Simpleposie wants to know: "Does the 'elitism of art theory and criticism' need remedy-ing? What kind of tincture would you suggest?"

No, it doesn't. Elitism is a funny word, regularly thrown around by people who seem confused about its meaning. Art is unusual in that it can be (might be, may be, has been) made by, seen by, and interpreted by -- in Thierry de Duve's words -- "anyone and everyone." But it does not follow that every work of art is (or should be) equally accessable to everyone. There is a world of difference betweeen a Stephen Prina installation and a Monet landscape, beginning with the extent to which the work's formal properties have percolated through culture. I would like to be able to buy a calendar whose March is a Prina monochrome and not a Monet sea-stack, but that's personal subjective taste, and Monet has an approximately one hundred year head start on diffusing into culture-at-large.

Works like Prina's, or Mike Kelley's, because of the relatively complicated critical premises behind them, will attract similarly complex criticism. And I don't think that writing complexly about art -- using jargon, using theory -- is intrinsically a negative act. We don't require writing on theoretical physics to be immediately comprehensible to a general audience. If I study a scholarly article on physics, I realize that there is a certain amount of learning I have to do in order to understand the specialized technical language of the discipline. I realize that the article may refer to concepts and processes that I, with my funny art- and pop-culture-oriented brain, may never be able to process. And I'm fine with that. If I really feel I'm missing out on something, I might choose to study physics in a more systematic way, or turn to a "popular interpreter" of physics, like Richard Feynman, or Richard Dawkins, or Stephen Hawking, three authors who have all built careers out of being plain-language interpreters of high-end scientific writing for non-scientists like me. And again, I'm fine with that; I don't immediately go off crying about the "elitism" of physics, or science in general, & etc.

I think the expectation that art, and art writing, be immediately comprensible to everyone and anyone is a red herring. This is not a requirement made of any other discipline -- not literature, nor music, and definitely not the hard sciences. I think this expectation is typically advanced by writers and artists who want to dissolve art into life, into social or political praxis. I'm not negative about this idea (no Beuys without it, no El Lissitsky, definitely no Andrea Fraser or Center For Land Use Interpretation), but I definitely just see it as one of many choices on the art menu. Many proponents of sociopolitical-praxis art ("relational aesthetics"?) seem to want a clear-cut choice between their "progressive" aesthetic politics and the "conservative" politics of traditional art and aesthetic history. This kind of thinking strikes me as historically blinkered and reactionary. It's a shrill, reductive process I want no part of. The choice isn't between Cezanne and Beuys, or Cezanne and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Even the notion of a single "choice" is bizarre. All of these options are open and available for use; each inflects each another.

(Gloomily re-edited, mid-afternoon, for clarity & length)

- posted by cjb @ 9:07 AM