When the critic apologizes

And you get back to the adventure of your creative work

Apr 07, 2024

“The art world is being redone and you can play a part in it. All you have to do is wake up, keep working, don’t quit, talk to other artists, and make an enemy of envy.” - Jerry Saltz

Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York Magazine. He, unlike many artists, finds clear, succinct ways to describe the messages a work of art carries. He puts language around art, and challenges or pumps up its value in the canon of good taste and meaning.

Of course, it’s all subjective. The art critic’s word, is not the word. It’s his word. And he’s using a limiting set of tools (the grammatical sentence) knowing that more often, song, facial expression, beat of heart, speaks a truer truth.

On a spiritual day in the Western calendar, I heard him speak with artist Nicholas Wilton. You can listen here. By the end of their conversation, one clear message came through.

In all creative work, good or bad, Saltz said, there is courage because the person making something new for the world has to sustain belief in the face of uncertainty, vulnerability and judgment.

What part of the human is able to do that? To keep going while what they’re doing is challenging, consuming and lacking in any clear reward? Certainly not the ego, and I expect the brain is not keen on anything shrouded in risk.

Well then, I arrive at the human spirit.

The human spirit seems to operate at a different frequency.

Like turning a dial, in spirit, I no longer worry about how I look to others, how the world is impacting my kids, what to make for dinner, the state of my bank account.

Instead, I’m drawn into the thing that wants to speak to me.

Songs get me there instantly. Try listening to “More Than a Feeling” by Boston and tell me you can think about dinner, schedules, the economy! Songs like that draw you in. Full stop, exclamation point!

And yet, during the creative process, my spirit is constantly getting squashed. It can feel so hard to get drawn into the work sometimes…

And over the past few weeks, my spirit has felt like a dim, flickering light.

Getting drawn into the work again

Art critic Jerry Saltz apologized to me, kind of.

He talked about the power of “the critic.” And, in his honesty, provided some hope and clarity. There’s a welcome dose of paradox in it all.

Don’t listen to him, he says. “Stop paying attention to the people at the top.”

“The art world is being redone and you can play a part in it—all you have to do is: wake up, keep working, don’t quit, talk to other artists, and make an enemy of envy. Envy will eat you alive and ruin your work. It’ll make you grumpy. We all have envy. But you have to set it aside and get on with the work.”

This new world he talks about is happening now, in real-time, and it’s a free-for-all.

Gone are the days where there was a single voice that disseminated art to many.

He learned when he began writing on social media that now “the many can speak to one another.”

Who measures art’s value is no longer governed by the eye of the one on top, who usually and historically has been a white male. Jerry Saltz & Nicholas Wilton are both white males. And Jerry emphasizes that point: “We need to shut up and listen.”

And so, my question is, in this “free-for-all” how do artists get the work out and make money, make credibility, make dialogue for the work to speak out in the world? Traditionally, artists looked to notable publications and curators for approval, recognition and support. Now, we’re supposed to add “followers” and “likes”to that list?

Author Amy McNee @inspiredtowrite on Instagram says this:
Creative success is not tied to a following.
Metrics don’t need to be growing in order to be a successful creative.
Art should provoke a response.
Art shouldn’t be used as a vessel to indulge in people pleasing.

“Art is Using Us”

Jerry Saltz says, we must remember art is using us.

And I come back to McNee’s point: art should provoke a response.

The places we need to go in art, in counter-culture, in the creative spaces of the self are supposed to be uncomfortable and ask more questions.

“I’m lucky, as a writer,” Saltz says, “I have editors that say you have to push this idea. And it’s always where I’m scared to push it….every artist kind of knows when they have these wings that they’re not spreading.” They can feel it.

Creativity does not live in the status-quo, in the center of the circle. It lives out on the margins to push us out, into new spaces. This is the work; this is when you feel you’re tangling with spirit.

I’ve felt this many times. And unexpectedly, always. I’ll share a wee personal story that goes back to a first story of mine that was published…My editors back then were a small group of University of Toronto continuing study folks. And for months, we went rogue and gathered in a bohemian-style apartment in the heart of China Town. We were led by a talented and celebrated writer I won’t name here but is well-known in Toronto’s cultural scene. We’d sit around a collection of tables, drink wine, break bread, and critique creative writing work. Admittedly, whenever my story was in the hot seat, all I wanted was for my work to feel understood and praised. I needed it, and desperately at that stage of my writing career.

Of course, we were all there to respect creative work, not pander to the ego. It was the work, not the person or social issue, that was being critiqued. Which becomes difficult to decipher when the very questions you’re being asked involve, as Saltz says, the very places you’re afraid to explore.

Nicholas Wilton & Jerry Saltz both essentially say art criticism is often a way of asking the artist to go deeper.

When spirit is stuck or not coming through, it’s because there’s something to tease out.

What I uncovered with that first story I wrote was that I was afraid of talking about my miscarriage and the female experience, and my writing group led me there. “Why are you a side character in this story?” Someone asked. “You keep writing about Frida Kahlo but there is a beating heart that’s being muffled.”

My first published story transitioned from a story about Frida Kahlo into a story about my miscarriage.

But I wasn’t able to write in the first person “I”. It felt awkward and trite.

Then, after my instructor suggested the second person, the “You” form, a loosening happened. I was able to explore my thoughts and feelings on loss and the female body, mine and the others who came before me.

Art provoked a response. It’s value, understood, full stop. Spirit charging through.

So as Jerry Saltz says, stop paying attention to the people at the top. You just have to show up, stay up late, and work, work, work. And it will take a lot of you, emotionally. This is the adventure of the work.

A final thought from the great poet Mary Oliver:

“Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure.”

And if you’d like the read my piece on Frida Kahlo & miscarriage, here it is.