Dear Art Editor,

I was shocked to read the review of Michelle Grabner’s exhibition by Ken Johnson in last Friday’s NYT, in which he basically summarizes Grabner’s show as that of a bland and witless mom. Grabner has an extraordinary CV: besides being an artist, and as he noted, a Professor at a major art school, and one of the curators of the last Whitney Biennial, Grabner is also a regularly published critic, co-curator/director of two experimental art spaces, and the subject of a museum survey show last year. Yet the NYT apparently saw no problem in printing a piece of writing about her whose primary criticism is her seeming lifestyle, and in which the characterization of her is not only the somewhat demeaning category “mom,” but the further boiled-down, more dismissive category of “soccer mom.” Johnson doesn’t even get his facts right: for example, he omits entirely the information from the exhibition’s introductory video about Grabner’s study of math, science and philosophy. It’s simply lazy to overlook this, and to mis-state the work’s own terms. Johnson concludes that Grabner has no satire: the two art spaces that Grabner co-runs are called “the Suburban” and “Poor Farm.” Does Johnson really think that Grabner is so naïve that when she portrays herself making a pie, she is doing so without any self-consciousness about her position in the world as a Midwesterner and a mother, as well as artist/curator/professor? (And hasn’t he ever heard of “normcore”?) This kind of condescending writing is a pattern with Johnson. Major complaints of racism and sexism have been lodged before about his writing, most recently two years ago when he was called out widely in public for “irresponsible generalities” regarding women and black artists. Once again, Johnson hangs his so-called criticism on his subject personally, in terms that seem to both diagnose her and reduce her to a cliché of her demographic. That’s textbook sexism. Johnson has the right to say whatever he wants about the work, but the point is how and why. What does it mean that the NYT does not seem to care about the politics of his language? I’m not surprised by Johnson’s writing at this point, but I am surprised that this insulting review could pass muster with the Editor of the New York Times.

Amy Sillman

[Johnson’s response]

Taking Sillman’s points one by one:
1. I don’t think Grabner’s resume should place her above criticism. Sillman doesn’t mention, by the way, that Grabner curated her (Sillman’s) paintings into this year’s Whitney Biennial. She’s not exactly a disinterested observer.
2. I thought that in a short review, simply describing the works in the show would be enough for an informed reader to get the underlying conceptual/feminist dimension of Grabner’s project. Had I spelled it out, it still would not have changed what I felt was an irritating spirit of self-satisfaction and obliviousness to her own privileged social position in the exhibition. Normcore or not, I still think the works in the show are bland and not in an illuminating way. They certainly didn’t make me care about the math and science of paper weaving.
3. I may have underestimated the degree to which Grabner intended the show as self-satire. If so, I’d say the show wasn’t satirical enough. That would only slightly modify my basic criticism. If Grabner did intend self-satire, than why would Sillman object to my idea of satirizing what I characterize as “the comfortably middle-class, tenured professor soccer mom”? This seems to me contradictory on Sillman’s part and humorlessly so. (I once was a soccer dad married to a soccer mom who also was a tenured professor of art. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a soccer mom.)
4. Sillman’s charges of racism and sexism are slanderous and based on misreadings of two of the thousands of things I’ve written for the Times over the years. You would think that Sillman would be more sensitive about tossing around such accusations after Grabner was much criticized for including in the Whitney Biennial works by Joe Scanlan that were supposed to have been made by the fictional African American artist Donnelle Woolford and for not including more works by real black artists. It’s a serious thing to accuse someone of racism and sexism. If someone claims there’s a pattern of racism and sexism in what I’ve been writing over over the past 30 years, then that person should be obliged to prove it. I don’t think it’s provable in my case. I think it would be easier to prove the opposite.

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Joan Waltemath, artcritical contributing editor, is billed as one of three moderators. (Will the moderators need a moderator, one wonders?)  Waltemath was invited, she tells us, after fellow moderators Christopher Stackhouse and Jomar Statkun read her own intervention in the artcritical debate.  Waltemath concluded her remarks by asking: “If Johnson had erred on the side of sensitivity, could this much needed discussion have emerged?    Let us make the most of it, it is a rare moment when the issues are on the table and there is something at stake.”

The evening is billed as “Critical Inversions – Artist to Critic, and the Publics in Between,” and Johnson is joined at the podium by artists Lisa Corinne

Davis and Anoka Faruqee, who was one of the authors of the “open letter” first challenging the New York Times critic for his pointed remarks on race and gender.  The panel announcement also hints at “possible special guests.”

