What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.
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| Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick) |
1. David Salle
2. Wayne Koestenbaum
3. Gini Alhadeff
4. Susan Tallman
5. Johanna Fateman
The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books.
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John, do you like Jerry Saltz's reviews and essays?
ReplyDeleteI'm embarrassed to say I've never read him. Maybe I should start?
DeleteI’ve just spent an hour exploring New York magazine’s archive of Jerry Saltz writing. What a revelation! I feel sheepish that I didn’t know about him. He was not on my radar. But he is now. Thank you for bringing him to my attention. I see he has a new book out, a collection of his essays and reviews called “Art Is Life.” I’m going to order it.
DeleteI really like Simon Schama's writing. There's not enough of it in the New Yorker, so a regular beat as an art critic would be great.
ReplyDeleteFunny you should say that. I was thinking of adding Schama to my list of candidates. He was the magazine's art critic back in the mid-1990s: see, for example, "True Grid" (on Piet Mondrian); "California Dreaming" (on David Hockney); and "Dangerous Curves" (on Ellsworth Kelly) - all brilliant!
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