Matthew Barney's Hemorrhoidal Distractor notwithstanding, there is no shortage of good art today, only responsible critics. When the distinguished associate editor of Harper's, Roger D. Hodge, sings the praises of Barney's Field Dressing, of a young Yale graduate sliding up and down a metal pole, applying cooled Vaseline to his orifices, we know that art criticism is in a crisis, just as surely as we know we don't have to argue for the disposal of our excrement -- because it stinks. Before works entitled Anal Sadistic Warrior, Constipator Block, Roger Hodge declares: "His work demands awe," or, "of world historical significance . . ."
What has gone wrong? Let's begin (and end) with post-modern criticism (deconstruction) that encourages/empowers (ad extremis) the art critic to make his subjectivity the measure of all art, with the result that everything and anything these days passes for art, a development that inspires the categorically untalented into believing that an original/outrageous work will transform their God-given mediocrity into an enduring truth.
Enter Matthew Barney, critics' choice for the 90s, whose palette consists of scotums, anuses, testis etc, who, suffering from a variety of disabling (art-enabling) retentive dementias, has managed to transform his manifest self-loathing and sickness of being into an acceptable art form -- with the necessary collaboration of the nation's most esteemed art critics such as the NY Times' M. Kimmelman, who proclaimed Barney as "the most crucial artist of his generation."
If the art critic sets the tone from the top down, the art you flatter, Mr. Hodge, has a direct bearing on those impressionable minds you instruct. It should give you cause to pause on the consequences of what you and your ilk have legitimized as works of art: such as, Barney's Open-Close, of the artist masturbating and then plastering his anus shut.
How are eager young minds (who regard you as role model) to defend against your eloquent turn of phrase, your presumptuous reading-into of meanings and significations where none exist? Referring to the descent of the testicles you write: "this is man's fundamental ontology, man's forgetfulness of his own being . . ." Ontology and forgetfulness, terms ordinarily used to express philosophical concepts, now in the service of genital art, Onanism and Anal Sadistic Warrior?
Critiques that resort to this seamless mixing of unlike, non-analogous idioms, once the sole prerogative of advertising tricksters: (Nike: the shoe that 'cares'), has now become stock and trade of the art critic. But with one decisive difference: when we buy the advertised product (the Nike shoe) we expect it will perform for us, whereas we 'buy into' Barney's 'scrotum clamped with ribbons' -- an art of dubious redemptive value -- only because you, Mr. Hodge, have artfully persuaded us the work is meaningful.
With 'painterly words' you have evolved a new genre of art criticism I call glibsterism - the disingenuous employment of superior writing and rhetorical skills to raise inherently inferior work to undeserved eminence -- to the effect that the usurping critic becomes responsible for the content of art. Not so long ago, the man who plastered shut his anus was simply a man with a problem to work out; he was not an exalted art form or an exemplary symbol of the 'genesis of male sexuality.' The second danger you pose is that consequent to your catastrophic disregard of the norms of common-sense and aesthetics, a right-wing back-lash will erupt, and the very things common-sense people abhor, such as censorship in the arts, will be ushered in on a wave of Helmsian indignation that calls for, without debate, the immediate disposal of all art deemed disgusting and damaging to the moral fabric of society.
Consider, in a moment of silence, Mr. Hodge, that you and your kind are the unacknowledged custodians of culture. Based on your recommendations, you determine the contents of the spaces we set aside for art. Unless you make your very assumptions that which most deserve to be called into question, and the rehabilitation of taste your first priority, and rediscover the necessary relationship between aesthetics and morality, what is already bad in our society is going to get worse.
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