Audience looking for resolution of this odd affair may not actually find it this evening, however, if the blurb on the announcement is any indication: “This discussion will pursue a generative conversation about cultural production, societal value, and how critical faculty figures into the assessment of agency between artifacts deemed art and those potential audiences that might receive said objects, experiences, or material of whatever type as art.”   “Artifacts deemed art” sounds heavy, and the statement forgets to mention gender or race!

But the presence of Lisa Corrine Davis – a woman of color, a veteran educator and a fabulous painter to boot – and the moderating influence of our own Joan Waltemath, encourages us to believe that, notwithstanding the conversation getting anywhere, civility will prevail.

The post Ken Johnson Affair Rolls On: Resolution or Turning of the Screw? appeared first on artcritical.

The historically well-informed Ken Johnson will be aware that critics usually come out nicely from the antagonism they provoke.  The most notorious case of a petition against an art critic (hitherto at least) concerned an earlier New York Times writer, John Canaday, whose dismissal of abstract expressionism led to a torrent of calls for his own.  Forty-nine of the great and the good of the American avant garde penned a letter to the Editor.  Canaday kept his job and earned himself a bestseller book title: Embattled Critic.

Less known on this side of the pond is the case of Brian Sewell.  In 1994, the exuberantly and eloquently reactionary critic of London’s Evening Standard so infuriated the art establishment with his vituperative wit that a roster of celebrated artists and museum curators called for his replacement.  Again, like Canaday, Sewell was gifted a book title that publishers can only dream of in a pluralist era when criticism rarely excites passions: The Reviews That Caused The Rumpus. 

At the time of that controversy I lived in London.  Although few of Sewell’s tastes accorded with my own, and despite the presence of friends and even a professor of mine amongst the signatories, I felt moved to organize a counter-letter with a couple of dozen colleagues who shared my sense that criticism suffers when dissent is stifled. Instructively, however, my letter received no citation in Sewell’s Rumpus volume.

Living in the age of social media, Johnson has managed to dwarf Canaday’s 49 with an online petition that has garnered over 1500 signatures.  The charge in this instance is not mere philistinism, however, but gross insensitivity to issues of gender and race.

Failing, perhaps, to learn a lesson from the Sewell affair, I have determined that artcritical needs to weigh in on the Johnson affair.  While many of our contributing editors and regular writers have focused their thoughts on the core issues of race and sex, my own observations are restricted to more specialist and marginal concerns of editorial process, whether from the writer’s, reader’s, publisher’s or protester’s point of view.

We turn to a newspaper of record for accurate reporting and stimulating analysis.  Journalists in the line of fire get us the latest developments in Syria while a pundit like Thomas Friedman tells us x number of things that are wrong with the world and y easy ways to fix them.  In the visual arts, critics are expected to deliver on both fronts simultaneously: a review of a sprawling museum show that simultaneously identifies and comments on an underlying aesthetic or museological problem.  With varying degrees of skill, the Times critics, who now include a Pulitzer-winner amongst them, manage this feat quite admirably. But in a slew of volatile recent interventions, Johnson has taken on identity issues that some would argue simply do not lend themselves to successful resolution in the cramped quarters of an exhibition review, or – in the case of his inflammatory gender speculations – preview.  With so little room to maneuver and so much potentially at stake, it is hard not to think of the critic as a bull in a china shop.

And, if the critic is consciously courting controversy, another idiom comes to mind: “where angels fear to tread”.  Ken Johnson, as an idealistic child of the sixties, no doubt feels that his own political purity is unassailable.  I suspect that most people in the art world, left or far left (we don’t seem to have a right!) would answer in the affirmative to Johnson’s opening question in his review of a show of Caribbean artists at Museo El Barrio, that it is indeed time to retire the identity-based group show.  While Johnson’s positions on such shows that persist are controversial his underlying motive in making these remarks is clearly positive. He is no Newt Gingrich.  But – to deploy yet another well-worn phrase – an angel does have to consider where the road of good intention can lead.

