The Art Angle Podcast: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl on His Adventures in Life as an Accidental Art Critic

by admin

Apr 30, 2020

artnet

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

In his 2019 essay “The Art of Dying,” acclaimed critic Peter
Schjeldahl describes Patsy Cline’s voice as “attending selflessly
to the sounds and the senses of the words… consummate.” The same
could be said about Schjeldahl’s incomparable writing about art,
most notably during his 22 years (and counting) as the art critic
for the New Yorker. And no one expected this outcome less
than Schjeldahl himself.

A Midwest native who beamed to New York at the dawn of the 1960s
with little more than a high-school diploma, Schjeldahl was an
aspiring poet who began reviewing exhibitions to pay the bills.
More than five decades later, he is almost universally regarded as
one of the most respected and beloved art critics alive. His
signature first-person reckonings with art—several examples of
which were recently collected in his latest book, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings,
1988-2018—balance accessibility, lyricism, and wit in a
style that he has been painstakingly refining for nearly six
decades.

Schjeldahl hasn’t always led a charmed life. Over the course of
the past year, he experienced an almost unbelievable series of
misfortunes. First, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given
just six months to live; next, the apartment in the East Village he
shared for 47 years with his wife, Brooke, caught fire and took his
papers with it; and most recently, of course, the Schjeldahls were
forced into lockdown along with much of the rest of humanity by the
global health crisis.

Yet the tide recently turned in Schjeldahl’s favor:
miraculously, his cancer is in remission thanks to treatment. His
brush with the end has also enriched his perspective on art and
life in new ways, which the inimitable writer was gracious enough
to discuss in a phone conversation with Artnet News’s own renowned
critic, Ben Davis, from his country home in the Catskills.

On this week’s episode, Andrew Goldstein gives the floor to the
critics for a free-wheeling, candid, and refreshingly upbeat
conversation about subjects ranging from the intellectual
gymnastics of art reviewing, to the chaotic ’60s art scene in New
York, to why you can’t really understand Rembrandt before age 40.
It’s an indelible reminder of why no one else has ever done it
quite like Schjeldahl—and why no one else ever will.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)