On Breaking into Art Criticism

By 1966, I had published three and written four bits for Artforum. The first review published by them was in the December, 1965 issue, "Art Treasures from Japan: The Much-heralded exhibition opens its U.S. tour in Los Ange­les." It came about one day when Carl Belz and I went up to visit Phil Leider in the editorial offices of the maga­zine, which was then based in Los Angeles. I remember him talking on the phone, or to someone about the forthcoming exhibition of Japanese art, and wondering what in the hell he was going to do about finding some Japanese expert to do an article. So I said that I was, indeed, an expert on Japanese art, and that I would be delighted to type up an article for him.

At that time I was eager to publish some kind of article in my chosen field of art history--and it did not make very much difference what the topic was. Actually, I had studied the history of Oriental art for about a year while a graduate student at Princeton, under a mentor who went (out of his earshot) by the appropriate name of "White Fang." In conjunction with this endeavor, which finally proved to be ill-starred, I also spent eight weeks during one summer studying the Japanese language in an onslaught course conducted at Stanford University. Previously I had looked at a lot of Japanese art and liked it, and had spent a few days wandering around Tokyo once--but mostly getting fucked and fed. That made me, in comparison to the other potential experts sought, but not found, in Leider's brain, at least an adequate authority. I had plenty of books at home if I needed them. And there was the art itself to consult, should I ever want to qualify my critical objectivity by actually confronting the art about which I intended to write. I felt I could do it, and layed it out to Phil, and he picked it up. For me that was something of a big Chutzpah ploy--although it would have passed for next to naught in the canibalistic New York context. The only important background for this move of quietly in­spired desperation that I should mention here is the collabor­ation between Carl and myself during the previous summer (1965).

Together we had written a radical, complex and astounding article on what in the hell had been going down in America in terms of the arts and cultural history generally within the last decade or so. Full of pith and prophesy since confirmed, it was far too far out to find someone willing to set it in print. The classic situation of young writers with few or no credits (I had published a review of Charles de Tolnay's monumental study of Michelangelo in the light, latest form it took, The Art And Life of Michelangelo, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly—but I think little wise in the field of art history).

Since Easter of 1965 Carl and I had been taking rock and roll seriously, and were at that time earnestly beginning a rich period of collaborative research for a book on the history of this medium. Carl turned me on to rock with the Supreme's great (and I mean great) album, Where Did Our Love Go. It was in Princeton, where I was teaching at the time; Carl was teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He came down for a weekend to stay with me, and brought along some friends--Sarah and Deb, I believe, and Joe Egan might have been there--maybe Roberta too. We listened to that album--or they listened to it all weekend. I had never listened to rock really. Oh, I heard it all around. But when people like Bobby Rosenblum used to refer to the Shangrilas during coffee break in Chan­cellor Green (student center), or gayly giggle about WABC's echoing "Number ONE, ONE, One, One, one, one..." it went right over my head. And Rosenblum would be the last son of a bitch to give you any tips for free--one of the great, sad disappointments of my education (and sources of profound discouragement with the idea of universitas) is pinned on Dr. Robert Rosenblum's karma: when it was really beginning to happen in New York at the beginning of the 1960s he was into the action, he knew the people and what was happening. He was in touch with the big scene, Oldenburg's store days events, Dine, Grooms and Kaprow, and then Warhol, Lichtenstein, Stella and most of the other major US artists of the 1960s.

And I was a graduate student in art history, studying 19th and 20th century art with him--man, the art of the twentieth century, which was then going through some very heavy changes. And he knew it, he was on it, he had it down. But do you think he ever gave any of that? Fuck no. Jacques Louis David (which can be a groove, but in other, other terms). The German pissing Romantics (something else again--but even here he didn't do Friedrich as spaced-out or Runge as the proto-psychedelic madman he was). Cubism and Twentieth Cen­tury Art (Harry N. Abrams, $25.00). Well and good--but that was not, manifestly, where it was at right them. And Rosen­blum's life was right there; but he could have and did not give. It wouldn't have cost him jack shit to say, "Look-a here, there is something you ought to pick up on." Fucking lousy tight-ass vicious bitchy god damned New York-type shit-ass art historian. And that whole field is chock-a-block with similar assholes, the only difference being that they are generally stupider, far stupider than Rosen­blum--who is not stupid at all, and hence possibly evil in knowing full fucking well what he was doing and going ahead and doing it anyway--and then coasting on all those claims (unvoiced, to be sure) about being a TEACHER, SCHOLAR, HUMAN­IST. Horse piss.