As to his antagonists, one wonders if they have thought through the wisdom of their chosen format—as dubious, for the settling of a nuanced critical issue, as the exhibition review is for the airing of so emotionally raw a set of historic and political problems as the cultural and economic marginalization of women and blacks.  Petitions are a good way for the average citizen to let polsters and pols know where numbers lie.  But artists and academics and critics have means at their disposal to register consternation and objection that are surely better suited to this situation than an anonymously penned round robin.  If one can’t be bothered to write one’s own response to this issue it is better to leave well alone than to participate in the act of closing down debate.

But that, of course, is already to take a loaded position—that Johnson’s comments weren’t that bad.  And in truth, the way they read when quoted in isolation, the more egregious phrases – “black artists did not invent assemblage,” “the nature of the art that women tend to make” – are indeed cringe-worthy.

So, artcritical’s position is: better editing all round; more judicious, art-historically informed articles; less big ideas latching onto the coat tails of functionalist newspaper exhibition reviews, and way less petitions.  That said, as the responses to our internal inquiry demonstrate, artcritical provides a platform not a position.  Our feelings on the Johnson affair are diverse.

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In an attempt to censor the critic Ken Johnson, an anonymously penned “open letter,” actually a petition directed to Johnson’s employer, The New York Times, is posted on iPetition.com where more than 1500 have signed it. The charge made against him is serious: in a review of an exhibition of mostly black L.A. artists, “Now Dig This!”—currently at P.S. 1—as well as in a preview squib about a women’s art show in Philadelphia, Johnson is said to have compared “women and African-American artists to white male artists, only to find them lacking.” Did he?

The P.S. 1 review is of a show clearly meant as a historical exhibition, defined by a period and a place. The show as presented at P.S. 1 is significantly different from the one seen at the Hammer Museum in L.A., however, where it was one component of a huge historical survey, “Pacific Standard Time”; in New York, it is, in effect, a showcase for black artists and some fellow travelers on the West Coast. Johnson admires, at the beginning and end of his review, works by the two best-regarded artists in the exhibition, Melvin Edwards and David Hammons (who also are given pride of place by the P.S. 1 curators). In the middle, he asks, in effect, what is it about the rest of these artists that has been an obstacle to their success and wider appreciation of their art?

Anonymous Petitioner states that Johnson “starts with” the claim that “Black artists didn’t invent assemblage”—a remark that actually comes seven paragraphs into Johnson’s review, after a respectful and informative description of a sculpture by Edwards and mention of the artists in the show who responded to the Watts riots of 1965. Wherever it appeared, this seems to have been the flash point for readers, and it certainly seems like a provocative statement if taken out of context, as Johnson has since acknowledged. The assemblage remark is a lead-in, however, to a passage whose point is not to naively assert white artists’ priority in artistic discovery, as Anonymous Petitioner supposes, but to set up a subsequent observation about form and content. It appears paradoxical, Johnson thinks, that a genre of art associated with Dadaists and other artists aiming to liberate themselves from conservative aesthetics and social mores would be adopted by artists of the mid-1960s attempting to express a sense of solidarity with their community. (One might draw a parallel in the adoption by committed artists of the 1970s and ’80s of the pristine forms of ’60s Minimalism as vehicles for political content.)

It does not follow from this paradox (if it is one) that black artists adapting a widely practiced art form of the time (William Seitz’s Art of Assemblage show was seen at MoMA in 1961) are in any sense inferior to their white contemporaries.  What troubles Johnson, and this concern has found expression in other of his reviews, is that focusing on a specific “race” (or gender or sexual orientation or even nationality in some circumstances) may result in excluding or alienating viewers not part of that group.

I think that some of Johnson’s critical comments misfire; for example, he imagines that those with a “distanced perspective” would interpret the grasping hand of John Riddle’s Untitled (Fist) as a social realist cliché of a defiant raised fist, where I would expect reasonably sensitive viewers to see it in a more nuanced way, as evoking resistance certainly, but also aspiration and suffering. But if that and other remarks seem wrongheaded to me, I can simply disagree with him; I don’t need to threaten his livelihood by petitioning his employer.

As an editor who has worked with Johnson on a book project, I’m going to claim a modicum of insight into his concerns as a critic and thinker. I believe the central issue for him, whether it concerns an individual viewer, an artist, or the audience for art, is expanding one’s mind and removing obstacles to shared experience. His questions, if I may reframe them, seem to be: Has identity politics in art, and the consequent splintering of audiences, erected barriers that limit our capacity to understand or empathize with work by artists who are of another class, “race,” religion, and so on? And have these barriers marginalized and impeded the careers of some artists who turned inward to their communities, in “solidarity” as Ken puts it, but who fail to also engage effectively—in however ironic or challenging a way—the larger art audience?

