The Essential New Art Examiner

Dear Profession of Art Writing

P eter S c hjeldahl Dear Profession of Art Writing June 1977 My crummy benefactor, how can I not be grateful? For 12 years fount of my sustenance, social identity, claim to fame, without you where would I be today? Teaching? Teaching what? I don’t know anything but you, Profession of Art Writing. Would I be more a poet than I’ve become? Maybe, but at what cost? That much closer to complete physical, and psychic collapse, or beyond it already, an unhappy memory, another scalp on the belt of drug abuse and cultural devastation, gibbering in some Rocky Mountain ashram, understood to have had a good mind, some adventures, a wad of lyrics poignant arid obscure . . . I would not at any rate be sitting here smugly, at this desk, this typewriter, as baby daughter capers in next room and cat suns on day bed. A picture of total contentment. I must be a jerk not to regard you more highly; Profession of Art Writing, my lucky charm. Or perhaps like a clumsy teenage suitor shocked to have conquered, I find you hard to “respect.” You did favor me awfully readily. P E T E R S C H J E L D A H L    Dear Profession of Art Writing   41 A rhetorical knack—what else did I bring to you? Abysmal ignorance, slovenly habits of thought, star-struck narcissism, a starved and sneaky ego . . . Yet success came my way in cozy degree. I get top dollar when I’m nervy enough to demand it. I get frequent opportunities to decline, with secret glee, offers to write or speak. Still, I have craved in vain the approval of my betters, the ambitious toilers, the scholars, the committed, from whose difficult harvests I gleaned at random whatever I’ve provided of food to the mind. Not that I lose any sleep over that. What’s ghastly is that on occasion I mistook my hand-me-down taste for the light of election, and poured ink on the worthy. I still blush, hotly, for those occasions, yearning for a large bomb to fall directly on myhead. Like that supercilious dismissal of William Baziotes—horrible! And Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, for God’s sake, I patronized your venerable ghost! And Susan Crile, estimable painter, what full moon was shining when I sat down to review you? Also Stanford University, and redoubtable scholar Albert Elsen; I sneered at your splendid museum, behaving just like a paranoid’s dream of a New York chauvinist, oh shame! James Brooks, you didn’t complain those years ago, but even today you could flay me with a look. Jim Dine, how could I, and Joan Snyder, how could I denigrate your indubitable value in the (unpronounced) name of (non-existent) standards of acceptability? Richard Hamilton, where did I get off welcoming you to America in that disgraceful fashion? And Gio Pomodoro, though you never will be to my taste, that was no excuse for behaving like a fat-mouthed provincial! All these atrocities in the Sunday Times, each in a million copies just whizzing off the presses, fanning out over the land, alighting in libraries—microfilm, oh God!!!— unkillable and infamous words! Just let me take this knife and . . . 42   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer But no. (Puts knife back in drawer and closes it.) Already I feel a little better . . . So back to you, Profession of Art Writing, whose fool I’ve been: who needs you anyhow? What loosens the purse strings of the journalism business to finance the bad conscience of louts like me? The imperatives of commerce, is it? Capitalism? The art-buck megalith and entertainment combine? Are we all just lackeys? Seemingly so. But then who isn’t, here and now? (If we aren’t bourgeois, then what the hell are we? as James Schuyler once said something like.) But is the artist, for instance, a lackey, upon whose peculiar habits the whole industry turns? The artist, our dream god or goddess of freedom, free to act crazy in public, free to send his craziness forth in the tidy receptacles of his work which, though inexorably they reach the iron museum, stir souls on the way—don’t they? (FUCK!!! You see, I can do that because I’m a poet. Poet, n. a currently negligible species of...