August 9, 2005
1981 = 2005
Last week I dipped into Peter Schjeldahl's The Hydrogen Jukebox, a selection of his writings from 1978-1990. One paragraph in his first Village Voice column, published in January 1981, remains incredibly relevant twenty-four years later:
Beneath hip veneers, many journalistic art critics today are testy, defensive, and carping. This may be because they are beset from without by hordes of the recognition-starved (one's mail some mornings is like a nest of open-mouthed baby birds) and from within by a haunted sense of their own powerlessness. Such purposeful power as critics used to have disappeared with the time lag between the appearance of something new and its acceptance, a transition that dealers manage now seemingly in a matter of hours. The art-worldly function of criticism has become largely ceremonial: after-dinner speakers at the victory party. Thus critics tend to dig in their heels.
I recently dug my heels in for a short piece to be published in October, and found myself voicing similar concerns (albeit not as elegantly).