Dear Art Institution
It's been a decade since I first addressed you so directly without recourse to the art that calls you home. Back then I was an exhibiting artist, moonlighting as an art critic. *Context: Before sitting down for an interview an artist referred to me as a “bull in a china shop”. I laughed, taking it as a compliment. The metaphor of the china shop was perfect, more perfect than the artist knew before he sat down to be interviewed like the porcelain doll he was waiting to be cracked open. That said, I was more of a baby than a bull in those days. Still dangerous, yes, surrounded as I was by the fragile world of the artist (if not art object) as I “cooed” and “ga ga'd” the language of art without being too self-conscious of my I’s and eye’s .
Today, of course, I don't know what I am, like all of us, in the flux and flush of the present. I just write… and wait. I am still waiting for you to share my critical reviews, not just the love letters. I understand, or partly understand, why you don't share them, china shop and all. And yet I still wait. Your kind and private acknowledgements of my softer words by DM or email is appreciated, but what of the other words. I put more into those other words than the belle lettre ones. The other words come with worry and fear: worry that I may have cut too deep with my words in the necessary struggle to unpack the artwork, or worse still, ribboned the experience of art in kinky blindspots. But still I wait.
I accepted long ago that art criticism is a fugitive and fallible event, something that flaps on the beach at sunset after being flung from the wide and deep ocean of art. But in your acknowledgment of some words and not other words, words that pose questions and sometimes perform provocations, you are claiming infallibility for the art you represent, infallibility for yourself, or art's helplessness in the face of its fallibility – fallibility being the most human thing in art.
But I still have hope for you, hope that one day you might believe in the fallibility of the art you represent, believe that art can fend for itself without your cherry-picking custodianship.
—James Merrigan, waiting.