The Brooklyn Rail

I was drawn to New York by the downtown poetry scene, which swirled around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. In 1968, I began to publish poems in The World, the Poetry Project’s magazine, and in the scene’s many other mags. During that year, I wrote make-believe versions of various things, including the short gallery reviews in the back of ARTnews. By the end of 1969, I was writing those reviews in earnest, though my “real” reviews weren’t all that different from my parodies. I had been invited to contribute to ARTnews by the poet John Ashbery, one of the magazine’s editors. Within a few years, I was publishing art criticism in Art International and Artforum, where I became a contributor in 1972, after a regime change installed John Coplans as the Editor-in-Chief.

Under the previous editor, Artforum was a fortress of the Minimalist and formalist dogmas that inspired snickers and outright guffaws from ARTnews writers. Coplans considered these dogmas oppressive, and the writers he recruited—Lawrence Alloway prominent among them—agreed with this happily uncompromising judgment. Though we vigorously disliked Minimalist dogma, we had reasons to find formalist orthodoxy even more repellant.

I objected to formalism chiefly because it fostered the notion that an art critic’s highest calling was to write the history of the present as it unfolded week by week in gallery exhibitions. Authentic history is a selective, carefully weighed account of past events and developments. Wielding a method that promoted the illusion of knowing how art must of necessity develop, the formalists felt no need to wait until the present became the past. They treated the present as if it were the past, a policy silly enough to ensure that just about all their pronouncements about the moment’s significant artists were wrong.

Formalism faded long ago, and in its heyday convinced only one wing of the New York art world. I am recalling it now because its blinkered rigidity showed me what art criticism should and shouldn’t do. It should not deploy a method designed to produce absolutist judgments about the value and meaning of works of art. In our time, we see variations of that method whenever critics impose dogmatic notions of politics or identity. The trouble with dogma in any era is that it has little to do with art and everything to do with the dogmatist’s efforts to establish a position of authority. What, then, should criticism do?

Making no claim to authority, it should alert us to an artwork’s possible meanings. I say possible meanings because every genuine work of art is an ambiguous field that means nothing much until our speculative grappling brings it to life. Having created a work, the artist invites us to create its significance, usually but not always guided by a sense of the artist’s intention. Meaning in art is collaborative and I have tried to write art criticism that renders me and my readers aware of our part in the collaboration.

Criticism of this sort is of little use to art world institutions, which attract audiences by telling them what artworks mean and which artists are major, which are second tier, and which can be safely neglected. I have never ranked artists, nor have I “explained” what their art means. Nonetheless, I have managed to sustain myself as a critic. Besides publishing lots of reviews and essays, I have taught at art schools and in the art departments of Hunter College and New York University. Over the decades, I have written monographs and historical studies. And I continue to do so. I am now working on a book about figurative painters, among them Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, and Nell Blaine, who were friends of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and other New York poets. My art criticism sustains me not only in practical ways but by keeping me aware of, alive to, the power of art to endow life with meaning it would not, in art’s absence, have.