Think or thwim

ArtForum, Sept, 1993 by Glenn O'Brien

What's the remedy? It's not enough that art writers quit writing. I've tried that. It's not enough. They should start speaking. Art writing should be replaced by art talk, art dialogue. The perfect replacement for the turgid, static monograph is the recorded live symposium. Absolutely live, ers and ums included. Plato got that idea right. And Burroughs expanded on the possibilities of the dialogue as the generator of a dialectical "third mind." The technology exists to reproduce a lively exchange, should one miraculously occur. Perhaps this is how art criticism should have been working for the last twenty years.

The solo review should be replaced by the dual. The defender and the prosecutor. Or the panel of experts.

Tonight on our panel of experts we have Donald Kuspit, Jenny Holzer, Steven Wright, Stephanie Seymour, Tom McEvilley, Eileen Myles, and Andrew Dice Clay. Give them slide projectors and stun guns and let them work it out.

But if they insist on writing about art then they should live up to the standards of art. Art writing should be art or shut the fuck up you're bringing me down.

Artists themselves should write more. For one thing they'd be putting it on the line at a time when the norm is to dissemble and cultivate ambiguity. For another thing, they couldn't do it worse than the critics, and in many cases they would undoubtedly bring some creativity to an activity generally practiced by rote.

If art writing is to flourish it must subvert the cult of seriousness instead of sucking on it. It must resist the popular tendency to regard art as a true-or-false quiz. It must concoct more and nastier manifestos. It must use the vernacular. Do the vulgate. Get down. Get real.

I'm sick of credentialed dunces and hacks, holding on for dear tenure. Publish or perish? You croaked already. I just won't read it and if I do, by accident, I'll find some way to make you pay for wasting my time.

Art isn't what it used to be. It's all aura and no clout. Its sanctimonious where it should be shocking. It's silent where it should be stentorian. It's safe where it should risk sorrow. And if art is ever to be as important as it was then the word will have to take the lead in that restoration process.

Let's get busy. Let's clean house and embarrass the shit out of the poseurs. Let's knock em out. Let's act as nasty as Jesus on a bad-hair day. Let's write like a drive-by shooting. Let's talk up a war of words that makes the world funnier and more beautiful. Let's make everything that has to do with art--from the reviews to the sales pitch--into art. Art so fine. ...