Graciela Speranza

I became interested in art and writing since I was a kid.

Although there were no large libraries in my house, or perhaps because of that, reading is one of the clearest memories of my childhood. What’s more: when I was eleven or twelve years old I wrote the first chapter of a novel (I perfectly remember the loose folder pages, tied with gross tape), which was probably a naive copy of Little Women. Because, of course, after reading Little Women, I wanted to be a writer like Jo. And I think that the taste for art was awakened by a collection of fascicles that for months arrived punctually at home, once a week along with the newspaper, Great Masters of Painting. Meeting many of the originals during my first trip to Europe at the age of fifteen was a real shock.

My first published book was.

A book of conversations with fifteen great Argentine narrators, Primer persona, which brought together the interviews I did over several years for a section that Tomás Eloy Martínez devised for the cultural supplement of the newspaper Página 12, “The Buenos Aires Review ”, in homage to the famous interviews in The Paris Review. It included brief autobiographies that each one wrote for the book and extraordinary portraits of Alejandra López. The publication took a long time and it was a great joy to finally see the book, a material witness of unforgettable encounters with admired writers. Later I was lucky enough to interview Susan Sontag, John Berger, George Steiner… and talk at length with Guillermo Kuitca for a book about his work. The interview became a conversational form of the essay.

I´ve never regretted a criticism that I´ve made.

I almost always write about works or books that dazzle me, disturb me, disturb me, or raise questions in my mind, artists and writers with whom I contract a debt of gratitude that criticism comes to repay and, therefore, I never I regret Susan Sontag said that Barthes had renounced the vulgar roles of system builder, authority, and mentor, to reserve for himself the exercise of taste, which naturally implies praise. I like that definition of criticism. But I must say that the only two harsh criticisms I wrote (with broader arguments that, in each case, I thought were timely) were perhaps the most read and celebrated. The paradox did not affect my natural inclination to reason and share enthusiasm, which is always the first driving force of criticism for me.

We are in a moment of transition in arts.

Indeed, art has opened up to dialogue with other disciplines and other languages, and, fortunately, it has become more sensitive to the threats that shadow the future of man and the planet. The plurality that characterized the art of recent decades (the lack of paradigms became the new paradigm) was extended with a more active dialogue with other forms of life, more inserted in the social fabric. The most challenging art today attempts to remove the man and the artist from the center of the scene. And above all, in the face of so much denialism, to show what is not seen.

In addition to “Lo que no vemos, lo que el arte ve”, there are several books on contemporary art that begin with Goya.

I wouldn’t say that contemporary art begins with Goya, but the modernity and eloquent darkness of many of his works, especially the black paintings, never ceases to amaze us. Extending Italo Calvino’s definition of literary classics, I would rather say that Goya’s works never finish saying what they have to say. Contemporary art, I have no doubt, begins with Marcel Duchamp.

Where is today what was previously described as “the sublime”?

That amazement tinged with restlessness that characterized the feeling of the sublime is no longer born in the face of the power and majesty of nature that moved the romantics. The contemporary sublime bears the mark of man. It is enough to remember Tony Smith’s sublime suburban on a newly built unmarked highway in New Jersey, in the middle of the darkness of the night. And the questions regarding nature are different in the 21st century. Will the waterfalls and glaciers that used to amaze us still exist? Even when? And immediately: whose responsibility is it to preserve them? What most astonishes, frightens and disturbs today are the effects of man’s intervention in these dazzling natural landscapes. I think of a series of photographs by the North American Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Drones), with wonderful colorful sunset skies that look like Rothkos, in which there is a tiny point barely visible, a Reaper Drone, a deadly weapon of North American military attacks.

A lot of music excites me.

Four very varied choices that can summarize the arc: all Chico Buarque, Rickie Lee-Jones pop pop, almost all Keith Jarrett, Nico Muhly.

Films too.

 Of the most recent, Otsoga Diaries by Miguel Gomes, a Portuguese director who has given me great moments of happiness since his first film.

I had spoken of the critic as a “search engine.”

The panorama of art and literature has become extraordinarily varied and has multiplied in the new infinity of the virtual world. And the overload, acceleration and frenzy of the web do not help much in orienting oneself in the unmarked field of current art. True, the critic largely lost his power of mediation, but he remains a qualified explorer, a cartographer of tides, a tracker of new forms, devices and practices. One of the unavoidable tasks of the critic continues to be the precise description, the characterization of formal and aesthetic singularities, accompanied by a critical argument that illuminates the formal and aesthetic effectiveness of the work: what does that author or that artist do that he does not do? no other. And also detect something particularly resistant that surely gives it its value: its way of missing the world so that we can look at it again, its mystery, which in a great work is also the mystery of the form. If criticism does not play that role, we will be left to the chance of the market, algorithms, influence networks and the championship of self-promotion. So I agree with the mottos of Art on Trial: “Criticism without algorithms”, “Criticism at a slow fire”, giving each work the time and critical attention it deserves.

A museum where I would get lost.

At the Metropolitan Museum in New York I literally get lost but with pleasure. I always come back and there is always some great unexpected discovery.

An overrated artist.

We should start by not confusing value and price. The prices for Jeff Koons’ works are truly crazy, but after the Whitney Museum’s big retrospective in 2014, I left behind the prejudices that this confusion generates, and I had no doubts about their value.

And an underrated one.

The Argentine Fabio Kacero.

I can’t stand in the art world.

The obscene figures of millions of dollars.

My relationship with art is “definitely unfinished”

Definitely. Long live Marcel Duchamp.