To focus the question more acutely: why is it that David Hammons’s Bag Lady in Flight, praised by Johnson, is so thrilling and affecting? Is it because this riff on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase adds humanity to Duchamp’s abstraction, leveraging our shared familiarity with that icon as it simultaneously draws from Hammons’s artistic and social identities? Or is it simply that the grease-stained shopping bags from which Hammons’s “bag lady” is constructed firmly root her in the street reality of the homeless even as her spirit, and ours, is made to soar?  CHRISTOPHER LYON

The exclusionary rhetoric of a formalist critique

Ken Johnson deserves “whistle blower status” whether or not he intended his review of Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles to expose art world pathology. By writing that ““the art of black solidarity gets less traction because the postmodern art world is, at least ostensibly, allergic to overt assertions of any kind of solidarity,” Johnson attempts to lift the race out of art’s ghetto by providing a template or map to guide black artists into the sanctifying “light” of Duchampian mischief and away from the disenchantment of social mores.

“Formally, you have a dialogue between stasis and dynamism, and psychologically, between reason and feeling” Johnson writes. “Such dualities would be enough on which to base judgment and interpretation were this a piece by, say, the white junk sculptor Richard Stankiewicz. But it makes a difference to know that Mr. Edwards is African-American…”

It seems that Johnson is saying when an artwork contains general and formal binaries such as reason vs. feeling or stasis vs. dynamism, there is enough information to make a decision.  But when information is too complex or there is too much of it, Johnson and the high-end art world are unable to interrupt it. Therefore, when Johnson speaks of the “‘white’ high-end art world”, his own comments seem to negate the mental or conceptual sophistication of this art world in favor of the sort of sophistication that can be assumed due to proximity with money.

“Herein lies the paradox,” he continues. “Black artists did not invent assemblage. In its modern form it was developed by white artists like Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, David Smith and Robert Rauschenberg. It did not come out of anything like the centuries-long black American experience of being viewed and treated as essentially inferior to white people. It was the art of people who already were about as free as anyone could be.”

Since when do people or groups of people have to invent a motif or mode of artistic production in order to have the right to use it?  Picasso did not invent African or Iberian masks nor did he use this cultural iconography in relation to its historical/cultural precedent. It should go without saying that Western art has appropriated from Asian, Islam, etc.  Herein lies the (real) paradox, that Johnson is seemingly arguing for the integrity or respect of modernist customs and traditions. His formalist interpretation of them must be obeyed even though as an epoch Western Modernism appropriated and transformed cultural signs and symbols at will.

Furthermore, Johnson’s totalizing analogy between white men and untrammeled freedom, beyond his essentialism that disregards war, sexual orientation, cultural and material determination, his words speak to a colonialist mind frame. Colonialism is based on control and domination, the subjection of one group of people by another group. This dominance can often lead to the disregard or denial of humanity/voice/perspective of the colonized group.  This denial grants the colonizer permission to employ systematic violence not only physical and psychic but cultural as well.  The displacement of a group’s culture allows the colonizers to use “newly discovered” cultural currency as they sees fit.  Johnson views a black artist’s use of assemblage as a transgression of “white” cultural heritage. Therefore this misappropriation doubles as an inversion of historical power relation’s in regards to the colonized and the colonizer.

My biggest concern with Johnson’s approach is that it devalues black art made decades ago by applying the exclusionary rhetoric of a formalist critique to artists who cared little for Greenbergian discourse working in a milieu of political and cultural upheaval.  Not to mention the fact in 2012 – the year in which we and presumably Ken Johnson live – black art, unequivocally, can no longer be essentialized.

