[BKARTS] Art Criticism

[Paul T Werner <paul.werner@xxxxxxx>]

Dear Jessica: 

Thanks for the wonderful quote from Perez. As for the passage from 
Pinter, I see in it a fascinating unconscious revelation of Pinter's 
own failures as an artist.

As to your suggestion: I recently returned from two weeks teaching in 
Hawaii. At one point a student who knows my critical writings wondered 
out loud how someone so tough in his criticism could be so tolerant in 
the classroom. I told her that when I was fifteen years old and 
wandering through the mountains of Crete I found in a marketplace a 
clasp knife with the following sentence on the handle: "The one who 
owns me is a man. He does not open me for trifles."

If you're gratuitously mean in your writing or your personal dealings, 
you're a fool. If your writing career is devoted to sacrificing your 
beliefs in order to make nice-nice with incompetents, then you just 
don't care about art and you might as well give it up. If you can 
manage somehow if to be exactly as tough as you have to be, if your 
meanness has a meaning and an objective, then you're a mensch, and a 
critic. As Theodor Adorno put it, "There is no true life within the 
false one."


Paul T Werner, New York

"Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World." University of 
Chicago/Prickly Paradigm Press
http://museuminc.net

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