Cheers for Jeers

Four critics took their places onstage. Each reached into a translucent Pyrex bowl, feeling around for scraps of paper denoted with the names of a hundred-plus works that appear in the National Academy of Design’s ongoing annual exhibition. Billed—perhaps with an eye toward the Paris Olympics, then still underway—as a thrilling display of “competitive criticism,” the event was devised to showcase their impromptu musings. Indeed, in her introductory remarks, Barbara Pollack riffed on Allen Ginsberg’s “stream-of-consciousness writing, automatic writing, a fearless kind of writing that unleashed the truth within the brain and the heart of the poet.” Do critics speak the truth? And are they poets? Flattering! I thought. But Pollack, a cofounder of the nonprofit Art at a Time Like This, burst her own bubble: “I have to say from my experience in writing criticism that it is just the opposite of stream-of-consciousness—or even if it is stream-of-consciousness, by the time you’ve discussed it with your editor, it’s definitely not stream-of-consciousness.”

For the first and l…