Best of 2022: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Anthony Lane's "Living for the City"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Gorgeous? Oh, yeah.” | “Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”);

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “All Together Now,” April 11, 2022 (“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.” | “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience, and, as in the case of Pritchard, being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump”);

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Scaling Up,” June 13, 2022 [“The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.” | “Inexhaustibly surprising smears, blotches, fugitive lines, and incomplete patterns feel less applied than turned loose, to tell enigmatic stories of their own”);

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Dutch Magus,” October 3, 2022 [“Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch”];

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Stilled Life,” October 10, 2022 (“Then there are the still-lifes of remarkably unremarkable windowsill miscellanies: some random fruit and bits of studio gear transfigured by a happenstance of daylight”); 

6. James Wood, “By the Collar," April 11, 2022 (“These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation”);

7. Anthony Lane, “Living for the City,” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“ 'The Worst Person in the World' strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle”);

8. Alex Ross, “Moonlight,” January 31, 2022 (“Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly”);

9. Merve Emre, "Getting to Yes," February 14 & 21, 2022 ("From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons - a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is 'dressingown,' like 'scrotumtightening,' a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?");

 10. James Wood, "The Numbers Game," December 19, 2022 ("There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them").