Who We Talk About When When We Talk about Art

Via Modern Kicks I found this wonderful article by Berlin-based critic Jennifer Allen on how to talk about the art you haven't actually seen. I'm so delighted by this piece, I'm tempted to reprint the entire thing here (actually, I'm having a hard time choosing among my favorite passages), but she starts by explaining how she was saved from a series of awkward social situations that might have been, because she had postponed seeing a chunk of this summer's Grand Art Tour and folks were expecting her to be up-to-date in the dishing and dialog at parties and such:

[M]y wisest move had been picking up the book Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read).1 Written by Pierre Bayard, a literature critic and professor from the Université de Paris 8, this book-length essay – both an apology and a how-to guide originally intended for literary professionals – became this year’s surprise best-seller in France.

Allen suggests one can simply replace the word "book" in Bayard's text with the word "art" to arrive at the perfect manual for surviving those chatty art parties where everyone seems to have seen everything. Here's how:

Bayard’s first words of advice: don’t be ashamed, you’re in good company. The author assures us that he and most literati, dead or alive, never did their homework. Take Paul Valéry, who penned a homage to Marcel Proust a year after the latter’s death in 1922: ‘Although I hardly know a single volume of the great work of Marcel Proust […], I am nevertheless keenly aware, from the little I’ve had the leisure to read in In Search of Lost Time, that literature has just experienced an exceptional loss.’2 Oscar Wilde didn’t like to read the books he reviewed. Michel de Montaigne couldn’t remember the ones he wrote himself. Why should art lovers have higher standards, even if most art works are consumed with a cursory glance? [...]

Books and art works can be pretexts for a complex exchange in which many elements come into play beyond the storyline and the artistic medium: collective and individual memory, relative cultural values, power structures, social circles and reputations – of both the speakers and the works themselves. Physically absent in a conversation, books and art become imaginary, virtual, ghostly, fluctuating, even fictional entities, which Bayard urges us to invent with gusto. Since this imaginary library – or museum – is collective, everyone has the right, if not the obligation, to participate in its upkeep by talking its holdings into existence.

But the gem of keen observation here is revealed in this passage:

There are always enough details floating around about art works to make associations creatively. If you make a mistake, Bayard tells us, you can always pretend you confused one work with another. Talking about yourself – Wilde’s modus operandi – involves treating the book/art work as a pretext not for a conversation but for an autobiographical note. For Wilde, a fanatical non-reader avant la lettre, the object of criticism was himself, not the work: ‘I never read a book I must review’, said Wilde, ‘it prejudices me so.’3 With evident admiration Bayard advises making a perfunctory reference to the work’s title, status or atmosphere before getting down to the real business of you.

Indeed, there's nary a conversation about art I can recall that didn't eventually segue into an oration about the preferences (art related or not) of the person I was talking with. Which I'm very guilty of myself (see, I did it just there!).

Armed with this encouragement, I now feel empowered to share my impressions of a wide range of exhibitions, from the 1913 Armory Show to the 2009 Venice Biennale (who said the art has to be made yet for me to talk about it?). Lucky you, no?

Lucky all of us.

Have a great weekend all.