Art and Small Talk: A Memoir

Alice Neel, Robert Smithson, 1962. The Metropolitain Museum of Art, New York

I published my first gallery reviews in the October 1969 issue of Artnews. Every month for the next two years, the Assignments Editor Delores Fenn would give me a list of a dozen shows to write up. That may seem a lot, yet it was doable. Reviews were sometimes just two or three sentences long and profound insight was not required. The standard review noted the look of the work in question, described its subject matter if there was any, and made a general comment about the artist’s progress. Had there been a breakthrough or was it business as usual? In those days, the magazine deemed about two hundred galleries worthy of attention, so I was one of a fairly large handful of reviewers—or Editorial Associates, as we were known on the Artnews masthead.

When I made my rounds, I didn’t confine myself to the galleries on Delores’s list. If I was scheduled to review a show at Fischbach, I would visit A. M. Sachs and Dwan, the other two galleries in Fischbach’s 57^th Street building. If the list took me to the Castelli Gallery, on 77th Street, I would visit Bykert just four blocks north. I never visited all the “serious” galleries in a single month, but I did stop in at many of them, and the number increased as Soho turned into a new center of art world gravity. Inevitably, my daytime excursions led to evenings spent at gallery openings, which, as I remember, were on Thursdays—though I could be wrong about that. Whichever night it may have been, the openings filled 57^th Street and West Broadway with crowds of semi-tipsy art-lovers wandering with quasi-focused intent from one venue to the next. The openings were always lively and sometimes felt glamorous. Phyllis Derfner and I attended them regularly until, some time in 1973, we stopped. They had become boring. No one ever said anything about the art on view. Talk was all small talk.

I am not against small talk. We are social creatures, and I understood that inconsequential chitchat can have the salutary effect of maintaining personal connections. The trouble, for me, is that I am not very good at small talk. This shortcoming was more salient at art world parties than it was at gallery openings, where people came and went and my awkwardness went unnoticed as long as I kept moving. At parties, a cluster of people would stand around together for extended moments and expect one to say something about art-world careers, art-world breakups and reconciliations, art-world real estate, but not art and how to make sense of it. That, of course, is what I wanted to talk about, and I found only two interlocutors: Robert Smithson and Harris Rosenstein.

To borrow the lingo of medieval psychology, Smithson was saturnine with a touch of the choleric: a gloomy personality tinged by anger, especially when he talked about Clement Greenberg’s leading disciple, Michael Fried. Sneering at Fried’s penchant for “delectation,” as Smithson called it, his brow would furrow, his eyes would glower, and his voice turned gravelly with contempt. The point of art, he believed, was not to provide some specialized sort of pleasure but to reveal the entropic forces ceaselessly at work in nature and even more ominously in culture. Intent on undermining our happy faith in progress, Smithson was a darkly visionary artist—a pessimist in militant opposition to Piet Mondrian and every other optimist in the ranks of avant-garde utopians.

Harris Rosenstein was sanguine. A Senior Editor at Artnews, Harris swam with delight in the scene’s currents, crosscurrents, and quiet backwaters. Unburdened by dogma, he attended to works of art on their own terms, not to adjudicate but to understand. Because he was one of the Artnews editors I worked with (the others were Betsy Baker and John Ashbery, who recruited me to write reviews), I often benefitted from Harris’s astute enthusiasms, and it was always a relief to run into him at a party. One crowded evening at Alex and Ada Katz’s loft, Harris and I talked at such length that Phyllis approached us with a baguette, offering it as a prize for the evening’s longest conversation. It could just as well have been a prize for asocial behavior.

The art world is, after all, a community, and Harris, who did not lack small talk, felt at home there. I did not, so almost from the start of my life as an art critic I presented the odd case of one who cared about art but not about the world where it lives. I understood the purpose of galleries and the art market, of the art press and museums. I was willing to admit that these institutions are necessary. Yet I did not feel that their necessity is absolute. Though I have never formulated an alternative to the art world as we know it, I’ve had a half-conscious, unarticulated sense that the status quo, as it evolved from one decade to the next, is not inevitable. Nor is it inevitable that art criticism provide readers with hip phrases with which to enliven their small talk. Criticism should bring to light the meanings that connect art to the world beyond the art world. That is the only certainty I have found in all my decades of writing about art—not a bad discovery, considering that the courage to be uncertain about works of art is all that keeps them alive and worth attending to in the first place.