Arts Criticism

There is an interesting exchange going on between Tyler Green and Terry Teachout about the merits of specialized versus generalized arts criticism. I definitely have a horse in this race because I never set out to be a harpsichordist or percussionist or to compose electronic music or to study theory or any of that. I went to college figuring that I would be either an art major or a literature major (the former because I have been primarily interested in visual arts for as long as I could remember, the latter because it seemed proper to have an undergraduate degree in some sort of letters).

However, when I got to school the art department was being taken over by flakes and lunatics (a sad thing, seeing as how UCSC had a good art department) and the literature department was already in the grip of flakes and lunatics. After a brief flirtation with astronomy I found myself in Gordon Mumma's History Technology and Literature of Electronic Music class. To make a long story short, I ended up a music major with Gordon Mumma as my advisor, and ended up switching from piano to harpsichord (another long story, but one with a very good ending) and then adding some percussion to the mix.

Certainly all of this music study, especially at a rigorous program like UCSC's, resulted in me knowing a fair bit about music, being able to write about it, to write it, to play it, to edit it, etc., and I even ended up in the music business, but the main influence all of my study of counterpoint, harmony, form, structure, twelve tone matrices, rhythm, texture, and so on, has been on my painting.

For one thing, I don't think that I would have nearly the love of Diebenkorn's work had I not had my background in music (one funny coincidence was that I invented a system of structure based on Stockhausen's Four Criteria of Electronic Music. It resulted in a graphic structure that was based on expanding polyrhythms. Later I looked at one of them and was struck by the similarity it had to one of the Ocean Park series paintings of Diebenkorn. It certainly was not conscious).

Even when I think about the bullfight, I am drawing from concepts in music (usually the relationship of ornament to the written melodies in baroque music, but also in terms of basic structuring of time space, from the division of the whole into parts as well as the specific time and space issues of particular lances and passes).

Obviously it is important for the critic to have a deep specific knowledge of the form he is writing about. If someone is writing about Diebenkorn, I expect them to have a pretty good grasp of painting in general and to have read Nordland, Landauer, Boas and others on twentieth century California painting. And, frankly, I would be more annoyed if this hypothetical critic lacked this specific knowledge than if he lacked the ability to discuss the Ocean Park paintings in the context of musical structures and symbolist poetics. Nothing is worse than the generalist who is ALWAYS out of his depth (for instance that Marin County MD who wrote one of the silliest and shallowest books I have encountered on the relationship between modern art theory and scientific discoveries - lots of superficial appeal and arguments that fell apart as soon as they were looked at too closely. I think the fellow was a surgeon. I hope he knows anatomy better than he knows art or physics).

Now, the thing that is left out of both Teachout and Green is the critic with a scientific background. I remember the first time I read Ruskin and was impressed by how much he knew of matters geological, botanical, etc. I am no scientist (which is defined as one who has a tesla coil in his laboratory and a vaguely mitteleuropaische accent and a nervous giggle), but what I have studied of geology, zoology, anthropology, chemistry, astronomy, etc., has greatly enhanced my ability to think about and comment on art of all sorts, never mind the tremendous fodder that it can be for creating it (I dare you to study the geology of Death Valley and not want to go out and paint or at least to get a glass of water).

So, I will end this with a question for the great generalist Terry Teachout: are you ready to tackle the bullfight yet? Dance, music, drama, it's all there. Ole!