In the US it's called "parachute criticism", and I've been accused of it more than once. In its practise, the critic - usually from a major cultural capital whose inhabitants are known for their cocksuredness regarding just about everything (sounds a lot like a writer from New York, doesn't it?) - drops in on some far-removed city, community, or "scene" for a few days, then rushes back home to pronounce published judgment on it.
Usually, the persons most offended by the deceptively arrogant visitor are local critics, who inevitably complain that the outside arbiter just "doesn't get" the unique culture of the place, doesn't speak the language, doesn't know enough history, hasn't lingered in the right hang-outs, hasn't got the right kind of eye or ear or palate to appreciate intuitively the local fare.
Oddly, a generally positive view of the scene usually generates about the same amount of pique as a negative one. When I wrote (what I certainly thought was) a qualified rave about the art world in Santa Fe, New Mexico (which was, and still is, trying to earn a promotion from a picturesque, touristy art colony for upper-middle-class white people wearing lots of turquoise jewellery to an important contemporary centre), I was hammered in a newspaper column by a local critic for, well, being a parachutist.
Never mind that by going off to New York and Los Angeles and rendering verdicts on their cultural doings for the folks back in New Mexico, she'd committed more or less the same crime of which she accused me; and never mind that the nature of most art that critics get to see, even in exotic climes, is public: it hangs on the wall and sits on the gallery floor precisely to be judged by strangers.
Ah, but what about art institutions? At first glance, the anti-parachutists would seem to have a better case with them. Although the art they exhibit is meant for one and all to see, their inner political workings are not. Or at least - their local constituents might say - the tugs-o'-war and contretemps among an art institution's directors, boards, staffs, benefactors and overseeing government offices are nobody's business but the local constituents'.
That's true up to a point. But if, for example, some internal dust-up at an institution results in bad shows, exorbitant admissions fees, or a poorly kept physical plant, the management of the institution becomes the business - or the legitimate subject of published opinion - of anybody, local or otherwise, who ventures through the turnstile. And even if there's no immediate, discernible effect on the exhibitions, ticket prices or food in the cafeteria, there's still the matter of the wider art world: are the institution's internal disputes a harbinger of bad (or good) things to come for the way in which, say, modern and contemporary art is presented to the public in other cities and countries?
Which brings me to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Since I'm a full-disclosure kind of fellow, let me sketch in something about the background and circumstances of my indulging in parachute criticism about the inner workings of IMMA.
My qualifications for dealing with anything Irish are meagre at best. Although I'm half-Irish (on my mother's side), I've never been interested enough in that genealogy to find out even whether the Shields and Powers families are from territory in the Republic of Ireland or in Northern Ireland. (In fairness, I'm not much interested in my German genes, either. My parents moved during the second World War to Los Angeles, a rootless place where nearly everybody was a Johnny-come-lately resident. I've always felt comfortably alien in any place I've lived; by upbringing, I'm probably the perfect parachutist.)
I've spent a grand total of five days in Ireland, all of it last year, when I came specifically to write about - what else? - IMMA and the Dublin galleries. (The piece was premeditatedly upbeat: on the basis of what I'd heard and read recently, I'd picked out Dublin to headline an article on where to go to see art in Europe that summer.)
I had a wonderful time and - continuing with truth-in-packaging here - the reason I accepted the assignment to write this essay is that it entails (via the Critical Voices programme) my coming back to Ireland to answer for its shortcomings.
Small price. I trooped happily around Dublin on foot, visiting every gallery and museum I could; I ate Salome, and The Plough and the Stars. Indeed, at the last event, a man unknown to me struck up a friendly conversation in the aisle, during intermission, wanting to know what I thought of Stephen Rea's production. He turned out to be a professor of drama at a university. (That doesn't happen to me at home.)
My sole extra-Dublin experience was taking the train down to Bray, hopping a bus to Enniskerry, then walking five miles out from there and five miles back, just to get a look at some countryside.
On to IMMA. Admittedly, I liked Declan McGonagle (then director of the museum), who talked faster and longer than my little tape recorder could handle. And he actually said something about art, museums, and politics. If a museum director truly speaking his mind is no surprise in Ireland, in the US it's a rarity. In fact, a young stringer who was interviewing a couple of them once called up to ask me: "Why is it that these guys all sound like they're being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee?"
Perhaps, I told him, US museums get so little support, comparatively, from the public sector and are so beholden to the private one (i.e., the demands and eccentricities of rich people), that their directors are loathe to say anything that might off end any single one of hundreds of potential donors.
Although McGonagle was articulate and forthright, I did disagree (albeit silently - I was interviewing him) with much of what he said.
Generally speaking, I'm a kind of Pickwickian elitist who believes: a) like the late art critic, Clement Greenberg, that what counts most about art is its quality as art, and not its standing alongside school lunches and measles vaccinations as something that will alleviate the misery of the economically disadvantaged; b) that the dreariest function of contemporary art museums is to support, by showing and collecting, artists living in their greater surround, i.e., to put geography and "boosterism" before aesthetics; and c) that, nevertheless, contemporary art is, and should be, an open club, joinable by anyone who cares to walk through the door.
I find that art which, wrapping itself in noble extra-aesthetic purposes, attempts to be, in Aidan Dunne's felicitous phrase, "the continuation of sociology by other means", is generally less good - which is to say, more self-congratulatory, less rigorous, more self-righteous and less efficient - than art whose first task is trying to look good in a new way.
And, in my experience, the presence of a squad of artists-in-residence tends to nudge a museum back toward an art-college ambience more than it invigorates it with in-progress creativity. (A couple of directors of US museums with artists-in-residence programs have also told me that, off the record.)
All that being said, McGonagle's IMMA seemed to work, at least for me. (I'm not a priori opposed to social-content art.) On the day...
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