As long as spaces still exist for art criticism, as long as those of us who write on -- and with -- art are encouraged to play with the review form as artists often do with the forms they work with, then let us do just that: play with our critical work in ways that excite new and unusual ways of thinking and feeling and responding, and leave the hand-wringing to "the rest of us [who] have already been thinking" and writing about the contradictions (indeed, the ironies) of the (late-) capitalist mode of production.
Mitch, your response in Momus to Rodney Graham's Spinning Chandelier entry in Westbank's Gesamtkunstwerk is as nicely-written as it is appreciated by those of us who have for some years now been calling bullshit on our off-leash modernisms (Were you in town to experience the piece?). Page, your heartfelt poem in the "Comments" section that follows Mitch's text is what I hope Momus publisher/editor Sky Goodden will consider publishing more of when it comes to art criticism. This being Vancouver, where artists have long played an important role in art criticism (Vanguard magazine) and art history (in which Graham contemporaries Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall hold graduate degrees), hopefully more -- and younger -- artists and writers will continue to make work that is critical of existing work (as a new form of institutional critique?), particularly now, when so much of that existing work is in public space.
On that note, how about a fictive "dis-informational" tourist pamphlet to be handed out to those disembarking from cruise ships, one that carries an "alternative" story not only of Spinning Chandelier, but of "non-art" public works like our asthmatic Gastown Steam Clock and the militaristic 9 O'Clock Gun? (After all, that's what Spinning Chandelier is, isn't it? -- a confection for tourists? A Trojan Horse disguised as a confection, in the same way Paul Verhoeven's 1997 Starship Troopers is an art film disguised as a Hollywood space western?) Let projects like these stand in for art criticism, and let's move the hand-ringing expository essays to the Op-ed sections of our ever-shrinking art press and what remains of the mainstream.
Vancouver delenda est.
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