That is one of the really powerful negative experiences--because it could have been so alive, so right there, and really brought home something that true and real scholars have always known when they have loved their work: that it is alive and real and very, terribly, astonishingly exciting. I got this in other, foreign, expatriate and mellow-dying ways from great scholars at the Institute for Advanced Studies: Paul Frankl, Erwin Panofsky, Charles de Tolnay, and good art historians like Gertrude Coor. There was Bobby Rosenblum cutting up singing 'The Name Game" and me not even knowing who Shirley Ellis is or ever was, let alone picking up on Lincoln Chase (of "Cinnamon Sinner" and "Lincoln, Lincoln, Bo Bincoln" fame). And Bobby's got all this shit nailed down, and he hung on to it all. It took a long time, much longer that it should have taken, and much inefficiency to get it for myself. Carl gave mountains--he was way ahead of me, but both of us largely got into it--I mean deeply into it--together...with an awful lot of work, much of which should not have had to be done, perhaps.

I grew up with "good" music. I am a kid, conducting the orchestra in front of the record player--and I have memorized all of Rossini's overtures in the 78 r.p.m. album. And I got other tricks, like lots of Tchaikowsky, and some Beethoven Leonore overtures, building up languages and musical intelligence and memory. But rock? I never listened to that shit. One of my cousins, Judy, always carried around her name an aura of "tramp" because she liked to listen to rhythm and blues, which was dirty and had something or the other to do with either negroes or pachukos. Anyway Aunt Shirley smoked Chesterfields. But of course the notes of the music went into my ears, and I did hear, and the indelible etchings were made upon my brain pan--it all got coded and stored, and is there today. I remember "Honey Love" but couldn't have told you anything about the tune that I can tell you today.

Now the Drifters were something else again: and putting it right out in front, they were a hell of a lot more important in the existential, phenomenological, or just plain real aspects of my life than C. D. Friedrich or the Nazarenes could ever likely become. And no one yet is giving kids weapons of cultural self-defense, such as talking about real quality, or structure, or histori­cal significance, or rock and roll as Geistesgeschichte, or about the popular arts as art and in the same terms as the so-called fine arts. Well, that is just the sort of thing Carl and I essayed in the doomed article fabricated during the summer of '65, largely in the sunny sanctuary of 814 York, in Oakland, California. And no one bought it. We could not then, and still can't give it away. And both Carl and I have lost about two jobs each for talking about such matters in our classes, respectively. And if that kind of thing keeps up for very much longer the whole cowardly twenty-three cent world of the academe in America is just plain finished.

It always was finished in terms of what German schoolmasters had going for them on lots of levels (i.e., human beings alive and in love with their minds, at least--if not with their bodies and with the fullness of their beings--and giving, passing on what they could to those who wanted to know. Just see Erwin Panofsky's essays on art history in America for one more line on all these topics: "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" and "Three Decades of Art History in the United States," both published in Meaning in the Visual Arts, a Doubleday Anchor paperback book). So we talked to San Francisco Bay Area literati; one of my then girl friends, sweet almost radical Suzanne Wiggins, suggested we send it to Irving Howe of Dissent (in her good old, well‑ meaning. leftist-liberal naive frame of mind). He sat on it and then whoompf, he sent it back. It seems that the article wasn't slick enuf, and especially didn't have a whole lot of Marxist horseshit laced throughout the pages, and so he wasn't interested, which probably meant that it began to scare him a little--as much as he could possibly have gotten into what we were trying, albeit unslickly, to say.

