Michael Kimmelman is the main art critic for The New York Times. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books. His most recent book is The Accidental Masterpiece.
As loyal readers may recall, I heard him speak with Alain de Botton at the 92nd St. Y a little while ago. I chatted with him earlier this week about conducting one’s art education in public, the benefits of collecting lightbulbs, and the fragmented nature of today’s art world.
Liz Lopatto: How does one go about becoming an art critic?
Michael Kimmelman: I fell into this job by chance, and I certainly didn’t set out to be an art critic. I had been interested in art, and I’d been studying art history in graduate school, but I wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a newspaper art critic, for various reasons–partly to do with my academic training and partly because I hadn’t done any journalism, visual art journalism, before I came to the Times.
But when I was at the Times, I was first a music critic. And John Russell, my predecessor, learned that I had been trained as an art historian, and I guess was desperate enough that he asked me if I would also be interested in writing about art. And although it was the field in which I was academically trained, I hesitated, because I didn’t have any particular connection to doing art criticism. It took a little persuading, believe it or not.
So I tried it out. I tried in part because I was becoming a little frustrated by the form of music criticism, which is by nature both a miniature and also generally constrained to reaction to performances of repertoire that has already been around a long time. So I tried writing an art review, and I thought, “Well, this isn’t so bad.” And I did a little bit more and a little bit more, and finally realized, yes, this is much more up my alley.
Basically, once I switched over to it, I had to–and I still am–conduct my education in public, in a very conspicuous way. I didn’t come out of the contemporary art world, as do most art critics. And that had its advantages, but it also had some disadvantages too. It was fortunate, and in some ways difficult to not have planned to do this from the beginning. How’s that for a long answer?
LL: Sounds pretty good to me. So, from something I imagine was one of the things you had to learn in public as you were beginning to write art reviews: what’s your personal criteria for evaluating if a piece of art is worthwhile?
MK: You mean, how do I judge whether something’s good or bad? Well, I just make it up. [laughs] What happens is that it’s like anything else in life. You grow to have certain experiences which are meaningful to you and which connect to other things that you see, and you begin to see things as valuable because they relate to things that are meaningful.
There are many answers to “What makes a work of art interesting?” and right now, when the art world is just all over the place–and it’s busy, and hectic, and diverse, if not terribly compelling–it’s hard to understand what kind of standard will fit. Because there are a lot of standards for what art should be, and what good art is.
I actually think that part of it, the idea that we have a lot of different art worlds, is not so bad. It’s been happening for many years, and for many reasons, and I think what it reflects is that lots of different people found different ways into art. And found different ways into what are, for them, meaningful experiences. Those experiences are not all the same. Not everyone needs to look at the same sort of paintings to believe this is what good art is, or to have some takeaway reaction which lingers for more than a second, which is one of the criteria of a good work of art.
But I also think the biggest problem in evaluating art is that people feel unable to just look at what’s in front of their nose. Because I think art has, in some ways, and for specific historic reasons, isolated itself by creating this impression that you need to have a body of knowledge without which, you cannot really understand what you’re looking at in a museum. So people walk into museums and galleries and they’re intimidated. They feel that without this body of knowledge, they really don’t know what they’re looking at. They don’t know how to react. They don’t do what–really, what artists do, which is just look, decide about what they see right in front of their faces. And to be fair, that’s really quite hard to do.
I found that in school, I wasn’t open to, or I wasn’t trained properly to just keep my eyes open and look . And decide for myself whether or not I found something interesting, apart from whether I knew exactly what it was, I knew who the artist was, I knew the history and what the historians and critics had said about it.
So one of the first things I did when I got this job was to go around to museums with artists, which produced a book called Portraits, in which I went around with artists to the Met, at first, with the idea of seeing through all these different artists’ eyes, Rashomon-like. Having each one look at a different part of the museum, or seeing, sometimes, the same works in different ways. The point there, which was quite instructive to me, too, was that there is no single correct way to look at art. Artists selfishly look at art for what interests them, or how the work relates to their work–which means they find all sorts of things in works of art which may be outside standard art history and have nothing to do with what are accepted opinions. They’re just looking. And that’s the hardest thing to do.
I think in trying to conduct my education, I try to remember that just looking and keeping your eyes open is essential. You can’t worry whether received opinion is one thing or another. There often are reasons why certain artists get well-known and liked, of course, but in the art world, especially now, when it is rambling and crazy, there’s nothing that is universally admired, and so in a certain sense, one is liberated not to have to worry about what correct opinion is. [laughs]
It occurs to me that I’m supposed to provide correct opinion, so I shouldn’t have said that. [laughs] There you are.
