Manifestos, My Archive, Cecily Brown, Lynne Tillman
Criticism, as a genre of writing and an institution, such as it is, may survive for some years yet—in some form—as a pastime, a “side gig,” and as a death doula for empire and the nation state while Pluto journeys through Aquarius as it did some two hundred and fifty years ago. However, criticism as a profession, in terms of its viability as a form of paid work and its reputation in the larger culture (again, such as it is), is likely already unsalvageable…
So began my bleak (and, ultimately, I hope, not that bleak) manifesto for last week’s 4Columns event, which was so eventful that it made it into Annie Armstrong’s Wet Paint column, though not with the headline or precise context that I would wish for. But, since gossip is one of the forms I advocated for in my polemic, maybe it’s perfect. (Rumor has it the evening’s texts may be published.)
Anyway, my end-of-the-world rhetoric (re: publishing in general, really) got me thinking that I should back up all of my writing before the ship sinks, and I paid for a service to scrape my bylines so I could make PDFs of everything. (All 650+ articles!) And though this was not my original intention, now I have a searchable archive of everything from 4Columns, Artforum, Bookforum, CULTURED, and the New Yorker (plus a few random things) here. (I will need to manually add TNY Goings On About Town reviews from the first few years as those were unsigned, and I still need to organize the clips a little. And maybe I’ll also upload my print juvenilia and catalogue essays…)
Meanwhile, for TCT I wrote a Close Look on Cecily Brown’s mid-career retrospective at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. (Free link at the end.) And we published our first LA missive—a moving piece by Ross Simonini, who considered the Jospeh Beuys exhibition at the Broad in light of losing his Altadena home in the Eaton fire.
The great Lynne Tillman’s book of stories Thrilled to Death comes out TODAY with a release party on March 30 at Parkside. Then, on April 3, I will be talking with Lynne about the collection at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. x