Ouch! Etc.

Self-portrait of the art critic: John Hurrell, Self Portrait I, 1993, acrylic and ink on paper maps

As I've mentioned before, I am no stranger to the stonkingly bad review. I know the heart-pounding moment as you open the paper to the arts page, holding your breath as you scan the review for words like "tour de force", "must-see" or "important"; followed by the sense of deflation and anguish as your eye instead catches on "disappointing", "inconsistent" and "unresolved".

I don't have to exert myself too greatly, then, to imagine what the staff of the National Gallery in Edinburgh must be feeling this morning after Richard Dorment's truly excoriating review of their exhibition, 'Impressionism & Scotland', appeared in yesterday's Telegraph.

Dorment (rhymes with "torment") opens by wondering whether the title of an exhibition can be reported to the Advertising Standards Authority for deliberately misleading the public. And it all goes downhill from there.

The work itself is terrible, reckons Dorment: the show "tells us nothing about Impressionism in France or in Scotland - but at least it confirms that even when French art hit rock bottom there was always some clueless Scot who could do worse." But the curatorial premise, it seems, is even worse: "At times it looks as though the curators tipped the contents of the storage areas of every museum in Scotland upside down just to see what fell out."

He concludes one of the most eyewatering reviews I've ever read by pointing the finger squarely at the two individuals he considers the prime culprits:

"The blame for this mess lies with the curator, Frances Fowle, who was also responsible for the unreadable catalogue. But the director general, John Leighton, is also at fault for not pulling the plug on this waste of time the minute he realised how flimsy the material in it was going to be."

Crikey. Smackdown.

Perhaps there's something rising in the global ether: over the ditch at The Art Life, the air is running blue as they tear strips off a guerilla advertising team, Mind Heist, who had the temerity not only to (a) monkey around with Martin Creed's Work no.850 at the Tate Britain, but (b) to attempt to pass off their nonsense as an interventionist art event. When all the time they were advertising running shoes.

And closer to home, art critic John Hurrell has pinned a large 'kick me!' sign to his back, asking his readers to comment on his own artwork which is currently being exhibited at the City Art Rooms in Lorne Street, Auckland. Owner-operators of galleries that also do framing, the Waikato Museum of Art and History, and Chris Heaphy, take note.

Critical care

Tracey Moffat, Fourth #1, 2001, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. A truly fantastic work, and not the subject of a stiff review on eyeCONTACT.

Over at eyeCONTACT, New Zealand's hardest-working art reviewer John Hurrell's been writing up a storm lately. He's been calling it how he sees it; "The venue is not the sort of venue I take seriously. Too small, usually too much work closely hung, often part of a framing business and a lot of undersized and mediocre work. The type of gallery commonly found in Parnell." Take that! And elsewhere: "despite all that work... the results invariably look gross. Clunky, mixed with a dreary civic narrative." Ouch, etc. But as John says in his site introduction, eyeCONTACT is "about direct talk, perhaps two people speaking face to face, one of them asserting an unpopular position and staring down the opposition."

I would imagine he's going to need to do a fair bit of staring down after those recent reviews.

Something I've particularly enjoyed are John's musings on how an artist might have made his work more "intriguing". "If C---’s paintings were a lot bigger, maybe vertically bifurcated with conventional paint used in one of the halves ... Perhaps they need extension of surface and complexity of composition?" But then, perhaps wisely, John veers away from finishing the work for the artist: "I’m thinking out loud here (and starting to burble). He’d have to test the options."

I was reminded of this yesterday when filling out the Massey Arts Journalism survey at the behest of Bestof3. (Only a few little tweaks to the truth to make myself sound more impressive -- blogging does count as arts journalism, doesn't it?) One of the questions was whether you believed it was ever acceptable for a critic to advise an artist on how to make their work. Well, it depends on who the critic is -- and the artist -- but there wasn't a box to tick for that. Another one was whether you think it's acceptable for a critic to exhibit their own work. I ticked yes, thinking of Rita Angus's point of view (discussed recently by Artandmylife) that only practitioners are qualified to criticise another artist's work (no box for that, either). Actually I don't think it matters what a critic's day job is, as long as they can write well and have something to say. John Hurrell's eyeCONTACT scores on both counts.

I have been on the receiving end of some stiff reviews myself over the years (luckily none of them from Mr. Hurrell). Some of them would strip paint. Of course, at those moments I have done what everyone does when confronted by negative criticism: 1. Laughed and said it didn't worry me; 2. Made offensive and filthy remarks about the reviewer's intellect, personal appearance, and dress sense. And felt a bit better. I understand Colin McCahon had a list -- an actual, handwritten, itemised list of critics and other people who'd done him bad turns -- headed 'Hate List'. He kept it for decades.

At a book launch, I once met a critic who'd given me a shite review about 15 years previously. Pretending to be mature and nonchalant, and like it had just popped into my mind, I laughingly quoted the particularly choice line which was still burned into my memory like a plasma screen left on pause too long. He looked a bit shifty. "Did I really write that?" he said. Chuckled, and changed the subject, and disappeared off to the drinks table, and that was it. I felt vaguely disappointed, but I'm not entirely sure why. Well, clearly it was more important to me than to him: maybe that was the problem. Perhaps we want our critics to care...

Most artists I know pretend not to read their reviews. There's nothing worse than being asked by someone else what you think of a terrible review of your own work. Best to pretend that it didn't even enter your radar. (And then add the reviewer's name to your own handwritten list...)