New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, in town last week to lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art, didn’t waste any time putting us rubes in our place. “Chicago’s a great place to be from,” he said. “It’s a place that has always sent talented artists and creative types out—a net exporter of talent.” Schjeldahl, who considers himself a New Yorker but admits to being a refugee from small-town Minnesota (rube central, for what it’s worth), describes our little burg as a kind of bin by the lake. “It’s a great place to be, if you have a particular reason,” he said, “and a great place to visit. But I would call it one of the great receptor cities of the world.”
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Schjeldahl was supposed to be talking about the history of art over the last 40 years but confessed that he couldn’t get far from the starting gate, the momentous years of 1967-’68. The MCA’s founding in ’67 was part of a huge shift in how contemporary art figured in American culture, he said. It marked the end of modernism and the avant-garde as they’d been understood to that point, and of private galleries as the nerve centers of contemporary art. The founding of places like the MCA brought institutionalism, professionalism, and academicism to something that had been “wild and woolly,” while the prestige of specific art objects, like paintings, took a dive. Since then, the institutions have been more “consequential” than any of the art shown in them, and have, in fact, generated that art, giving artists an alternative to the commercial scene (which, in the late 60s, was “in such bad odor”) and spawning the likes of conceptualism and installation art. Art was created for the spaces available to show it; the public existed to be educated.
Schjeldahl, who calls himself an “accidental” critic, is also a published poet. He advised art students not to whine, but shared his problem at the New Yorker: “They have more critics than they have pages.” He also noted that the major product coming out of art schools now is artists’ statements, that art history is slide study, and that there are just two options for American artists—a career of selling or a career of setting up video installations in museums. He opined that Jeff Koons at his best is as good as there’s been in the last 20 years, that Damien Hirst is cynical and smart, and that dealer Leo Castelli was a good and honest man. A week earlier, at Archeworks, designer Bruce Mau called for an end to the tyranny of visual fashion, but Schjeldahl said fashion is a necessity: “Without it,” he observed, “everybody would need to know everything about everything all the time.” Here, in a receptor city, that could be especially tough.
Steppenwolf lead Deanna Dunagan, whose previous New York experience was a single performance as an understudy in 1979, says there were rumors of a strike “from the day we walked into the theater.” Dunagan says she doesn’t think anyone in the show really wanted to come to Broadway, “but we wanted the play to be seen in New York, and we didn’t want other people to do it.” Now there’s talk of taking it to London.
