The Best Single Page of Art Criticism

To really understand art criticism, it’s necessary to look into its philosophy, as people have done since Kant, and into its past, as this book does; and I think it’s also necessary to compare it to criticism of drama, theater, dance, music, and other arts. That’s because has its own conventions that illuminate art criticism. In the past half-century, for example, art criticism has become much more descriptive, neutral, and even affirming, while criticism of fiction, poetry, and dance have retained the older possibility of very negative and personal critique. Criticism of novels, short story collections, and books of poetry are often 5,000 words or more, while criticism of contemporary art is often so brief that there’s hardly room to do more than inventory titles and media. Music criticism used to include excerpts of sheet music, but now that fewer people read music, critics are constrained to vague or impressionistic phrases like “the music slowly gathered force, in the strings and woodwinds, building to a surprising conclusion,” which don’t tell us anything about the actual substance of music—its harmonies, melodies, progressions, counterpoints, and rhythms. The kind of music criticism that happens in music master classes, on the other hand, can be microscopic in its attention to nuances of tone, attack, posture, gesture, and voice, and the critic (the “master,” as they’re still called in music) may find it’s necessary to leave words entirely behind and teach by doing.

Each kind of criticism is different, but they illuminate each other in fascinating ways. The text I’ve chosen for this book is not art criticism, but literary criticism. Vladimir Nabokov’s review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée (Nausea) is the most perfect single page of criticism I know. It has a supernatural concision, and within that concision it has a lovely balance of topics and emphases. It begins with small points and progresses to a point so large, so fundamental, that it could be the subject of a year-long seminar.

The piece is so short I encourage you to read it first. It’s here: tinyurl.com/sartrenabokov.

The opening paragraph is charming, snide, and condescending all at once: three admirable qualities for a review, because they promise the reader an interesting critic, as well as—or in place of!—an interesting author.

Then comes the critique of the translator of Sartre’s novel. Nabokov was fluent in French, even though he said he was never influenced by his years in France one way or the other. (He declined to be wowed by Paris, as he knew he was supposed to be.) His ease with French is on impeccable display, and the three examples are perrectly chosen: they are funny—they’re what contemporary reviewers so aggressively call “howlers,” concisely establishing the translation is appalling.

Note there are only four more paragraphs in the review.

The first is a literary genealogy for Nausea, which is still read as a philosophical novel written by a philosopher—that is, a work whose place in the history of novels isn’t pertinent. The art world also often ignores precedents, except to mention names without explaining the connections—Olafur Eliasson is indebted to Romantic landscape painting, is indebted to AbEx, and so forth. In this brief paragraph Nabokov provides a sketch for a new style (a “really very loose type of writing”), traces it to Dostoyevsky (“at his worst,” presumably the programmatic parts), and then traces Dostoeyevsky to a lesser-known progenitor, Eugène Sue (1804-57). It’s infinitely suggestive and plausible, and it fulfills the part of the critical task that requires art history.

The next two paragraphs complete the plot summary started in the first. Any account of the content of an artwork—in visual art criticism this is the “formal analysis,” description, or ekphrasis—has to abbreviate, and given that necessity it’s often best to select just one passage, part, or episode. Nabokov’s choice is Sartre’s fantasy of an American composer. It’s all clichés (I count seven) and it isn’t even factual (the composer was Canadian).

It really helps, in art criticism as in any writing, if the writer can put words together well. Nabokov was, on many scales, a brilliant writer, and the phrase “in an equivocal flash of clairvoyance” is amazing: it’s intriguing (since we haven’t yet seen the evidence) and, in retrospect, it’s a crystalline verdict.

The final paragraph is five sentences. First: Nausea is an existentialist novel. Then comes a trenchant criticism of philosophic novels in general: their philosophy is “on a purely mental level,” meaning it’s detached from the feelings and experiences of the rest of the novel. But instead of saying that, as I’ve just done, Nabokov gives an example, making it immediately clear why it’s not a good idea to superimpose the “purely mental level” of philosophy on a novel. In such a novel, the character, Roquentin in this case, is “hapless”: invented from other parts of the writer’s imagination, vulnerable to misuse by the autocratic novelist, who “inflicts” his philosophy on him. Notice that Nabokov isn’t saying that Sartre’s philosophy is an “idle and arbitrary fancy”: he’s saying that it appears that way because Roquentin is a living creature with its own thoughts. That’s why (in the second-to-last sentence) a reader won’t be annoyed at Roquentin. But a reader might well be annoyed at the author (the last sentence) because he wasn’t capable of imagining a world in which the character and his ideas are a coherent whole. It’s a trenchant, even profound critique of the entire genre of philosophical novels.

So in one brief page, you have: a critique of materials (in this case, translation), a plot summary, fact-checking, a review of the pertinent history, and a philosophic rumination. And almost a dozen memorable turns of phrase. A perfect work of art criticism.