I just may print the whole damned article, bad as it is and riddled with insights and fresh ideas and in a sense totally unimportant because guys like I. Howe and his senile, screwed-up self-deceptively fascistic capitalist esthetic had the real effect of keeping it private when it should have been published. So that is why I was ready to write something on Japanese art. Hell, I would have taken on ----  customs of the little-known ---  tribe of the upper --- river-‑you know. But as is frequently my wont, I pushed it even with the Japanese art critique, such as in the following paragraph quoted from said article:

"An obligation to protect the pieces as important things produced, unfortunately, a proliferation of uniformed guards and plainclothes detectives. Insofar as these contribute to a certain police-state atmosphere, they are inimical to the appreciation, in gracious and civilized repose, of any art. Really close, first-­hand scrutiny of the works, absolutely essential for the artist, critic and scholar, was also martyred as protective cases and barriers prevented contact, and kept the distance."

There were a few other petulant things I had to say about the sometimes fine, sometimes mediocre exhibition, and put them down pretty straight. Only later did I find out that they hurt the sensibilities of sweet (sweeter than Suzanne Wiggins) George Kuwayama who had worked so hard to put toge­ther this show. And I really didn't want to do that, as any thoughtful person could tell, were it not the "art world" that was involved, where the assumptions of personal spite and malice are usually foregone as starting hypotheses. But we are seeing that such sentiments can find plenty of other ways out to expression, as with anger and malice toward former quasi-professors. I have always had correct, if not cordial, relations with Rosenblum; what makes the case different with Kuwayama is that I didn't even know him and had nothing to say about him except in so far as he bore responsibility for the exhibition. I did have something to say about the exhibition, and if you like, about the people who put it together--but only by that very limited and directional extension. Indeed my literal ignorance of the organizers and my open lack of concern with implicating them in any but a strictly professional context is demonstrated by these sentences:

"This exhibition, entitled "Art Treasures from Japan," was a delightful smattering of sometimes magnificent pieces; but it demonstrated no clear organizing men­tality, little sense of unity or purpose, and elicited no clear effect or response. Not that the display of beautiful or highly-valued objects always needs some didactic justification--but the total effectiveness of the exhibition usually does depend upon communication of a rationale, a theme or coherent structure, which helps to explain why certain pieces were included, and why others were not. There is little evidence, however, that "Art Treasures from Japan" was either conceived or selected by any single creative spirit. Rather, it seems to have been the product of committee and compro­mise all the way."

Now if that is the way George's personal touch shines through it all to me, then he will just have to answer to the criticism, if he is at all interested in answering criticisms anyway. But the only thing I heard about this was from George's sister, who runs a boutique and who is pretty. Ah well, later I did meet George socially, and it was all right. But the case with Rosenblum is altogether different, and I have gone to some pains to set out the reasons why this is so.

Still, I have a resolutely strong regard for Rosenblum as a thinker and writer on art; and more, he has style, real style--which is so very much more than you can say for the legion of vanilla dullards who have had anything to do with Princeton ever since the (whenever the hell they were) great old days. I thought they were in the time of Charles Rufus Morey until I read his book on Italian art; I don't know, maybe there is something to be said for being consistently charming even when you are wrong on point after point of scholarship, analysis and hypothesis. This charm, which I may tend to respect more than I should to the degree that I sense my own shortcomings in that department, still obtains between, say, Rosenblum and myself. Why he said, "Oh, hi Kurt," when we saw each other outside a Tuesday Weld movie in the Village not too long ago, and I played the hand.

But most of these cats have consistently, charmingly perhaps, tried to fuck up my art history career (such as it is, was, or could ever be) whenever they had a chance. Not so the totally different breed of old-timers, the real humanist scholars like Frankl, Panofsky and de Tolnay--each of whom have written letters for me because they liked me--and that not because of any style or charm, but because they could respect where my head was at. When we talked, we talked about art history--about specific problems, which became the right and natural vehicle for some of the widest and deepest comments on the history of mankind, etc. The real first-raters had little enough to fear from me--and I can only wonder what kind of threats I might have posed to the second, third, fourth and plenty of fifth-rate art historians around that place and around most of the other places I have frequented since.

Anyway, you see, I made some of that trip myself--and if not all by myself, at least without any tips from the Bobbies of this world--and then we happen to cross paths in the aura of a Tuesday Weld phenomenon. And man, we are going different directions: Rosenblum was waiting in line ready to go into the theater and I was on my way out. Don't tell me it doesn't mean something cosmically. The next thing I'd like to do is a far-out interview with Tuesday Weld--and I just don't think Rosenblum is anywhere, close to that at all.

Kurt von Meier