The Hunt for Read October

Dan Hopewell excerpts from an issue of October to prove that art theory is not a coup orchestrated by Rosalind Krauss, despite what any number of art writers will have you believe. The October piece, by Yve-Alain Bois, concerns Barnett Newman (PDF). Not only is it a worthwhile essay, it's not even theory per se. I don't understood the substantive complaint of October's critics, who dismiss the journal (interchangeable with "theory," often) whole-cloth, and here's hoping that the sight of a representative article laid bare on the Internets, naked as day for all the world to see, will compel some naysayers to argue with citations—Dan upped the ante for this blog debate and that's good. Todd Gibson's take on Michael Fried's reading of Thomas Demand ought to serve as an example of a principled refutation of an art theorist.

I won't comment on Art Since 1990: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism—"the October vision of a century of art," as Dan puts it—except to say that, if the hostile sentiment expressed by Frank Whitford for the LAT is the best that can be summoned, the book must be very good. Whitford's gripes about pomo language (a worn-out dartboard if ever there was one) are especially feeble—the language he cites is perfectly tolerable.

Since language is the nut of the pro-connoisseurship and pro–opinion criticism crowds' complaints—you know, about how when art theorists say that art "interrogates" something, etc.—a defense is merited. I might just be more tolerant of the language than others, but nevertheless: Taking Meyer Schapiro's formal definition of art history ("the language of experience of forms"), Hippolyte Taine's positivistic definition of art ("la race, le milieu, et le moment"), and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" thesis, I might say that I have three theoretical vantage points with few intersections. Common to them all, though, is a philological practice. Theory requires rock-bottom syntactic accuracy, industry terms are necessary for dialogue across genres and theories, etc.—so, sure, language comes up that wouldn't appear in a shopping list. Same for the law, same for literary theory. It doesn't exclude Peter Schjeldahl from the conversation by any means to observe that his use of poetic terms (e.g., "beautiful") would be enormously problematic—that's, like, aethetics Ground Zero. On the other hands, it's not as if Rosalind Krauss is publishing her studies in the New Yorker. And I think that Schjeldahl's poetics and Barthes's investigation are both significant resources for an art critic. I guess I'm not seeing the problem with the clerics do ing their thing and the critics doing something different, unless it's a Roger Kimball–type complaint that liberal universities are turning co-eds into Commie pomo zombies, a point that I don't think is cause for concern (or empirically valid) to begin with.

Sincere apologies for the post title; I couldn't resist.