New Yorker art critic Schjeldahl explains what art is, for now

Marcella Veneziale Arts Editor

Not many art critics would hazard to answer the daunting question, “What is art for now?” But Peter Schjeldahl, resident art critic of The New Yorker, plans to do just that in his Nov. 17 lecture entitled “What Art Is For Now.”

Schjeldahl has written extensively on a vast range of topics in art, including contemporary artists such as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, and Willem de Kooning, as well as old standbys like Edouard Manet and Edvard Munch. He also continues to teach seminars on art at Harvard University.

Schjeldahl became involved in the world of art criticism by chance. After dropping out of college, he lived in Paris for a year. Upon returning to the United States, he became more involved with the bohemian poetry scene brimming in the 1960s Lower East Side. He first began to write for Art News as a way to support himself financially. His critical writings took a backseat to his poetic yearnings, but eventually the majority of his work came to be written in the critical field. He has continued to write both lyrically and in prose, and has published much of his poetry as well.

In the 1970s, Schjeldahl quit criticism after having written for the revered New York Times Arts Editor Seymour Peck, but came back to it with assignments from The Village Voice. In a seminal interview in 1982, he stated that he returned to writing critically with a renewed zeal and recognized that he had always had strong abilities for writing journalistically, although he called himself “a terrible reporter.”

Schjeldahl has described himself several times as “one of those 60s drop-outs you read about,” and has been mostly self-taught. In his essay on teaching at Harvard, “Why Artists Make the Worst Students,” he describes the peculiar dynamics which arise in groups of artists. He likens these groups to street gangs in the sense that they are formed by people on the fringes of society, they are strictly hierarchical, and they are competitive with the outside world. The essay describes the importance of artists’ education, not for having an arbitrary store of information, but for developing sophistication. According to Schjeldahl, it is “knowledge that’s acquired in the course of having a purpose.”

Much of his writings on theories in art and art criticism are very reader-friendly, but they don’t shy away from difficult or controversial topics. Such writings include a trove of essays with titles such as, “Why New French Art Is Lousy,” “L.A. Demystified!” and “I Missed Punk,” which have been compiled in book form as The Hydrogen Jukebox.

Considering these previous writings, the ambitious topic of his campus lecture should not come as much of a surprise.

It is clear that Schjeldahl is willing to pose tough questions about the state of the current art world, and he is not afraid to answer them without skirting the issues that lie at the heart of the matter. Upon being asked in the 1982 interview of his opinions about irony in 70s art, he simply replied, “Irony isn’t new. It’s the modern condition.” If any current critic could answer the question proposed for the lecture, it certainly would be Schjeldahl.

The lecture is part of the Claflin lecture series under the auspices of the Art Department, and will begin at 6 p.m. on Nov. 17 in Taylor 203.