February 20, 2004
Dale Peck makes a good point
Dale Peck, who has garnered too much attention for his "hatchet job" reviewing style, is apparently ready to publish his last negative review. It will appear in the April/May issue of maisonneuve, though of course its introduction is posted online now to drum up publicity. His popularity (or infamy) has allowed him the column space to consider the role of the critic at length in each of recently published reviews, and this one is no exception. But he makes a good point when discussing overly close analysis:
Exegesis at this level is less interpretation than parallel narrative, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if it expands a text’s impact or diffuses it through too many tangential, anachronistic, esoteric associations. Or, to put it another way, whenever I see a critic taking such liberties I’m not sure if I’m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I’m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humor of a Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art—an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves—cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance would seem, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humor is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal.
I'm not familiar with Paglia's writing, and would put Hickey in a different category. To Koestenbaum I would add Bruce Hainley, Dennis Cooper, and David Rimanelli. My response to their art criticism exactly mirrors Peck's: I often laugh, I roll my eyes at unnecessarily obscure references, and then manage to forget content while remembering form. Hainley's January 2004 Artforum article on Sue de Beer is a case in point: I do not remember his main argument(s), but do remember that a parenthetical aside mentions something about how an art world that gives birth to her type of video art might parallel the shift from Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games to interactive computer games. When that's all you remember about a three thousand word article, it becomes pretty easy to dismiss. So I often chalk it up to some kind of gay ecstatic scribble that my straight mind isn't privy to, wherein the critic takes a very camp approach to crafting sentences. Is this an unfair judgement? I can't tell, but I can't shake it either...
(Link to maisonneuve article first seen at MaudNewton.com.)