Resolution: Say Goodbye to History

Being home in North Carolina for the holidays put me in mind of Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem “This Be the Verse.” It begins: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” My parents are warm and loving. Regardless, spending a week with family can be like glancing in the mirror while high on edibles, a painful lesson about anxiety and self-absorption. Larkin’s sourness is a little rhetorical. Yet there’s truth in his singsong iambs. He was a traditionalist, he wanted to jettison the unrelatable experiments of modernism and get back to basics, so naturally the passage of time bore his resentment. He craved a burdensome past over a disorienting present.

For travel reading, I brought a 2022 collection from The New Criterion, the right-wing culture journal founded in the 1980s by grouchy US art critic Hilton Kramer. This has been ringing in my head, like Larkin, because the drift of indie art criticism insists that what contemporary art needs now isn’t love, it’s rigor, standards, and traditions. Troy Sherman of Midwest Art Quarterly, for example, offers that “the critical situation” should be “specific and precise and formalist. It has to be rigid and reified.” Well, The New Criterion agrees – and has, for four decades. The book gathers essays by eleven men, almost all of whom, whatever their immediate subject, offer capsule histories of Western Civilization and caricatures of “wokeism.” One guy actually argues that chattel slavery was better in ancient Rome than in the US because it was based on differences in fortune and ability, not race. Just one of many subtle jabs at affirmative action.

Resolution: Work Harder

Conservatives of this vintage fixate on the good intentions of the US founding fathers. They concede that people are imperfect, that reality doesn’t always match ideals, yet insist that faith, family, and freedom have always been the country’s core values. In other words, over-fidelity to a hazy tradition keeps them from seeing the present.

It’s not just conservatives. One of the quirkier tics of Jerry Saltz, on staff at New York Magazine, probably the most prominent art critic in the United States and a standard-bearer of his profession, is that he repeatedly tells young artists they’ll probably be poor forever. This is meant to be encouraging: do it for love, not money! Such unclely advice also dovetails with Saltz’s self-mythology as a Dunkin-drinking truck driver with no degrees who somehow bumbled into one of the last salaried art critic jobs on Earth.

In fact, his true path, an odyssey of tactics and kismet paved by the fortunes of boomerhood, is much more informative than his digest. Saltz attended the Art Institute of Chicago, sold a few paintings, and that truck was full of art. Enough tales of pull-worn bootstraps and monastic poverty. The institutions that raised Saltz to such heights, like the Village Voice, no longer function, which isn’t his fault, but undermines his example.

Resolution: No Press, Please

Around this time last year, New York art’s big off-the-record conversation concerned Artforum and Gaza. The head editor David Velasco had been booted after the magazine’s website published a pro-Palestinian statement in a way the new owners at Penske Media Corporation didn’t appreciate. The boycott was on. Editors and writers and artists pledged not to work with PMC. The company now controls three of the oldest and largest art magazines in the world, Artforum, Art in America, and ARTnews. I don’t think we’ve reckoned with the loss that consolidation represents, or consolidates. For the art press, that’s like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post all coming under the same brand, leaving journalism with less variety and journalists with fewer (traditional) opportunities. PMC’s thick portfolio also includes Rolling Stone, that boomer flagship, which is a shell of itself. We can hope the art mags don’t suffer the same enshittification, the process by which legacy brands are gutted of what made them great. It’s already hard to believe that, not so long ago, a single trade publication could anchor the discourse of a whole industry.

But some siloing might not be a bad thing. The other week, at drinks after an opening for the trans octogenarian artist Pippa Garner, I learned about an apartment gallery in New York with an ungoogleable name and/or no online presence. One of the organizers, who I’ll leave anonymous, seemed reluctant to tell me more – they said they don’t want any press. I think I let my surprise show. “Really??” Yeah, really. I hope this doesn’t count.

No Press is today’s No Logo. Now, you are the brand, your public image is the logo, your life is the product, and to live and think entirely in the public eye is sheer mise en abyme. There are times for bold declarations and letter-signing, too. But air-gapped discourse feels healthy. I’m genuinely curious why several signatories of last year’s letter(s) have returned for Artforum’s December issue. At the same time, it’s refreshing when not everything is available for consumption, and a resolution can be personal, brutally honest yet forgiving, a lingering glance in the mirror.

Resolution: End It All

“Man hands on misery to man,” Larkin observed. “It deepens like a coastal shelf.” And the salty spray of time pelts Larkin’s pockmarked jowls as he gazes, gazes, into that most ancient of traditions, the sea. I imagine that, for conservative critics, contemplating tradition can be as sublime and vertiginous as the present is baffling and cruel. Larkin’s poem ends with a resolution to stop the cycle: “Get out as quickly as you can. And don’t have any kids yourself.” He didn’t – although his poetry carries his particular misery forward. Resolutions are meant to be broken, and to occasion new resolutions.