On Quitting Art Writing (455 words)

Last year, after decades of banging away at it, I made peace with the fact that I have little interest in conventional art writing. It was liberating to no longer try to be an “art writer,” and instead simply write about art. I was free!

This happened unexpectedly, through the MFAH 100, an off-the-cuff personal project in which I wrote 100 words about 100 artworks from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston collection, in honor of the museum’s 100th anniversary.

The idea may seem arbitrary and even a little kitschy, but I discovered there is a poetry in the 100-word limit. It forced me to cut the unnecessaries, by which I mean the customary topics of art writing that sound correct, and hopefully, knowledgeable. These topics are:

1. The artist’s biography
2. The artist’s intention
3. Historical context
4. Technique

Make a cocktail of these four ingredients, swirl it around and you can dance around any artwork, writing long, safe, expository essays that will win you nods of approval.

But those topics—all of which, it’s true, can add to one’s appreciation and enjoyment of an artwork—are ultimately only window dressing. The more we hammer on about an artist’s nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, or orientation; the more we suppress our own response in favor of what we are told the artist’s intention to be; the more we buttress the discussion of a given artwork with historical background or technical descriptions of craft—the more we isolate ourselves, creating distance from an artwork. All that “understanding” risks straying from the most important understanding: the essence of the work itself, and how it speaks to a universal human experience.

With only 100 words to work with, I immediately realized I didn’t have the space for these conventions. I had to jettison the four pillars of art writing if I wanted to get to the fascia beneath the fleshy blubber of art-speak. I didn’t discuss who the artist was—didn’t even mention whether they were living or dead—because it was more important to find resonance in the works of art themselves. I wanted to try and make each artwork alive and personal to each reader.

It was the most enjoyable writing about art I’ve ever done. As I get older and see more clearly the cyclical, constant nature of news and noise, I’m only interested in the things that make life worth living, and how we humans draw each other’s attention to those things. I only want to keep discovering all the interesting, beautiful and sublime art that exists—all those efforts by all those people to make sense of life, and to remind us of the better angels of our nature.

untitled by Joshua Foster on Flickr