I know I didn't get much material up on the page this week, and I know that a few people are and have been waiting patiently for a few reviews. (Thanks.) I've come down with something like writer's block. Granted, that's not an affliction that interferes with blogging, but reviews are formal and are therefore composed in Microsoft Word, you see, where these types of germs thrive in the damp, dark crevices of the formatting palette. I'm sure I'll iron it out over the weekend. But, but, at least I haven't written anything resembling what New Republic art critic Jed Perl wrote about Gerhard Richter in 2001:
Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter. His retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art until May, is a colossal bummer–a hymn to deracination, a visual moan. This seventy-year-old artist works in paint on canvas, but what he sends out into the world are not paintings so much as they are Neo-Dadaist puzzles engineered to inspire philosophical flights of fancy among art professionals who are more interested in massaging their world-weary minds than in using their jet-lagged eyes. [emphasis added]Which he then repeated as the Richter show toured. Can you imagine, first of all, having the gall to dismiss a minor master such as Richter? Prefer him or not, Richter is simply too dominant to be called "bullshit," unless you have the credibility to spend to call the entirety of the art world into question. I remember when Perl junked John Currin—I was listening, I was nodding along, okay, Currin can certainly be didactic—but when Philip Guston ended up as collateral damage in that thrashing review, I realized I'd been led too far off the reservation. Something about a "wholesale derangement of values." I think it's the purposefully counterintuitive take that has to mind the needle on the values compass. J. Seward Johnson, Jr. is bullshit. Richter's only bullshit to someone who knows he really isn't.
And what about repeating the review for different cities? "New York San Fran, don't put up with Richter's bullshit!" Maybe this is done more often than I realize, but I don't know that reviews are typically repeated in a single publication. (I'd hate to have my office broadcasting my mistakes like that.)
I believe you can read Perl's entire article on Richter here. As for his article on Currin, Tyler wrote the funniest response to it, one that sums up what's wrong with Perl brilliantly. It was reading that post that made me think I had to get a site of my own. One could go on, but the thing about Perl that bugs me the most, and which Tyler touches on, is his attitude that anyone who thinks different from him is some sort of art-hating moron. Not an unusual attitude in an art critic, I suppose, but he carries to a fairly vicious extreme - without having a very generous sensibility toward art itself that might help compensate for it.
Posted by: Miguel Sánchez at March 27, 2005 3:52 PMRichter is excellent, maybe my favorite painting today. I'm no expert, but his series on the Baader-Meinhof gang was chilling.
Posted by: Rob W at March 28, 2005 10:22 AMAt the time, I thought Perl's piece on Richter was well stated. The retrospective had opened in Chicago, where I was in art school. I can't remember any painters in my circle finding the show to be very moving. His work was very bland (or blandiose, rather). Richter is one of the artists who makes art historians, critics, and wanna-be theorists salivate, as everything sticks. Among art history students, he was universally loved. Working with him is easy. He does for almost any writer what Warhol's Brillo Box did for Danto, just a vehicle to talk smart.
I've since then warmed up to Richter. Saw the show again at the Hirshhorn and found it more interesting. I thought of him more as an artist than a "painter" and chose not to think of his hype at all. I am slowly starting to appreciate him as a painter. We'll see where I am in a year or two.
Posted by: Dick Puddings at March 29, 2005 12:01 AM