And by the way, Robert Rauchenberg was part Native American.  DESHAWN DUMAS

The Mandarin Mentality

Ken Johnson seems fond of the term “mandarin” in his reviews, and his critical opinions indicate that he himself may be a somewhat conservative and reactionary art journalist, who evidently trivializes women and simplifies minority aesthetics.  But before we insist that any publication for which he writes should castigate Johnson for voicing his opinions, let’s think about possible implications of that demand.  Should any publication bow to such hostility, what would prevent the editors from agreeing to censor writers with other points of view, should the Huffington Post or a similar juggernaut scream loudly enough?  Our First Amendment deserves to be respected.  Anyone has the right to complain about a critic, but in this country no one has the right to silence that person.  As for Ken Johnson, whose writing informs me quite a bit more than it annoys me, the man does love art and has dedicated his career to teaching and art criticism.  Just because his art politics may be old-fashioned is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.  We also might note how much enlightening discussion has resulted from two of his recent reviews, however offensive they may be. SANDRA SIDER

Judged in Fair Ways

We art writers love binary oppositions. But they can cause trouble.  Johnson’s review of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” makes a distinction between social interpretations, which suit the African-Americans in this exhibition and art historical accounts, which are the way to describe their white peers. Question that opposition, and his analysis falls apart. Was Robert Rauschenberg, one of Johnson’s white artists, someone who was “about as free as anyone could be”?

Johnson’s second opposition, between “those who, because of their life experiences, will identify with the struggle for black empowerment, and others for whom the black experience remains more a matter of conjecture” is equally problematic. Surely many people who are not black identify with the African-American struggle for empowerment.

Johnson’s review of “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World” asserts that “the nature of the art that women tend to make” might explain the marginal position of women in the art world. What kinds of art do women make? In the recent exhibition of abstract painting at the Hunger College/Times Square Gallery, for example there were many female painters.

Why did Johnson’s reviews inspired such a response?  His comments, as I read them are about how the art market works. Distinguishing between the ways that black and female artists choose to respond to that market, he really is criticizing the way that people in the art market respond to art dealing with race and gender. Because of the history of racism and sexism, and because of obvious present inequalities it’s very important that African-American and female artists be judged in fair ways. And so it would be a good thing to continue this discussion, looking at a broader range of examples.  DAVID CARRIER

Important Questions Left in the Background

Two things can be unequivocally said about racism and sexism in our culture – they are horrible, and they still exist to far too great an extent. Reading Ken Johnson’s review of “Now Dig This!” my take away was that it was attempting a subtle criticism aimed at the community of overwhelmingly white collectors.  That is, if many of the artists in the exhibition were under-appreciated, the fault lay more with the art power network than with the art.  Admittedly, this could have been more clearly stated – one wonders if the editor could have done more. But conversely, the rather lukewarm argument presented by Johnson is typical of writers attempting to present an indictment of the power broker structure within a newspaper of the power brokers.  Clearly, the petition writers came away with an opposite reading, and precisely because of the imprecise and couched language used by Johnson, and his editor, one cannot convincingly argue that the petition writers are incorrect.  The same, I think, can be said of Johnson’s short piece on “The Female Gaze”.  I read it thinking he was attempting to stir up interest in another large group exhibition, making a bit of controversy by questioning his own assertion of sexism in the art world.  Again, the petition writers not unreasonably took the opposite reading.  Pushing this reading into an on-line petition, however, evokes for me unpleasant memories of bad graduate art school critiques, wherein one person would make an assertion about the nature of a work, and rather than question that assertion, everyone would just pile on.  Groupthink and preemptory judgment replacing wider analysis for nearly all present.  In the case at hand, social networking in the form of a petition becomes a ferocious multiplier.  So we are asked to sign a petition against a critic who has offered decades of valid commentary and who has often carried the banner of those on the outside.  Meanwhile, the important questions being raised – who gets to decide what is art and how those empowered to make those decisions effect what we get to see – remain to an unsatisfactory degree in the background.  DEVEN GOLDEN

Editing Down of Art History

Regarding Johnson’s comment on his review of “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles” he states “Black artists did not invent assemblage”  – a matter that historian Kellie Jones does not imply from her catalog quote stating the artists were simply “using the artistic currency of the time.” Johnson further mires himself in controversy by adding that assemblage was developed by “white artists” who were “about as free as anyone could be.”  Yet Dadaism was a critical part of the invention of assemblage (as was collage, Futurism, etc.), with messages steeped in anarchism and scathing social commentary following WWI.  If you include this Dadaist history what does Johnson’s statement about “being free” mean within a war torn European society that was given to elements of instability and corruption (think Weimar)?   This socially critical element seems to be something that numerous artists in  “Now Dig This!” admired.   Johnson’s editing down of art history and use of language seems tailored to be reactionary to dichotomies articulated by political correctness to begin with – and ends up circumscribing a double fault.  Art History, and the depth of historical consciousness implicit in it, is richer and more complex than either the narrowing language of politically correct theory, or Johnson’s partial and insensitive reaction to it.   DIANE THODOS

Picking Up the Gauntlet

At best insensitive and biased, Ken Johnson’s remarks about black and female artists only serve to reveal his own limits as a thinking person.  But the “Open Letter” is interesting.  On the surface, the letter critiques Johnson’s writings as sub par for the New York Times and requests that he be brought to task. But behind the polite palaver about editorial standards, a more substantive complaint is implied about the nature of criticism itself: who is determining value and on what basis?

