Dear Roy (editor of BE),

All the best with the venture, but I’m afraid I’m passed writing for nothing for samizdat publications.  Mind you, that’s exactly what I do once a week in the column I write at www.artcritical.com, my own website where I also publish “interactive reviews”, as I call them.  People recommend shows to see, and readers can then post their own comments once they’ve seen the show, too.  Having let you down you can be rest assured that soon I’ll be pounding on your e-mail box for you to do the same to me!

I know there will be writings of quality in Blunt Edge because you and Rose and Anthony and others who I guess will appear in its pages are decent sensitive people I admire and respect, but…

There is this sneaking suspicion at the back of my mind that there’s going to be a somewhat disgruntled “reactionaries left out in the cold” tone to the publication, and I’m a bit fed up with the whole “Last of the Mohicans” approach to art polemics.  I put in my years as a Peter Fuller protégé.  It really is hilariously funny, by the way, that Julian Stallabrass is giving the Fuller Memorial Lecture which I’ve given up waiting to be invited to deliver.  We used to be notorious at graduate seminars when we were at the Courtauld together with me drumming out and he laying into the Fuller line.  But then, being a one-time Fuller acolyte seems to have gotten me to a similar place at Modern Painters.  I ran into Karen Wright the other day at the Dia Foundation.  She gave me a big hug and said, “We had a tremendous glitzy Modern Painters party last night.  We should have invited you.”

I don’t want to put down the selection of Julian, by the way.  His book has one extremely fine chapter in it where he talks about the downward spiral that occurs when real criticism is eroded by hype.  The problem with Julian as I see it is that while he has a shrewd analysis of what’s wrong with light conceptualism, all he seems to want in its place is another dose of heavy conceptualism.   Consider the flimsy array ofnon-entity politicos he trotted out when Matthew Collings challenged him to name artists he liked.  Isn’t Julian just the Sister Wendy of Zhdanovists?  He actually has no aesthetic sensibility to speak of whatsoever.  You’ve never asked me for advice about the Fuller lecture, so I profer some with trepidation.  But there are some pretty impressive writers this side of the pond who are totally unknown in England, which is so convinced it’s the centre of the art universe these days, like Dave Hickey for instance, whose hilarious debunking of official kunsthalle culture is coupled with passionate avowal of the beauty of images.  He is, to boot, a genuine Ruskinian.  I’d have thought it would do much more credit to PF’s memory if the lecture bearing his name expanded international awareness in England that values that Peter cared about actually thrive in unlikely quarters, rather than just confirming parochial, insular prejudices of the “We Hate Damien Hirst” variety. 

Anyhow, the inevitable has happened.  I set out to tell you why I wasn’t going to do a rant for Blunt Edge and not get paid for it.  But now, of course, you are welcome to commit this surly drivel to print!

Warm regards,

DC

And do write some interactive reviews for artcritical! (www.artcritical.com)

 

Cover Drawing                                                          ROSE  WYLIE