Last weekend we travelled to Manchester to see someone give a talk as part of a social theory conference at the university. Afterwards, a safe distance from the campus, we laughed about all of the archetypes of academia who had shown up: the cantankerous old man who consistently spoke (well, sputtered, really) out of turn and walked out in the middle of people’s talks; the young intellectual, starstruck and sycophantic, angling for every possible opportunity to share his ideas with the academic celebrities; the ridiculous and deluded notion of academic celebrity, etc.
I imagine this is more or less how most academic conferences go, with slight variations according to discipline. But as irritating as all of this posturing was, and as boring as it might have been to watch the conversation devolve into nitpicking over semantics, it was clear that there were real benefits to what was taking place—to the basic practice of collectively working through ideas with a group of well-informed peers.
It occurred to me that so many artists could really stand to benefit from a more conventional forum in which to do this same thing. With so many of them working in relative isolation, (particularly non-students), I get a sense that they forget how to talk about their work in intelligent and constructive ways. While art students enjoy the benefits of regular peer critiques, the tradition of salons and other formalized settings for peer review seems to be scarce in the professional art world.
I so often fall for a work, online or in a gallery, only to have it ruined for me by a fluffy and meaningless artist’s statement. Maybe this shouldn’t be the case—after all, I do think there’s something to be said for a work’s value being judged separately from artist’s intentions. Further, I don’t think artists are always as cerebrally-challenged as their statements might make them seem; after all, their chosen medium is visual, not literary, so one has to reserve some amount of judgement when they struggle to communicate in a language that is not, arguably, their first. But I think that learning to think and speak critically, not just about one’s own art, but about art in general, is one of the things that (hopefully) will separate artists with real longevity from the one-hit-wonders.
