[Second painting] One role of art is to voice the ineffable through allusion
and abstraction. In painting/sculpture I wish to evoke this essential function
through entanglement of intuition, nature, and constructions of time, history
and knowledge. In doing so I find myself absorbed by the awe and beauty
of the sublime.
[Third painting] Nature connects the interlocking knowledge passed from
generation to generation. Here forces of geological, ancestral, and histori-
cal time fuse into repetitions and cycles to be observed and understood. It
is in this delicate balance between creation and destruction—chaos and pat-
ter—disorder and order—that my work is centered.The pretentious artspeak of these students, as well as the meaningless
work it purports to explain, merely reflects those of their professors, and
of the artworld at large.
The Critics
Art critics now writing for general-interest periodicals are cut from the
same postmodernist cloth as the philosophers, historians, and professors
cited above. But unlike that of academics, their work is aimed at general
readers. Roberta Smith and Grace Glueck (now retired), both of the New
York Times, typify the breed. Smith once confided to readers that she cut
her “art-critical eye-teeth” on the dictum “If an artist says it’s art, it’s
art,” while Glueck declared that something is a work of art if it is
“intended as art, presented as such, and... judged to be art by those
qualified in such matters.”^30
The avant-garde monopoly of art criticism is starkly evident in the
results of a nationwide survey entitled “The Visual Arts Critic,” con-
ducted in 2002 by the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) at
Columbia University. Designed to assess arts coverage by general-inter-
est news publications, the survey queried 169 critics (writers whom the
public would view as “shapers of opinion on matters of visual art”) from
ninety-six daily newspapers, thirty-four alternative weeklies, and three
national newsmagazines, whose combined readership was estimated at
some sixty million. The findings prompted András Szántó, NAJP’s asso-
ciate director and author of the survey, to observe that the artworld is “a
cultural realm singularly lacking in precise boundaries and definitions”
and that this “singular situation” makes the job of the art critic more dif-
ficult owing to “the continuing proliferation of art of all kinds.” As he
further noted: “The once seemingly linear course of art history has
splintered off into a kaleidoscopic array of interdisciplinary experimen-
The Interminable Monopoly of the Avante-Garde 175