Writing

Writing

Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely

Contributed by Rebecca Chace / It’s 5:40 AM in New York and 12:40 PM in Palestine on August 10, 2024. I run back and forth inside my dark Brooklyn apartment, barefoot in a T-shirt and underpants. The workshop I’m leading for teachers in the West Bank begins in twenty minutes and my internet is down. Unplug the router; count to ten; plug it back in. I’m the one who’s supposed to have good internet. I have hot water, air conditioning, access to health care, and a well-stocked bodega on the corner. I lead workshops for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, which has partnered with Al Quds University for sixteen years. When Ibrahim, the soft-spoken director of the program for first-year students, reached out to schedule their annual faculty training sessions, we assumed he meant the workshops would take place on Zoom, not in-person. 

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News Comment Writing

Part 2: On “negative criticism”

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It’s tempting to lament the demise of the takedown review. The form invites both schadenfreude and outrage, which are energizing. In the literary world, it had been fading for some time until B.R. Myers and Dale Peck revived it in the naughts. They enjoyed an extended moment of visceral celebrity, but it seemed to burn out relatively quickly on a pyre of stern earnestness. Literary Hub does publish a list of the year’s “most scathing book reviews,” but the targeted screeds – self-promoting Beltway memoirs, vanity projects by anointed novelists, didactic polemics masquerading as fiction – tend to be overripe, low-hanging fruit that would be exempt from even the most charitable standard of forbearance. The general rule of civility is still that the compulsion to shape opinion is best served by measured reason rather than reactive assault.

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News Comment Writing

On “negative criticism”

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Sean Tatol, the art critic who writes a snarky website called Manhattan Art Review, recently penned a piece for The Point about art criticism titled “Negative Criticism, a sentimental education.” In an era in which many critics prefer to describe work rather than judge it, Tatol’s Manhattan Art Review is notable for the “Kritic’s Korner” — short, sometimes scathing reviews that include a star ranking system: five is great, four is good, three is okay, two is bad, and one is awful. At artnet critic Ben Davis took a deep dive into Tatol’s essay in a two-part piece (one and two), that brings in ideas by other critics who have written on the topic. Davis wonders if “’negative criticism’”’ is the right way to frame the solution, or even if ‘the question of judgment’ is really a full picture of what is at stake.” I asked contributors at Two Coats of Paint if they had any thoughts about the essays or the state of art criticism today, and today we are running responses from critic David Carrier and artist-critic Laurie Fendrich.

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Obituary Writing

Dave Hickey and the louche tradition

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A clear strain in American letters celebrates the capacity of insouciant and unabashedly disreputable people to say things that matter by cutting through the flatulent smog that tends to enshroud orthodoxies. The Lost Generation had Ernest Hemingway, and Baby Boomers had Hunter S. Thompson and Dave Hickey, who passed away in November at 82. These guys particularly Thompson but undeniably Hemingway and Hickey as well showcased their disdain for convention and their embrace of the drunken and the stoned, the naughty and the down-and-out. But all three were dead serious about life and death, and that emerged in their work.

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