LL: So you’ve got a book that came out about a year ago–a delightful book, by the way–called The Accidental Masterpiece that, it seems to me, focuses on the role of chance in art. I was wondering what drew you to this subject.
MK: There is something of chance in it. I do hope that–to speak in a kind of literary way–that it would be an argument for having a catholic view of what art is. Which is to say that it can consist of Bonnard and also Ray Johnson and anonymous snapshots and all sorts of things that you might come upon by chance in life.
I think chance is one of those issues in the twentieth century that was part of modernism’s basic argument but also has to do with the fact that the world is full of creative possibilities, if we were open to looking for creativity in unconventional places. And you know, my life experience has shown that to be a useful way to conduct one’s life. So I think that’s probably why it ended up there.
I also thought there were some wonderful stories to tell, which involved characters whose work may or may not have been a matter of chance. But you know, chance also enters into how careers are made or forgotten. Charlotte Salomon–it’s by chance that Charlotte, this girl, who wrote this rather extraordinary book of illustrated semi-autobiography. There were hundreds of these watercolors, which she put together with no expectation at all that anybody would ever see this, and then she was swept up during World War II and died in Auschwitz. It was by chance, really, that this thing was preserved and is now sort of the art equivalent of Anne Frank’s work. God knows how many things like it were lost, and are lost every day.
So I think understanding the way life offers us unusual opportunities and some of them we never notice, and some by chance strike us–being aware of that fact is one of the most poignant things about art, and its relationship to life in general.
LL: My favorite was “The Art of Collecting Lightbulbs.” There was something about that that was joyous and very human. I was wondering how you found out about all of these people.
MK: I don’t actually remember how Dr. [Hugh Francis] Hicks [a Baltimore dentist and proprietor of the “Museum of Incandescent Lighting,” a very large collection of lightbulbs in his basement] came to my attention, though I was very interested at the time in Wonder Cabinets, the 17 th and 18th century conglomerations of whatever’s the biggest, the smallest, the strangest, the rarest, that kind of thing. And I was also interested in the roots of modern museums in wonderments, this kind of irrational beauty and strangeness. So all these kind of ideas, which became rationalized and categorized and institutionalized over time in museums and in our own imagination.
There was a point at which I started to look around for wacky museums and collections. I came across the Trash Museum in New Jersey–and if you travel around the country, the world, you find all these odd corners, like the Lock and Key Museum in Paris, which is one of the most delightful and beautiful places. It’s this idea of discovering something unusual. It’s something we all want to experience when we go to a museum. That’s why we go to a museum, to find something really cool and unusual that seems out of the ordinary, which is what art is, I think. Or what it’s supposed to be: something out of the ordinary.
So I started to look around for these places, and I heard somewhere about this guy in Baltimore. I called him up and he said, “Sure, come down,” so I went there, and it was his house. He had this townhouse with his dental office on the ground floor and his basement was this museum of 75,000 lightbulbs and lightbulb accoutrements, and sconces, and whatever–I don’t know, I’m not a lightbulb guy myself. But it was delightful, and he was delightful. He said people would come down there and stare in wonder, and that was exactly right.
Also, it wasn’t so much that I found individual lightbulbs beautiful. It was just–the whole place was something out of another time, these old cabinets with these yellowed, type-written labels next to these mysterious objects that were arranged, crowded together. It looked like–well, it looked like a Wonder Cabinet, except at the end it had a folding table where he served milk and cookies to schoolchildren. Yes, I enjoyed writing about that very much.
I also thought that chapter was meaningful, to me especially, because these days, when so much collecting is about just sheer cash, prestige, fashion–and there’s just so much crap being bought and sold. It just seems so craven and obsessed with its own wealth. And this idea of collecting the way that Dr. Hicks does seems like something of a creative act. It’s nothing to do with prestige, or flaunting money or social cache. It’s got a lot more to do with an expression of creative desire.
The Mutter Museum is another one like that, the one in Philadelphia with all these medical oddments. Which is actually, like the Museum of Incandescent Lighting , another place where you feel as though you’ve walked out of time.
The second half of the interview will appear tomorrow. Past interviews include Frank Wilson (one and two), Michael Lemonick (one and two), Claire Messud (one and two), and Marisha Pessl (one and two).