Several folks email or drop into the shop to ask why I'm "not writing art criticism any more." So here's a few paragraphs from the Rebecca Dart essay which pertain less to Rebecca specifically and more to that slippery package called aesthetics:

"I personally believe that 'formalism' doesn’t exist in art as such, and that this term doesn’t really have any meaning, outside of being handy to throw around as a diss or a put-down. But I also believe, as did Clement Greenberg, who for all his failings still remains for me the single most important art critic of the 20th century, that only form (called 'convention' in his late Seminars (short, philosophical essays which he published in publications like Arts magazine and Studio International) provides specific, verifiable means of describing art.

As Greenberg says at the beginning of Seminar 6, 'Formalizing art means making aesthetic experience communicable: objectifying it, making it public, instead of keeping it private or solipsistic as happens with most aesthetic experience. For aesthetic experience to be communicated it has to be submitted to conventions – or "forms" if you like – just as language does if it’s to be understood by more than one person.'

So, in place of private, and necessarily subjective statements, good criticism offers descriptions of specific, verifiable aspects of art objects. This painting is mostly blue. This sculpture consists of a stuffed goat, and a rubber tire, and oil paint, and some other stuff. There are nine panels on this page. And the specificity of this language, given plainly and directly and consequently available to almost everyone in ways in which the more specialized, technical languages of the applied sciences -- electrical engineering, say, or medicine, or quantum physics -- aren’t, is a way of gesturing toward, pointing at or otherwise denoting aspects of artworks which convince us, individually, of their 'quality.'

The point of so-called 'formal' analysis isn’t to smother artworks under a blanket of language or theory, but to concretize those aspects of them that appeal to us or move us, so that we can use these features as the basis for discussing why they move us in the ways that they do, or to argue that one thing is better than another. I once heard this process described as 'complicating love with judgement,' a phrase that still appeals to me."
- posted by cjb @ 10:24 PM