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 longest round, the participants—Will Corwin, Emann Odufu, Saul Ostrow, and Laura Raicovich—were allotted five minutes to engage with their respective selections and ten minutes to compose a review, which they then read aloud. The audience registered its approval with applause, measured using a sound-meter app whose interface was projected above the platform. (The loudest clapping threatened to push the ticker into a red “DANGER” zone.) A bottle of Farmhouse Vodka kept the scribes lubricated—a touch seemingly inspired more by Hemingway, who counseled that it was better to write drunk and edit sober, than by Ginsberg, with his fealty to mystical providence. Corwin seemed to channel both in his Ouroboros of a closing line about a sculpture by Howard Kalish: “I think that the problem is that it suffers a bit too much from too much detail and too little detail simultaneously.”

There were poignant moments: When staff neglected to project images of the artworks under critique, onlookers were left to engage in giggly acts of radical imagining. (The issue was resolved in the second round.) After Raicovich was announced as the winner, attendees were encouraged to contribute to a small purse. Criticism is a field “diminishing in opportunity,” a staffer whispered, and evidence of this extended to the event itself. The organizers had opted to use the free version of the noise app, so an ad for Ashley mattresses adorned the bottom of the screen throughout. It was, I thought, a telling slip about the attention economy and the critic’s place within it: You must immediately make an impression, lest you put your audience to sleep.