news” stories about art in Chicago that the Trib has published over the past few months. And I straight-up disagree with that particular choice of story.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, even though I’m not saying anything everyone who lives here doesn’t already know: it’s a damn shame that a city of the size and cultural prominence of Chicago does not have a national voice for its art scene, a newspaper art critic of the stature of Christopher Knight who could have written about Seward’s sculpture from a critically informed art historical viewpoint as well as the more straightforwardly populist one put forth by the Trib (or, better yet, would have chosen not to make this into a story at all, given that there’s nothing particularly timely or newsworthy about it).

This is not a city of people who know nothing about art and architecture, nor do Chicagoans evince a “fear” of the rigorous discourse that often accompanies discussion about those subjects. So why does the Trib cover art as if it its readership needs hand-holding and spoon-feeding via articles that essentially give us permission to look no further than a work of public art’s most spectacular effects?

Chicago needs at least one real art journalist with a national platform to represent this city to the rest of the country, if not the world (and by “art” here I mean fine art, not theater, dance, music, etc. if that’s not already obvious). Clearly, other arts writers across the country are still paying attention to the Trib’s art coverage and looking specifically (and exclusively) to that paper for news and insight into Chicago’s art scene and its art public. The problem is that the Trib is relying on reporters who have no in-depth art backgrounds to cover art news in this city–no dog in the fight, as it were–and frankly I find the effects of this to be somewhat humiliating.

Chicago needs a high-profile newspaper writer who is both a critic of and an advocate for the city’s art; not a booster but a person who will draw attention to bad decisions and art world folly while at the same time placing new developments within a larger cultural and historical context. Chicago’s art bloggers simply aren’t able to bear that responsibility, not because of a lack of talent but from a serious lack of time, money and resources. My advice to the Trib: get freelancer Lori Waxman on staff and make her a reporter or something–I don’t fucking care, but Chicago needs to cultivate its own Chrisopher Knight some way or another. Until we do, we risk letting writers from other cities steer the discourse on Chicago art. We owe it to ourselves not to let that continue.

Lori Waxman Newest Art Critic for the Chicago Tribune!

Claudine Isé — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:42:10 +0000

Breaking news: Art Criticism lives on at the Chicago Tribune! Yes, you heard that right, and Bad at Sports‘ own longtime contributor Lori Waxman (who reviewed several Chicago-area shows for last week’s big #200 podcast) is leading the way as the Trib’s new freelance art critic. It is with great pleasure and hearts swelling with pride that we post links to her first two reviews, here and here. You can also listen to an interview with Lori, and learn more about her project “The 60 Word a Minute Art Critic,” on an episode of Studio 360 here. Go Lori!

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