A Critical Memoir

Originally published in ARP (Art Review & Preview), 2007

I still have the T-shirt Mary Abbe (then Mary Martin) sent me in June 1982. She was public relations officer for Walker Art Center, and it was a nice move, sending a shirt to an underpaid college student who was just leaving a yearlong job as co-editor of d’ART, the short-lived citywide arts and entertainment rag published each Friday by the Minnesota Daily. 

I had been making $500 a month and easily working 60 hours a week, writing about art and editing articles by a bank of bright lights (including my rock critic co-editor, the brilliant wild man Eric Lindbom, now a PR guy in LA). The job was exasperating, sleep-depriving fun, and the perks were splendid—freebies to Northrop Dance and Minn Orch, the occasional guest list at 7th Street Entry, cutout LPs and access to artists whose work I had previously studied in history books. We wrote on manual typewriters, and ran a cover story on the eerie new rage in music: the Sony Walkman.

The 1982 Walker T-shirt was for an exhibition called “The Anxious Edge” (including work by Cindy Sherman, David Salle and Bruce Charlesworth), which was in part an expression of the national mood (recession, Reagan). But though the state of the country might have been sorry, I was a happy painter and writer, grooving to Prince and the Replacements while careening through feminism’s second wave.

Mary at the Walker, along with Karen Gysin, was good to me, the fledgling arts writer. She arranged my first big interview with the painter Wayne Thiebaud, whom I’ll always remember as a really kind man, and quotable. Later, in conjunction with Walker shows, I spoke to Frank Stella (peculiar and not very quotable), Nancy Graves (the meanest interviewee ever), Bruce Nauman (humble). 

During my tenure at the Daily, I met Elaine deKooning, phoned Alice Neel and had brunch with the performance artist Stuart Sherman. I was buoyed by studio visits with Walter Jost and Carrie Pierce, who exhibited at Rifle Sport, and got to know dear Frank Gaard. I was nurtured by WARM Gallery, which in addition to offering artists a huge ground floor exhibition space in the Wyman Building, offered a forum for young critics in panel discussions and the pages of WARM Journal.

I recall biking and busing between downtowns, from campus to campus, sometimes just to write a descriptive paragraph for a calendar listing. Rely on a press release for adjectives? Never! (Though with a piddling budget, we didn’t scoff at those free tickets.)

Later, as a freelance critic, I wrote to make a living for publications that barely paid—Chicago-based New Art Examiner, a wonderful forum that was forever pissing off writers for its editorial decisions or lack of payment; City Pages; and the late, great Artpaper under the editorship of the brainy and sweet Lane Relyea (now teaching in Northwestern University’s Art Theory and Practice program). Lane was the editor who best pushed me to write pithy criticism, rather than the fast reviews that were most in demand.

Back when Glen Hanson Gallery was almost alone in the warehouse district, I met then-local critic Eleanor Heartney for breakfast at the New French Cafe. Over baguette and café au lait we groused about the Strib’s sad little art reviews, and wondered how we could infiltrate the daily papers. Eleanor went on to enviable success as a critic in NYC, and I, eventually, infiltrated one of the dailies—the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I started in 1988, in a six-month, half-time internship sponsored by the Center for Arts Criticism. I was hired permanently only because I agreed to do restaurant reviews half the time.

My tenure at the paper was in many ways the best moment of my professional life and, until the past few years, the best-paid. I learned how to ask hard questions and to write fast and accurately. I finagled time with big dogs like Richard Avedon and kept an eye on deserving underdogs like Speedboat Gallery. I am still proud of my work there.

The newspaper, while it often valued glibness over depth, also allowed me to expand my purview by covering the interstice between art and politics during the NEA culture wars of the 1990s. I interviewed David Wojnarowicz and Andres Serrano, and even ended up doing on-the-street reporting when local artists protested the state of affairs on Nicollet Mall. It was exhilarating. 

But once I stopped writing about restaurants (believe me, it got old), I wasn’t so popular with the lowest-common-denominator interests at the paper. Art finances, blockbusters and acquisitions seemed more important than art and artists, and stories about troubles (the embattled Minnesota Museum of Art in particular) were torturous to crank out. I cried when a piece detailing the shortcomings of MMA and its director, the late, beloved Jim Czarniecki, ran on the front page.

“Anxious” described many of my later days at the Pioneer Press. In 1991, a repetitive stress injury and surgery on my keyboard-addled arm had me out on workers’ comp and, eventually, reduced my hours. On a beat that attracted few if any advertisers, I had limited sway. I saw unappreciated old-timers at the paper gone bitter after having willingly strapped on golden handcuffs crafted by the excellent union. But mostly, as a onetime artist myself, I was tired of writing about other people’s creative endeavors rather than having my own. I left the paper in 1995.

The Pioneer Press never hired another art critic, but relied on other staff and the Twin Cities deep pool of freelancers. My visual art counterpart at the Star Tribune, Mary Abbe, has long outlasted me, hanging on despite the hemorrhage of journalists there. At the Pioneer Press, I doubt I would have been able to retain my visual arts beat without assuming other reporting duties.

The Walker-sponsored website Mnartists.org has relieved some of the art-press famine, and weekly papers do their bit. But don’t try making your living writing about art; most local critics are underpaid, if they’re lucky, for their work. (This new rag lets us write for free.)

As for me, I’m taking this opportunity to reminisce while I continue to seek work that fulfills me as much as writing about art did, in fits and starts, during the 1980s and ‘90s.