Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic)

I'm an art critic by trade - that dreaded breed known for dissing and dicing and otherwise turning your self-esteem precarious. So you're going to have to take my word on this: I'm on your side. My stance is built-in. I'm an art-maker, too. We have a psychic link.

The doublethink doesn't give bad art a free ride, though. The disdain I have for bad stuff has its own life. My list of art-making no-nos warrants discussion - a lot of it – and I'll be doing that in a continuing series of letters to you. I hope you'll weigh in.

Overly Specific Art Titles

Let's start with an easy one: Putting overly specific titles on your work. For some shapeless reason, artists - from famous to novice – hem in viewer reaction with narrow picture titles.

Case in pointlessness, a recent show of paintings under the overarching banner "Amazon Mysteries." The tag left little mystery to solve.

On view were large leaves and vines so entwining, one might have wanted to take a scythe to them. But I wanted in. The jungly scenery offered needed escape from a paved-over world. Wildlife, half-hidden in the brush, drew me in deeper, and I was swallowed by the profusion of plants the size of trees.

But the darn picture titles nearly ruined the experience. They were too specific, not to mention annoyingly precious. They didn't let me think my own thoughts. Examples: "Poison dart frog and croton nestle in the root system of a giant fig tree" and "Darth Vader and the Armored Chameleon amidst a banyan tree."

Apparently, the painter had a need to charm, unaware that the pictures did that by themselves. No words necessary. In fact, there was so much to look at that the pictures needed nothing more than numbers to tell them apart. Besides the representation of seeable things, there was the unseen, unknowable part – a reminder that what we see is not all there is and that the unknown doesn't exist less for being out of sight.

The work was comparable to that of Post-Impressionist Henri Rousseau, who also was given to distracting picture titles, as in "In a Tropical Forest: Struggle Between Tiger and Bull."

Rousseau never needed such exposition. His pictures told the best stories. They made you think. Consider all the questions that come to mind on seeing a lion standing over a lone female gypsy sleeping in the sand in Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy." Is she asleep or feigning it to fool the lion? How did she get there? There are no footprints in the sand. Uncertainties like this heighten the suspense about the lion's next move, and turn the painting into a metaphor for everyone's worst nightmare: being alone and helpless.

Look, I'm not one of those Edith Wharton characters who always get what she wants. But if we can't get past this title business, we don't have much of a future together.

P.S. I just thought of an exception to my picture title rule: those nonsensical labels that Salvador Dali gave his work; i.e. "Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anomorphoses" ('33), is so incomprehensible, it doesn't matter.

— by Joan Altabe  |  April 25, 2006

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