The massive and labyrinthine show of Diane Arbus photographs currently at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory was recently reviewed on the Hyperallergic website by Hakim Bishara. “The era of Diane Arbus’s cold, classist gaze is dead, “ he pronounces in the lede sentence. “Her “freak” photographs,” he continues, “of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people she ambushed with a camera in asylums and hospitals were morally challenged when she made them between the late 1950s and early ’70s, and have only soured over the decades.”
Diane Arbus
He goes on to critique the fact that she came from a privileged family that owned a department store, as if that somehow disqualifies her as an artist and the work she produced. “Arbus was in her natural element in New York’s high society,” he asserts.
Interesting. Had he read her biography and dug into her life he might have come to understand just how much she felt like a freak herself, and how she more likely identified with the marginalized people she photographed than the social milieu in which she was raised. But the pulse of curiosity seems to be absent from his entire review. This complicated, suffering, and imperfect artist is instead basically cancelled, together with her work.
John Ashbery
One of my favorite art critics to read is John Ashbery, though he is fairly dead. His reviews focus on trying to understand what’s going on in the art. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he was an accomplished poet who had created many significant works in his life and maybe had some measure of compassion for the artists who were trying to do the same. I can’t say.
John Yau
I also depend deeply upon the reviews in Hyperallergic by John Yau, a former student of Ashbery’s and a poet, to guide me towards artists I’ve never heard of, and who often end up being very important to me.
Robert Creeley
In 1974 I took a reading class at the University of New Mexico from Robert Creeley on contemporary poetry. Creeley was a writer who was credited by many as one of the most important lyric poets of his generation, and who was associated with the Black Mountain school of poetry, which is where he both taught and studied after dropping out his senior year from Harvard. In our class with Creeley, we read many poets who I’m sure he did not see eye to eye with, nor feel much affinity for, but he led us through their work with the sincere intent to understand what they were doing without dismissing any of them.
Robert Duncan
The poet Robert Duncan used to say that poetry needs all poets. He basically refused to rank in a hierarchy the importance of different poets. And yet he was a poet of great convictions and opinions.
It strikes me that it’s much more challenging to seek to understand an artist than it is to measure them, sometimes 50 or 75 years later, against the moral standards of 2025 and find them to be wanting. I’m actually curious which artists can withstand such scrutiny today. Like, sincerely curious. I wouldn’t know how to make such a list.
I was taken, in reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, just how often the “father of psychiatry” admitted he didn’t know something, that he couldn’t have an opinion on it because he didn’t have enough information or it was beyond his expertise. He did this frequently.
Uncertainty. In my personal opinion, this is the heart of art. As artists, perhaps we eventually discover that it’s more useful to seek to understand than it is to know. As for cancelling, I’m not sure what it gives us that’s actually useful.