Let's Talk Around since not About

In a discussion with Kenneth Koch, John Ashberry said: It's rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is the easier it is to talk about it.

I can certainly agree that discussing what one's own art is about might be difficult, but I think we ought to be careful not to misread this statement as suggesting that one ought not to be able to discuss one's art. This is extremely difficult, and makes many uncomfortable, but an artist ought to be able to help guide people to elements by which they can begin a relationship with the work.

Why not just let people see it and appreciate it (or not) for themselves?

Well, that certainly would be nice. Unfortunately, especially today, we live in a world where we expect to be assisted. That has, even more unfortunately, created an environment in which people do not believe we can understand art and demand someone to tell us about it. Anyone can, and there are gallerists and curators who will, but why not let the artist at least provide some introductory remarks on which to help the viewer set sail–note that I did not suggest the artist talk about the art itself, so much as talk around it, talk about interesting things to consider alongside it, talk about anything that might allow someone who is afraid of art to begin to consider it alone.

So long as we continue to propagate the myth that artists are unintelligent and unintelligible beings of another realm, we will continue to have an audience for art that believes it must learn a foreign language in order to understand what it sees. Artists are trained to produce image-based productions (whether of a lasting or momentary-performative variety) and can equally be encouraged (or even taught) to speak for themselves. John Ashberry was an eloquent art critic who attended to art with care and compassion (even if he claimed in an interview in the Paris Review never to have been interested in producing art criticism but fell into it to make money). He has, however and even, been notably inspired by art, as in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for which he won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Thank you, Parmigianino!

Parmigianino, Self Portrait at the Mirror, c 1524

Not speaking about a work of art may even be important for the work of art to stand on its own, and develop its own life, apart from the artist. As Oscar Wilde said, a work of art "may be marred, and indeed often is so, by an excess of intellectual intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that whcih was put into its lips to say." If the artist knows the meaning of the work of art, and can state it, that meaning may limit how the work can impact. But not speaking about the intention of the work does not negate talking about art, albeit indirectly, because in fact, it is that very indirection that begins to open up for the common viewer the great realm of art, and learn to step sideways out of the dominating elements of the immediate to see something from a different, perhaps convex, point of view.