Read an A.O. Scott’s New York Times essay this morning: Is Our Art Art Equal to the Challenges of Our Times? (Nov. 27, 2014).
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/arts/is-our-art-equal-to-the-challenges-of-our-times.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region&_r=0
And I found it nauseating. Scott is probably my least-loved liberal critic. His commentary has a way of being preachy, terminally middle class, blandly questioning and nostalgic.
Is our art “equal” to our times? It’s an idiotic question. Perhaps he didn’t write the headline and can’t be blamed for it—except that whoever did write it captured his essay and the utterly banal commentary he managed to elicit from a panel of artists—“cultural figures” in the language of the NYT—who are not uninteresting in themselves, but aided by Scott manage to spout pablum.
“Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, I’ve been waiting for ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ Or maybe ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ or ‘Death of a Salesman,’ a Zola novel or a Woody Guthrie ballad—something that would sum up the injustices and worries of the times, and put a human face on the impersonal movements of history” (Scott 2014).
Are there really no such works that grapple with the realities of the contemporary world? Or is it that it would be impossible for an NYT critic to recognize such a work, trapped in mushy liberalism of the Times?
Given the vastness that is the contemporary artscape, the explosion of production in every genre, a better question might be is our institutional criticism equal to our art?
The answer, now as always, is no. The particular poignancy of our times is that criticism is more vitally needed than ever before. The very tsunami of art—stories, images, objects, music—that surrounds us begs for sorting, commentary, insightful tags, pointers toward, analysis of, critique of, and engagement with.
Such criticism exists of course, in equally unsorted forms, in blogs and tweets, instant reviews and shared reflections—but the mechanisms for sorting these are also still in their infancy, leaving us all to swim—as artist Andrew Abbot (http://allabbott.com/) has put it—in “world soup.”
Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. The need for criticism is real. But trusting a google search to sort the inane from the insightful is insane. Yet the soupiness of the world should not discourage us from looking for the art that responds to our felt needs. It’s hardly surprising, however, that NYT isn’t finding such art.