Poet as Art Critic [Book review]

[para. 1]: "By now it is almost impossible to conceive of the validity of art without the intrusive theoretical apparatuses of art historians and professional critics whose business is to reveal the social contexts for the work of individual artists. But the poet-critic’s relation to that world of social commerce instead offers a phenomenological exchange between viewer and image. The poet, by nature sensitive to language and image, while skeptical of the monetary flow of the art world, looks at painting to see what is fresh in the image and how it manages to apprehend some aspect of the world we live in. “Criticism should tell you what is there,” noted Fairfield Porter. Following up on this insight, Bill Berkson says that the “critic’s job is to respond to what is visually and conceptually there, to continue the conversation that making and looking at art both propose.” Commenting even more fundamentally on his own urges toward art writing, he says, “I’m an esthetic hedonist. I’m ‘in’ art for the sensual and intellectual pleasures I continue to find there, and as far as the practice of criticism goes, I commit to that for the joy of giving my verbal attentions to the things that answer them and usually stay put long enough to allow my views to add up.”"