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Peeks and Piques!
“Artspeak”
By
RAYMOND J. STEINER
ART TIMES July/August 2006
IT
IS DIFFICULT not to lose heart in this business. My desk is daily inundated
with press releases, exhibition invitations, letters from artists, art
books and videos — a steady deluge of written and visual material,
assuring me that, were I only to take the time to peruse them, would surely
arouse my interest. It has gotten to the point where I no longer take
the time to pore over each letter, each invitation, each art book. Thankfully, there are a few artists who have an inkling of
what my workload might be, and send only an illustrated postcard announcing
their exhibition with a short note inviting me to attend — aware
of the fact that, at bottom, it is the art that has to “speak” to me and,
chances are, that I’ve been at this long enough to be able to make a judgment
on my own. I fully understand the artist’s plight, and that without publicity
the path is long, hard, and nearly impassable. But it would be nice if
they also were sympathetic to my plight:
I am one person, we cover a very wide geographical area (our paper is
distributed across the U.S. and abroad), and we only publish ten issues
per year. The work of how many artists, then, can I possibly come to see
and write about? Who “gets the ink” falls on my discretion and, as anyone
who has read ART TIMES over the past twenty-odd years clearly knows, I do tend
to carefully pick and choose, sometimes waiting years and several viewings
before I write on any given artist. Truth be told, I do not find a great
deal to write about. Oh, sure — there’s ore out there, but buried
under so many layers of dross that I grow weary of having to dig so strenuously
for the real stuff. I have my own critical compass and, for better or
worse, it’s what I depend on to make my decisions. What I don’t need is
that ton of written material trying to convince me that this is the “real
thing”. I’ve said it before and shall continue to reiterate for as long
as I’m editor and critic of this paper: art must speak for itself. No amount of written persuasion or verbal harangue can move me. Given
enough money, any hack artist can hook up with some hack writer who is
willing to wax eloquently with glissades of non-substantive, adjective-laden
hoo-hah that signifies absolutely nothing. How can anyone with half a
brain take such verbal flights of fancy seriously when it purports to
justify and elucidate what your eyes can plainly see is a piece of crumpled
sheet-metal — or a canvas indifferently besmeared with colored paint
— or two boxed or flanged steel beams painted in day-glo leaning
against one another — or a pile of debris dumped on a gallery floor?
If there is any “art” going on here, it is surely in the fancy verbal
footwork being executed by the writer-for-hire who, if ever out of a job,
could surely become a speechwriter for our next political leader. Hype,
after all, is hype. And I come across this barrage of gobbledygook nearly
every time I open my mail or stop in a gallery to see what’s what. I’ve
been buttonholed by so many gallery owners/sitters eager to tell me what
I’m looking at that I’m beginning to dread stepping inside to take a look.
PLEASE — I want to scream at the top of my lungs — JUST LEMME
LOOK AT THE WORK! So enamored has the world of art-marketing become in
turning out rampant persiflage that these hucksters even lean on the poor
artists to contribute to the nonsense, requiring a written “artist’s statement”
to hang on the wall alongside the “artist’s statement” already framed
and ready for viewing. Artist Rick Pantell once said to me, “If they invite
a poet, do they ask him to paint a picture?” Right on, Rick! Meanwhile,
I slog on, unearthing a few artists here and there actually intent on
perfecting their skills, doing the best they can to create an honest-to-goodness
work of art. Yes, they do exist — usually outside the limelight and hoopla
of commodity-based markets — but oh lordy, at the age of seventy-three
I’m beginning to show serious signs of wear and tear!
Raymond
J. Steiner