Indeed.  While of course art critics do not set prices or directly profit from their critical activity per se, (indeed critics are the lowest paid entities in the entire economic system of the art world), to pretend that criticism is somehow pure and unrelated to the market is naïve and disingenuous.  Reviews equal revenue, and the art world economy is still pinned to the Romantic idea of rare, and thus expensive, genius.  But why, in a postmodern, post-feminist and postcolonial present, are we still investing in a societal notion that genius is rare and that art is best understood by the elite?   The net result of this intellectual shell game is a strained set of relationships between the art critic, the art market, the artist and the audience for art.

Critics don’t like to hear that – it undercuts their role too deeply and exposes a conflict of interests between aesthetics and money, two arenas which ought to be distinct from one another but which clearly blend with wanton disregard in the contemporary art market.  And in practical terms, who would pay for pure criticism if it did not support the matrix of museum patronage, gallery shows, magazine coverage, expensive production and graduate degrees?

The questions raised by the open letter lead inexorably to a critique of the entire art world economy and until critics are also willing, along with artists, to critique the roles of power and authority that underpin their paychecks, no one will be free of the dinosaur values that have been given voice of late by Ken Johnson and crew.  There needs to be a truthful discussion about the actual nature of art, not as a product, not as a commodity, not as a symbol of power and status and certainly not as a vitiating discourse amongst a canon of the anointed, but as something of actual cultural value that is meaningful to everyone.  That is the discussion that the open letter ultimately requires.  Let us see who is willing to pick up this gauntlet and really critique the institutions.  Looking at the re-writing of power relationships that are slowly taking place all over the globe, it is inevitable that this one will need to be rewritten as well.  And frankly, it is way overdue. TOBEY CROCKETT

Opening the Reader’s Eyes

The purpose of criticism is to invent new paths of thinking, not to protect or conserve the same worn and trodden ones. Criticism is about developing new associations, synapses and constellations of meaning. If there is a so-called new coalition of voters post-Obama’s re-election, then there also should be a new coalition of criticism that is more democratic and culturally, aesthetically and ethnically diverse. Like “Where Are All the Women Artists at MoMA?” article by Jerry Saltz opened the museum’s eyes to their own biases, Johnson’s article ““Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” has opened his reader’s eyes to his own unchallenged biases. GREG LINDQUIST

The Issues are on the Table

Whether the general consensus determines that Ken Johnson is guilty or not and what he would be guilty of, clearly, the provocations of his recent reviews have generated a multitude of much needed exchanges.  If the discussion can be maintained on the level set by the contributions of Bill Donovan, John Yau, Anoka Faruqee, and William Villalongo, to mention a few that were memorable in posts I read, there is a chance that significant change will come out of it.  The Varnedoe/McEvilley argument was a similar moment; it gave us a new awareness of the “other” and shaped discourse afterwards.

The critical questions for me are:

First, should the same critique be leveled across the board to all works of art or should critical arguments be based on criteria that stem from how the works themselves set their own terms?

Second, does the notion of the avant guard still determine our reception of works of art by relegating to an inferior position those things that are not deemed to be “the first”?  Can we develop an alternate model of equal persuasion?

Either of these questions could be extended into a full discussion, article or panel.  They point to aspects of a crisis in criticism, a crisis that is full blown in response to the intensity of Johnson’s remarks.  Yet must continue to allow the freedom for each of us to speak and represent our respective positions.  Whether or not we agree, without a clear delineation of positions we have no place from which to argue.

As director of the Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA where Ken Johnson will serve as Critic in Residence in the Spring, I can say, on a personal note, that the balance between sensitivity and incisive critique, which is charged with upholding standards, is a difficult one to strike.

If Johnson had erred on the side of sensitivity, could this much needed discussion have emerged?    Let us make the most of it, it is a rare moment when the issues are on the table and there is something at stake.  JOAN WALTEMATH

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