Critical reflections

The justification for this pretense to disengagement, of course, derives from our Victorian habit of marginalizing the experience of art, of treating it as if it were somehow "special" - and, lately, as if it were somehow curable. And this is a preposterous assumption to make in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music, in which every elevator serves as a combination picture gallery and concert hall. In fact the question of whether we can enjoy the world we see without the experience of images or the world we hear without the experience of music seems to me pretty much a no-brainer - so much so that I cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as "unesthetic," or for imagining that this quotidian esthetic experience occludes any "real" or "natural" relationship between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. All we do by ignoring the live effects of art is suppress the fact that these experiences, in one way or another, inform our every waking hour.

In my own case, I can still remember gazing at the lovely, lifting curve of a page upon which Oscar Wilde's argument that "life imitates art" was inscribed and knowing that this was the first "big truth" I had come across in writing. And I can remember, as well, standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue on a spring afternoon, six feet from a large citizen gouging the pavement with a jackhammer, and thinking about the Ramones, amazed at the preconscious acuity with which I had translated the pneumatic slap of the hammer into eighth notes and wondering what part, if any, of the pleasures and dangers of the ordinary world might rightly be considered "natural."

Finally, it seems to me that, living as we do in the midst of so much ordered light and noise, we must unavoidably internalize certain expectations about their optimal patternings - and that these expectations must be perpetually satisfied, frustrated, and subtly altered every day, all day long, in the midst of things, regardless of what those patterns of light and noise might otherwise signify. Thus, in the light of what I perceive to be the almost total absence of "unesthetic" experience in ordinary life, the necessity of art criticism addressing our ordinary experience of art, from whence these expectations flow, seems all the more urgent.

The joys and perils of our internalized formal expectations are not going to go away, no matter how we excoriate them at their source; and, as a consequence, to paraphrase Adam Phillips, the language of pleasure and the language of justice are inextricably intertwined. The question of who decides what we can or cannot enjoy, and how we may enjoy it, joins art criticism ineluctably to the realm of politics, where the battle between our professed standards, our cultural expectations, and our ordinary desires must inevitably be fought.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning