From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 12/14/02-02:50:50 AM Z
Jonathan Bailey wrote:
>
> But, I'd like to ask: at what point did it become necessary for artists to
> also be intellectuals??
According to an article in the New Yorker several months ago about a
crisis in the Harvard studio art program, artists started getting more
intellectual when more of them started getting academic degrees, and
it's my personal opinion (and as I recall it was also the opinion of the
writer of the article, and no, it wasn't Jed Perl) that this
intellectualism hasn't served art very well.
But I'm an intellectual myself, and although I mostly keep art separate
from my intellectual interests, as I've written before, I do have Sontag
in my studio library, and after reading the current article on war
photography, went out into a wild storm to retrieve her so I could see
what the fuss was all about, since I couldn't remember anything about
what she had to say in her essays one way or another. (In contrast, my
copies of Robert Adams' books of essays are worn and written all over
from many sessions of re-reading and writing comments in the margins,
and I could quote at least half a dozen passages sight unseen.)
But try as I might, I couldn't stay interested long enough to read even
one essay all the way through.
I think the crucial difference between Sontag and Robert Adams, for me,
is that Adams is a working photographer, as is/was? Szarkowski, and
that's what makes their writing worth reading.
Katharine Thayer
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