Editor's Message Guest Critic
Dove Sta Memoria
Any writer worth their salt knows how to pan someone or something. If they don’t let me direct them to Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective wherein every major composer from Beethoven to Berlioz to Bartók is summarily trashed with readable zest by a critic of their era. Or consider the put-down as practiced by Roberta Smith, who has made it her stock in trade if not her life’s work. Who else beside her predecessor at the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, has gotten such career mileage out of slamming artists, curators, and other critics or gained such rapt readership among the resentful and such a dubious reputation for being a “good writer” as these two peas-in-a-pod of the Great Gray Lady?
But there I go practicing that minor art myself.
“Doctor heal thyself,” you say. Indeed, any writer capable of genuinely rigorous judgment should know how to look in the mirror and train their sights on their own flaws, though few do. But as Aretha Franklin remarked in a recent tribute to Whitney Houston, when all is said and done, it’s the hits not the misses that count. She was right. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” redeems all the excesses of Houston’s uplifting, over the top hymns to love and self-love, just as Franklin’s own full-throttle saintly-to-sinful-and-back-again best makes one forget the most ill-chosen of her pop digressions, and enjoy the soulful underpinnings of those with a good hook and a good chorus. Indeed, the value of talking about creative weaknesses is not the “Gotcha!” pleasure it gives hostile commentators and rubbernecking fans of artistic spin-outs and pile-ups but the light it sheds on the creative strengths of those who really have them, those who go the distance.
For this issue of the Rail I have challenged colleagues to attempt the difficult task of bestowing just praise on art and artists that elicit their enthusiasm, admiration, even reverence. The risks entail undermining the positive things one wishes to say by choosing the wrong words, framing the issues in the wrong context, hitting the wrong emotional chord or register and, most damagingly, misranking them as a result of hedging one’s bets through misplaced caution or, indulging in hyperbole through unbridled zeal. Meanwhile, the cost to the critic of such miscalculations is to render him or herself vulnerable to counter attack without being fully committed to the position taken. The after life of such lapses can be truly embarrassing; being dogged by the bold record of an ambivalently held view or worse publically recanting an ostensibly firm conviction.
As a tuning fork for the exercise I offered two passages from the “Pisan Cantos” by Ezra Pound, a man possessed by rotten prejudices who was nonetheless among the most generous critics America has ever produced, “il miglior fabbro” as T.S. Eliot called him. Torn from the patchwork fabric of longer poems and repeated as a mantra without going back to the original, these citations are as follows:
“What thou lovest well remains,
The rest is dross”
“Nothing matters but the quality of the affection—
in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind
dove sta memoria”
Contributor
Robert Storr, March Art Editor
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Colonial Waterscapes: The Water Issue in Puerto Rico
River Rail Puerto Rico | River Rail
To fully grasp the current state, and the issue of water in general, we need to ponder the history of the waterscape in Puerto Rico and the changing social circumstances that have influenced its making, without losing sight of the role that both capitalism and colonialism have played in this process.

Within Global Isolation: Asian Artists in America
By Sahar KhraibaniJUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen
Within Global Isolation: Asian Artists in America is a virtual exhibition, organized by curators Han Hongzheng and Chandler Allen, and fueled by a spike in anti-Asian sentiments, xenophobia, and discrimination as a result of COVID-19.
Artists Space
By Nancy PrincenthalJUL-AUG 2020 | ArTonic
Shocking but true: Artists Space, essential model for a generation of feisty, funky, youth-driven nonprofits, is nearly half a century old. More surprising still, initially it depended entirely on government support, at a time when both the governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller) and the US president (Richard Nixon, newly re-elected) were Republicans. Promising to make up for a dearth of opportunity for young artists, Artists Spaces founders rounded some up and offered them the chance to call the shots, all on the states dime.

The Mirror Displaced: Artists Writing on Art
By Tom McGlynnJUNE 2020 | Editor's Message
Not all artists consider themselves writers too, let alone critics. The poet Alice Notley, in reviewing a new collection of poems by Edwin Denby in the St. Marks Poetry Project newsletter of 1976, prefaced her review (not quite a disclaimer nor a benediction) by stating, Poets cant write criticism because what they understand about a poet they adore is what they themselves do or would, it is visceraldeath to analyze? critics cant write criticism because they never are knowing.