Waxman is a professional critic and art historian who is an instructor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a freelance contributor to the Chicago Tribune, Bad At Sports and Artforum. With 60 WRD/MIN, a traveling performance underwritten by the Warhol Foundation, she visits isolated art locales like Austin, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; and our own Columbus, Ohio to write short reviews on an appointment basis for that untouchable caste in the art world -provincial artists.
So what's weird about that? Well, to start with, the reviews Waxman wrote in Columbus were published by a magazine that no longer has a dedicated art critic or arts editor on staff.* This is part of a nationwide trend among print publications to cut and/or water down arts coverage. Since art criticism has been amputated from our current media experience, part of the allure of being reviewed now lives in its near impossibility. Actually getting to have a serious review written about your work feels almost like a anachronistic novelty, like using a wind-up clock or going to a haberdashery to pick out a spic-and-span trilby. While 60 WRD/MIN clearly serves to invigorate local art scenes it also underscores that out-of-time je ne sais quoi of seeing actual art criticism in contemporary American media. The environment which makes 60 WRD/MIN necessary and intriguing also makes it a bit depressing, like "No, Lori, please don't leave - we need you here!"
But it's also weird for the contradictory impulses that have always been constitutive of art criticism, as Waxman points out on the 60 WRD/MIN site:
"The short review is at once a challenge, an insult, a record, and a piece of advertising. Its purpose is debatable and arguably quite different for the various parties involved: the writer gets a tear sheet, a couple of bucks, and some editorial gratification; the reader, in the best case scenario, gets a succinct, opinionated description of a body of work they probably did not see in person; and the artist gets published recognition and an entry for their bibliography."
In our absolutely mammoth conversation after "The Jump" I ask Waxman about all of that and more - touching on long form versus short form writing, general readership versus professional readership, quality of artwork in regional areas versus metropolitan areas, her PhD dissertation for NYU on radical walking, the theatricality of 60 WRD/MIN, its critical reception and the particularly odd behavior exhibited by a few of our more uncouth Columbusites.
*Arts Editor Melissa Starker left the Alive in December. Recent Artscape articles covering going-ons at the Wexner Center were written by freelancer Tracy Zollinger Turner, who is not listed as being a member of the Alive's staff on their site. And, perhaps tellingly, no one is listed as being the new Arts Editor.
Posts
