-What does the word "critic" mean to you,
and is it different than "critical" or "criticism"?
-So, the popular notion of "critic" is
that you are standing in judgment,
you are coming up with a set of hierarchies
for looking at things that,
"This is a 5 and that's a 4 and I give this one a 2."
There's a kind of commercial notion of criticism,
you know, "Do I want to see that film?"
or, "Is this restaurant worth my money?"
I don't really think of what I do that way.
I mean, I am making judgment,
but mainly what I think criticism is --
it's thinking in public.
-When you come into a space like this and you see paintings,
what are you looking for?
What is your first thing to do?
-The first thing I do when I confront something like this
is to describe it.
And a lot of criticism's actually description.
It's a kind of thick description,
just looking really close.
I mean, if we look at these paintings,
you immediately have a set of questions.
-Questions like, "What am I looking at?
Are they white shapes and black lines
or black shapes with white lines?
Why are some messy?
Why is there just one painting with color?
And what do they mean?"
-These are not paintings of something.
I can't spend a lot of time saying,
"That really does look like a dog,"
or, "That's not a particularly good horse in the background,"
or, "I think the light is wrong."
And so description becomes, really, the main tool in the kit
that you're using as a journalist.
So, this is one of the great words
from the middle of the last century.
It's Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross."
Now, if you know Catholic theology, you hear the term
"stations of the cross," and you think,
"Ah, this is a religious painting in some way."
-You're picturing something very different than that.
-You're picturing something very different,
something very representational, 'cause there's
this long history of painting these very excruciating moments
in the last hours of Christ's life,
from His condemnation to death to His crucifixion.
What he seems to want you to do is to take away
from it some larger message, some more fundamental question.
And as a critic, the question I think he's asking is very close
to one that we ask in the work we do.
It's not, "What does this mean?"
It's more, "Is meaning possible?
Is it possible to make paintings in the middle
of the 20th century, after these wars,
after these horrible catastrophes,
that have any meaning at all?"
And so he references Christ's words from the cross,
"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
in the title of the painting.
And for me, in a sense,
that brings us back to the most fundamental thing --
why do we keep thinking about art?
Why do we keep making art?
What drives us forward in an age when, really,
there's so many more pressing and horrible things
and there's so many reasons, really, to despair of the world?
-Do you sometimes question your own role
as a critic in that same context?
I mean, you're surrounded by colleagues who are breaking
major news stories or reporting on, you know --
reporting from war zones around the world.
You're writing about art. -All the time, yeah.
And does that matter? Is it just --
Is it a secondary thing that we can dispense with?
A lot of people say yes to that.
So, one of the things critics are doing almost all the time --
if you're writing about art or if you're writing
about classical music or you're writing about theater,
part of what you're doing is just making the argument,
"This matters. This is relevant, too."
-Do you worry about this field dying out?
-Yes, I do.
It's a very odd thing to go alone into a museum
and spend time looking at a very quiet,
silent thing hanging on a wall.
Everything in our lives these days is tending towards
a much faster sense of processing information,
a much more fractured sense of consciousness.
This takes work.
And it's hard to say to people today,
"You need to work to like something."
That goes against what we're supposed to --
how we think about culture mostly.
It doesn't seem democratic.
It seems elitist to say, "This takes effort.
You may not like it at first, but trust me --
you will like it later."
-So, how is the field changing?
We can all be critics now
because there are so many social-media platforms.
Everyone can have a voice.
-Well, when we say, "Everybody's a critic,"
it can mean a lot of different things.
The best sense of it is that everybody goes out
and they do something like what critics do.
They look at. They think.
They learn.
They refine their feelings about something.
And so that's the good part of it.
There are a lot of places to look at art
where the person writing about it may not be removed
enough from the institution that's presenting it
or the artists who are making it.
-They might be friends
with the artist or -- -They might be friends.
-Maybe on the payroll of the institution.
-Right.
They may be putting things on their Instagram
and taking money to do it.
So, kind of, you know, caveat emptor
when you're reading people who are writing about art --
-So, buyer beware. -Buyer beware.
Who are they and why are they doing it and how independent
are they and do they speak to you?
-Kennicott got his start writing about classical music,
but he switched to art and won the Pulitzer Prize
for his coverage in 2013.
The "Post" hired a second Pulitzer-winning art critic
in 2016,
adding Sebastian Smee's byline to the paper,
even as the field of art criticism struggled to survive.
-It's hard because, you know, newspapers have gone through
a lot of crises recently.
And they've cut their critics.
That's one of the first places --
when times get lean, it tends to be the arts critics
that are among the first on the chopping block.
So, you have to really, really want to do this,
to go into the profession.
It's not going to be an easy path.
Mainly, I think, you need to develop
a kind of insatiable curiosity
about the field that you're gonna criticize
and the desire to write and just do it.
And maybe that means doing it for yourself.
Maybe that means doing it on your own personal webpage
or Facebook entries,
until you feel the confidence to go out
and offer your services to people who will pay to do it.
-When you first saw these paintings,
did you like them? -You know,
I remember seeing the big one in a different space,
and I did like them.
-I'm so curious about what that even means, right,
to like something.
-I remember walking into a room --
and often this is the first impression you have of a work,
and that is just a sense, "Ah, something's happening here."
You know, I may not know it yet and it may take me a while
to figure out what's going on,
but, you know, lined up against a number of other works
that you may just pass by and think, "Eh, okay.
Maybe I should give that more time.
I'll come back. I'll think about it."
There is, in some ways, a kind of intuition
that there's an event,
that this is gonna be something you're gonna spend time with.
And I remember thinking that instantly upon seeing
these works, like,
"Wow, this is completely different
and they add up to something and this is not a one-hour
or a one-minute or a one-day engagement."
-So, there's only one painting in here that has color in it.
-Right. And what does that mean?
-Yeah. -I don't know.
I have no idea.
So, when you get there, you're thinking, "What is that?"
Somehow everything has changed.
Is that a moment of transcendence,
if this is a cycle
leading through these painful things of Christ's last hours?
Does that somehow represent what comes after
or what comes before?
I don't know.
You know, ultimately with abstract art,
there is this question that maybe
the act of interpretation itself is somehow misguided,
that you're really supposed to sort of
just exist with the work.
Maybe this is -- Maybe this is meaningless.
That's sort of what I think Barnett Newman's confronting,
and it's what all critics, I think, have to confront
if they're honest about what they do.