Famed art critic kicks off fine arts lecture series

By Sandra Larriva

This season’s Fine Arts Lecture Series at Parsons, the New School for Design, kicked in with New York Times senior art critic Roberta Smith. As hinted by the title — “On Becoming and Remaining a Working Critic and Whatever Else You Want to Discuss About the New York Art World (Within Limits)” — the lecture addressed the role of the critic in society and art in general, which, to Smith, is “sustenance, like food and sex. It makes your life work.”

One of the nation’s most distinguished art critics, Smith graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa and shortly after moved to New York to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She was also a studio assistant to minimalist artist Donald Judd, a “dauntingly, unforgivingly rigorous” figure who marked her career, and worked for Paula Cooper, owner of a leading gallery now in Chelsea. In 1981 Smith became The Village Voice’s art critic and in 1986 a writer for The New York Times. Additionally, she has written for ArtForum, Art in America and Arts Magazine.

Upon arriving in New York, the true nature of the New York art world revealed itself to Smith: The majority of those working in it were not artists, even if some of them had originally come to the Big Apple as such. If we look at Chelsea’s ever-expanding art bubble today, we realize that that is still the case. Dealers, curators, advisors, directors, collectors and critics pave the way and art follows.

When Smith’s writing career began, “criticism wasn’t viewed as a primary act but as a sideline, something that could be done lightly.” It is fair to say that her writing has contributed to the determining, yet developing role of criticism in today’s art world. Smith sees her main job as getting her readers out of the house, motivating them to “get the life force that I get from art and that is available to everyone who looks at it.”

Smith began the lecture by stating that while we are all inherently critical, we need to be more engaged with our visual world. She argued that an “essentially visually illiterate nation,” would benefit greatly from an increase in the number of critics that write for newspapers and from free access to museums, institutions that, in her view, have the power to change society.

“[Museums] give us the visual equivalent of things sorely needed today: an understanding of difference, and therefore, of tolerance,” she wrote last year in the Times.

Through personal anecdotes, Smith defined the work of the critic as a “big weapon” that should be handled with care. Its highly public aspect turns a critical piece into an obligation to its audience: an “evidence of reception” or response to the artist, and a truthful interpretation to its readers.

Regarding art, Smith described a true artist as someone who is doing something they cannot avoid doing, and used artist Kara Walker and her political work as an example. Once the work is finished, its meaning is up for grabs: “I see art as big rolling balls of wax that roll through time and pick up stuff, some of it sticks, some doesn’t, and some falls off.” Like so, appreciating a work of art becomes a highly personal experience.

Regarding art’s sky-high monetary value, Smith said: “Everybody’s prices have gone up. Mine haven’t.”