The passing of my colleague Peter Schjeldahl prompts some thoughts on writing art criticism and/or being an art critic. These Peter did with joy, conviction, and aplomb. Agree or disagree with him, praise him or take him to task for his apolitical, Epicurean response to the art before his eyes, you could not deny his devotion -- bordering on addiction -- to looking at the stuff, and his plain-spoken virtuosity writing about it.

Peter was a writer first and foremost. I first knew him as a poet, and only later as a writer on visual art. The New York milieu, to which the North Dakotan readily gravitated, brought many poets to visual art, but Peter was one of the few to cross over without ambivalence. (One of his last poems was a long, gossipy paean-cum-putdown to/of his fellow New York art writers. Yeah, I got mentioned, with what I now accept as arch fondness.) He was my editor at Art in America for a hot minute, the only editor I recall ever questioning my opinions rather than just my word usage. (He relented, if mostly to save time.) We were never buddies, and Peter was never one to assuage anyone's insecurities, but I was always glad he was writing, because his writing helped me over and over again to look at and think about art (I regretted only his abandonment of poetry -- even as I saw how his poetics remained in his art writing, indeed, drove it.) Importantly, he wrote vivaciously and persuasively enough to carve out a long career writing for non-art outlets like The Village Voice, Seven Days, the New York Times, and ultimately The New Yorker.

Peter's passion for his subject matter (if not always his subjects) was fervent and unyielding. He loved and honored art, but wasn't deferent to its makers, much less its gatekeepers (himself not least). Peter was no rebel, he sought to burst no bubbles or change the course of art history. Rather, he simply shared his insights with his readers and --- crucially -- did so in some of the supplest prose expended on the subject since the Second World War. Schjeldahl left the predictions and proclamations to more rhetorical compeers such as Dave Hickey (whose contrarian outlook and devotion to art as a source of pleasure tickled him) and Lucy Lippard (whose ideological embrace of aesthetics and politics discomfited him). His critical role was responsive, even reactive, discovering for himself and thus us the secret sauce in everything he chose or was assigned to write about. 

When you're that much about the encounter, when gut response is the raison de faire and providing context an at-best secondary task, you have by implication a lot of justifying to do. Who appointed you, you diffident straight white guy, the expert? Why do you get to sound off in The New Yorker, yes The New Yorker, and someone else perhaps more appropriate to the era doesn't? You'd better be better than good at what you do. Peter was. He was a captivating writer, even -- perhaps especially -- when you didn't agree with him. He wrote about the experience of encountering art, examining the sources of the sensations he was feeling and connecting them to broader frameworks, rarely academic but rarely self-indulgent, either. Schjeldahl relied on his prose to ingratiate himself and his ideas -- well, his method of having ideas -- to us, and he succeeded because his eloquence drew us to the art and not to him per se.

Peter had been a leading figure in the second generation of New York School Poets, a network of writers whose urbanism and ready, casual ekphrasis prompted them to embrace all the arts in a classic high-low conflation. They manifested their particular love of art and artists -- painters and painting, especially -- by writing art criticism. Apollinaire (along with contemporaries such as Gertrude Stein and Blaise Cendrars) was among their loftiest models, but they eschewed the Frenchman's influential ism-hawking and emulated instead his tendency to mirror the vitality of the art in question with similarly vivid and mercurial prose, offering words themselves as reactions to and reflections of visual phenomena. Many poets associated with the New York School, from Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery to John Perreault and Carter Ratcliff, were among the city's most active "insider" art critics, filling at least two decades of Art News and Art In America with their articles and short reviews. Of all of them -- of all of us -- who kept the New York art world lyrical, Peter was the one who got so deeply into the art writing that he gave up poetry itself. The joke among all of us was that writing about art was where the money was, but Peter never made us feel as if he had sold out, or even given in. He found in art criticism a genial outlet for his poetic impulse, and he gave the criticism his all.

—Peter Frank

Los Angeles

December 2022