Editor's Message Guest Critic
To Whom It Must Concern
Dear Brooklyn Rail Art Writers,
I’m sure that sometimes you’ve asked: “Who am I writing for?” The answer may have been: for the artist, for the “viewing public,” for curious collectors, for posterity, for yourself (perhaps in order to understand something otherwise ungraspable about the work). But what happens if you ask: “Who am I writing to?” What happens if the response to the work of art, the exhibition, the life of the artist, comes in the form of a letter? Does something else, another kind of art criticism, more intimate, or maybe more formal, more casual, or maybe more urgent, come into play?
We know that some of the most memorable writings on art have taken the form of letters, including, to name a few examples, Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Cézanne-inspired missives to Clara Westhoff, and the letters Samuel Beckett sent to Georges Duthuit in the late 1940s about the paintings of Bram van Velde (available in the recently published second volume of Beckett’s correspondence). On March 2, 1949, after suggesting it’s time they shift from the formal vous to the familiar tu (their correspondence is in French), Beckett declares, “Your lovely letter this morning. It pushes me out into too many currents for me to worry about how I swim.” He then launches into a vivid account of van Velde’s art that, almost without one noticing, becomes a compact chronicle of Beckett’s own writerly struggles. This letter, of which we have only a fragment, is as powerful as the best pages of Beckett’s novels, and reading it one can sense how energized Beckett is by having found such a deeply sympathetic correspondent.
The theme for this edition of ARTSEEN is, thus, not a theme but a form: the letter—a letter addressed perhaps to an artist, living or dead, but, just as plausibly, to anyone else. The occasion of the letter can be an exhibition you have just seen, or maybe the fact that there is something you have always wanted to say to someone about some work of art. Write not for any general reader but to a specific addressee, and, with luck, your letter will arrive at its destination.
Perhaps the most important difference between a conventional exhibition review and a “letter review” is that a letter implies a response, or at least the hope for an answer; it is not the last word on a subject, but the opening of a dialogue.
Lately, as an art critic it has, at times, seemed hard to know who you are writing for, hard to visualize the audience that is, you hope, engaged by your writing. And if you don’t know who your readers are, it’s hard to instigate a productive conversation with them. My desire with this experiment is to stress the necessary bond between writers and readers, and to encourage direct relationships between potential correspondents not via fleeting, truncated messages within a commercialized network of “friends” but through an altogether different kind of posting. As Paul Chan has recently observed (in a piece about his staging of Beckett’s Godot in New Orleans), “a voice that desires a reply sounds different than an echo that wants attention.”
Ever yours,
Raphael Rubinstein
Contributor
Raphael RubinsteinRaphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Lois Dodd: Natural Order
By David WhelanMAY 2023 | ArtSeen
In Lois Dodds comprehensive exhibition Natural Order, now on view at the Bruce Museum, the artists unique approach to observation is laid bare. Dodds paintings of modest subjects read like field notes, recording her perception of the immediate environment. The frenetic energy and physicality of her work reminds us that making sense of the world is not an instant phenomenon.

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South
By TK SmithJUNE 2022 | Art Books
As a historian of the American South, Gilmore is positioned to offer a historical analysis of Beardens life within a larger American context, expanding upon the work previously done by art historians, curators, and Bearden himself. A promising transdisciplinary endeavor, it fails to complicate what is widely known of the artists life.
Alejandro Contreras: In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?!
By Caitlin AnklamJULY/AUG 2023 | ArtSeen
Alejandro Contrerass In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?! at the ELM Foundation, his first solo exhibition in New York, is viscerally overwhelming. The sheer amount of material is difficult to process. Installation view: Alejandro Contreras: In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?!, The Boiler at ELM Foundation, Brooklyn, 2023. Courtesy the artist and The Boiler.
Artist Worlds and Indigenous Cultures: How Expanding Notions of Intellectual Property are Changing the Game
By Alana KushnirSEPT 2023 | Critics Page
The number of artistic projects which engage with simulated realities, immersive story-telling, and virtual world-building has surged over the past few years.1 With this growth has come an increase in the types of legal complexities of artist-led world-building projects. One complexity that hasnt received much airtime to date is how Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) and cultural lore can be celebrated in, or conflict with, such projects.