Hope Springs Eternal

Jerry Saltz is doing that cute little hopeful dance he does sometimes... you know, when he sees something he wants to say in something that isn't very good. The larger point he is making with Ted Riederer's review is totally worthwhile. And watching Saltz bend over backwards and put one leg inside his ear and stand on one testicle in order to do it is fun.

And he should be doing this dance. Criticism that is effective is constructive--it helps to point us where we want to go. And yes, it's completely worth it to ferret out the "aesthetic of reconstruction" and essential hopefulness that Riederer is bashing into the ground with a presentation that manages to be didactic and obtuse. Crushing. And since Saltz is being the good cop, I feel liberated.

Art's stuck in the cul-de-sac of the individual artist's experience, and the bottom line is that it is existentially impossible to share your experience with someone else...directly. Empathy is limited. All this art like Riederer's that originates from The Private Artist's Gesture is doomed to lameness, no matter how delightfully hopeful or reconstructive that gesture is, because it does not acknowledge this fact:

My job as the viewer is not to wish I was you and fling myself into you. So I am going to look at your documentation and see it as the dry, mysterious bullshit that it is.

You know how sometimes the best way to get across how something felt is to lie and embellish? Maybe one way to get to an "aesthetic of reconstruction" is to stop clinging to the veracity of our own mastubatory experiences and go dream up some shit that considers how the audience feels. Honestly, I don't need this Humpty-Dumpty tedium. Saltz's point is gorgeous and deeply true. But art isn't broken--it just needs to get out more.

EDITED TO ADD: I have been thinking about this today, and want to firmly position myself within this problem. I would not feel comfortable dealing with Riederer's work in this way if I did not have so many of my own irrelevant private experiences so thoroughly documented. Just ask any grad school colleague of mine... the hours I have spent staring at my own boring video footage of myself doing something that was great for me, not quite realizing over and over again that I have an inside and an outside... it is truly astounding.