Peter Schjeldahl

Art critics are notorious for communicating in their own impenetrable idiom–earnest references to Lacan or Foucault, allusions to an “inevitable ontological bent,” descriptions of “binding color to a defined materiality.” But Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The Village Voice in the eighties and nineties and The New Yorker since 1998, has always been, well, if not the people’s art critic, at least readable. Schjeldahl, sixty-five, isn’t completely without pretense (he is a New York art critic, after all), but he’s always showcased a disgust for the art establishment’s BS, whether emanating from museums, schools, or galleries. It’s flattering to attribute this healthy Midwestern skepticism to his childhood in Fargo, North Dakota, or to his college days at Carleton. Maybe that’s why the good people of Chicago were so offended this fall when, during a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Schjeldahl trotted out his new theory on “transmitter cities” (New York, LA, Berlin, and London) and “receptor cities”(everywhere else). So we had to ask (rhetorically): What does that make us?

Were you really shocked that the Chicago Reader got so upset after you called them a bunch of rubes?
Actually, I hadn’t, but after reading [the article], I thought, “Maybe they are.” [Laughs.] But you know, I thought about it and I realized that my spontaneous choice of “transmitter” and “receiver,” probably has a distant double-entendre, a sexual connotation, that I . . . uh, certainly didn’t intend.

You also once said that if you’re an aesthete, it’s impossible to live anywhere other than New York or Los Angeles without becoming clinically depressed.
I would say if you have an omnivorous appetite, if you’re a glutton for aesthetic experiences, you’re probably going to be in New York, because everything comes here and comes through here.

In that case, can a place such as the Walker Art Center be an important institution if it’s in a receptor city?
It depends on the show. [The Walker] developed that Frida Kahlo show, which definitely transmitted, and I was very happy to help it transmit. But at the same time, that show was kind of like an off-Broadway show touring the country.

But they developed the show, right?
Well, sure, a curator working there did.

You’re skeptical of curators, aren’t you?
Actually, I regard academic museum culture like Pizza Hut. You know, it’s a franchise, and universities are like that–somebody can teach for twenty years in Columbus, Ohio, and never be an Ohioan. But at the same time, one of those people can develop an idea like the Frida Kahlo show. Which takes some doing–it takes some funding and some institutional will. It’s not nothing, but the thing is that 99 percent of the earth’s surface is nontransmitter and nonreceptor.

Yet you began your aesthetic education in a receptor city.
Actually, the Walker Art Center was huge for me. I remember driving through a blizzard from Northfield to see a program of Jean Cocteau films, which just blew me away. I remember seeing Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg doing an evening at the Walker.

Not everybody drives through a snowstorm to see Orpheus–what drove you?
I came very late to it. I had no exposure to art growing up and I never took an art course in my life. In 1962, I dropped out of Carleton and got a job as a newspaper reporter in Jersey City, just across from New York, and fell into the poetry world and the art world. I was a poet and I was wild for anything new. And, of course, I was crashingly naive. But my first aesthetic experience probably happened between my freshman and sophomore years at Carleton. I worked as a reporter for the newspaper in Mankato, and there was a drug store down below and they had a little bookstore in there. I didn’t eat lunch because I couldn’t afford it–I didn’t have any money–so I would go there and sit down on the floor and read books on the rack. And I found this book full of impressionist paintings. I remember looking at a Pissarro and having a chill go up my spine. Somehow looking at it was something that I was doing, it wasn’t something being handed to me–I was making this [painting] be something. It was probably a blurry little reproduction, but there was a sense of power and an idea that there was a world out there–somewhere there were people who had done these things and were probably doing these things now, and it wasn’t in Mankato.

So you’re responsible for finding art yourself. Well, you’ve said the role of the museum is to put the paintings on the wall and make sure they’re well lit.
Yeah, I hate museums. But it’s like Willie Sutton said about banks: That’s where the money is. Museums are where the art is and that’s why I go there. I’d go anywhere that has the art. But you know, museums should really not take me or other aesthetes into much consideration because we’re a minority audience of ingrates and we’re completely unorganized.

Do you write for the ideal art geek?
Well, anybody gets to read me, and the more people who read me the better. I write for a living, so I try to make it entertaining for them.

If there are more aesthetic gluttons in NYC, aren’t there also more of what you call “Incredibly Stupid Viewers”?
No, see, I don’t believe in the existence of the Incredibly Stupid Viewer. I think the ISV was the projection of contemporary theorists who thought that very simple things had to be explained to people–the graphic female nude represents male patriarchy or museums represent economic and social power. I mean, duh.

So you prefer art that attempts to be beautiful?
No, my point is that if you’re grown up and are halfway sophisticated, it’s all stuff you know. It’s like the kind of person who talks about politics–we all know them–who believes that if you were as smart as I am, you would agree with me. It’s people who think their beliefs are products of their intelligence rather than of their hormones and their upbringing.

Why did you leave Northfield–your hormones or your intelligence?
Intelligence is a tool. It’s something that’s nice to have, especially if you’re going to be a professional critic or something. But it doesn’t make me better in any way; it does’t make me more right. I can talk better, but I’m playing the same game everybody plays. And people who never look at art have debates about beauty. It’s a point I make again and again: Everybody has regular aesthetic experiences. It’s organic. If we don’t have a little burble of aesthetic pleasure in our lives, we are in fact clinically depressed and we’re going to start thinking about committing suicide. People who get it from the shoot-out scene in the action movie or the moonlight over the strip mall–they’re fine, they don’t need art. Art is for those of us who find that it’s not enough. That makes us weird, and the higher and more refined the art, the fewer people are in the room. If that makes me weird, I’m fine with that.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has one of your favorite paintings, Rembrandt’s Lucretia.
Oh, god, what a great painting. Rembrandt is so open-minded. The thing about Rembrandt is that he wondered about things. God, what a painting. I think she looks like a little girl in the night saying, “Mommy, it hurts.” It’s really something, and then the thing is painted like a son of a bitch, from any distance, and also it’s Baroque painting at its peak, at the same time as Velázquez.

Does that piece make the MIA an important museum?
No, the selection is not all that impressive. [The MIA] has a lot of nice stuff, a lot of great Chinese stuff . . . .

So, it’s an OK museum with an outstanding piece.
Well, cities the size of Minneapolis all have museums. And the MIA has strengths and weaknesses. I mean, it’s like there’s Cleveland and St. Louis–they had more rich people at the turn of the century, so they have better museums. But the Walker has this sort of relentlessly progressive, Minnesotan temperament that has made it a really important place.