Art for art's sake

The difficulty in art reviews seems to lie in the torn impulses of the reviewer to write to the cultured art enthusiast and to attract the art-apathetic to their subject. Several articles in today's papers try to straddle the newsworthy aspects of their artistic subjects with their critical responses to them.


Damien Hirst and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living. The two phrases are nearly synonymous--although the title of the work may be less familiar to some, the image of the formaldehyde-encased shark it represents is known both inside and outside the art world. How, then, could The New York Times take well-worn subject matter and make it news today? It's all thanks to the Met, where the work has just been installed, on loan from owner Steven A. Cohen. The review in today's Arts section brings up many relevant issues: the edginess of showing this at the Met (despite the fact it was made 16 years ago), the recent replacement of the shark and, of course, the viewer's response to the work itself. However, despite mentioning the theory that Cohen is loaning the work to increase its value, the article never mentions the original $8 million price tag. I also think these monetary motivations of Cohen would have been best left to the end of the article; ostensibly, this is a review of the current installation of the work, so the final paragraph describing the reviewer's personal response to the work would have better served if it had come sooner in the article, and the less relevant concerns about Cohen and his billions could have waited until the end.

A Boston Globe art review today is much more clearly ordered. The review of painter Gail Martin's new exhibition at the Bromfield Gallery begins with the conception of the work, quoting the artist to convey the intimacy of the exhibition's theme, which sprang from her own thoughts on spirituality. It moves on methodically to discuss Martin's approach to the year-long project before seeking commentary from a curator at the Insitute of Contemporary Art on the common origin of art in an artist's spiritual thinking. The review ends, appropriately, with a reflection on the work that hadn't occurred to the artist herself and that offers an ironic twist to her whole intention behind the project, as someone suggests that by trying to comment on all the "stuff" she has, she has left herself with that much more stuff, in the form of her paintings.

The Times of London reviews photographer Mark Seliger's new exhibition in Manchester, England, and also pays particularly close attention to the motives that inspired the work. The review is well-written for a general audience who have no particular artistic expertise. The lede sets the stage for the discussion of the works' relationship to celebrity by showing just how difficult it was for the reporter to get access to the photographer to discuss his celebrity portraits. Later, Seliger's quote on the technical production of the platinum palladium prints he made for the show adds a physical dimension to the reader's understanding of the art, which is discussed in the rest of the review mainly in regards to its production location, rather than the composition of the final photographs themselves.