by Garrison Frost

Understanding fine art is not always easy. Fortunately, the best art speaks directly to viewers in a way that does not require translation. A work of art confuses, moves, surprises, disgusts, inspires, depresses, intrigues. But of course, fine art is not merely an emotional experience; it is an intellectual one as well, one that demands critical interpretation.

Art criticism comes in as many forms as art itself, but it can pretty much be separated into two categories — that which makes sense to the reader, and that which reads like a technical manual for hydraulic generators.

For example, not too long ago, I was reading a perfectly comprehensible piece in the New York Review of Books by Sanford Schwartz about the painter Fairfield Porter, when I happened upon this line at the end about the artist’s sketches:

“They succeed because, far more than the pictures by Monet, Vuillard, or de Kooning that were Porter’s models, they’re built on loose-limbed yet emphatic linear scaffoldings.”

I hung on that last phrase, “loose-limbed yet emphatic linear scaffoldings.” Sure, I might have been willing to soar off with this metaphor and assign it any meaning I wished, but why? Better to just skip it and start reading at the beginning of the next paragraph.

Another example of what I’m talking about is this choice paragraph from Jan Tumlir’s article in a recent issue of X-TRA, a Southern California journal of art writing:

“This manifestation of ephemerality is precisely the truth, submerged within the work’s material content, that most accurately reflects upon both past and future, according to [Walter] Benjamin; and it can only be accessed in the present, in the now-time of the object or image ‘where thought comes to a standstill.’ Linking up one point and another along the broken continuum of history, insight is experienced in a ‘lightning flash’ of revelation. Every component part of his theoretical ‘constellation’ becomes activated in this way — allegory and montage, the emblem, the reality-fragment, the ruin and the rune — all systems and figures which flare up for a moment, when art and criticism lock together to express completely the incomplete nature of our being in time and the world.”

Oh my god. This paragraph typifies the worst in art babble. Not only is it just plain bad writing (“now-time,” “ruin and the rune”), but it could hardly be more alienating. It is more a masterbatory exercise on the writer’s part than an attempt to convey an idea.

Perhaps the best attack ever waged against art babble took place last year in the pages of the LA Weekly, where art critic Brendan Bernhard lashed out at various writers at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Much of the writing on display at MOCA is itself deeply elitist without actually being any good — a terrible combination — and shuts out anyone who isn’t already in,” Bernhard writes.

Bernhard’s finest example of art babble is a review by Timothy Martin of video artist Jessica Bronson, which he quotes:

“If Bronson may be said to participate in, and perhaps extend a ‘tradition’ of West Coast video installations — think of those big, philosophical video boys (Hill and Viola) who currently haunt European museums — it would be in the way she approaches this matrix of the effect-affect, this is without narrativizing it beforehand — along the usual existential lines — or presuming what it by nature must reveal or mean. As such, her work achieves a kind of realpolitik of the sensual effect quite distinct from this ‘tradition,’ yet equally distinct from the unreflective horse trace of Hollywood techno-magic.”

It’s a risky enterprise to criticize art writers for talking their subjects to death. One may be called a simpleton by those with lots of academic letters after their names.

Still, to say that such writing is far removed from the creative process itself is an understatement. How does something as exciting as art turn into a quick remedy for insomnia?

Sometimes I just want to know something about the artist, what the art looked like, what it felt like to look at it and maybe a little bit about its overall meaning. If I want to feel baffled and alienated, I’ll dig out my high school trigonometry textbook.