HOT, COLD, HEAVY, LIGHT

100 Art Writings, 1988-2018

By Peter Schjeldahl

Whatever chips a critic might accumulate for honesty or temperance, for reading backlists, for punctuality or for nodding politely when yet another person recommends “All the Light We Cannot See,” for whatever, I would like to push all of mine to the center of the table on behalf of the following statement: Peter Schjeldahl is a great artist.

It’s unseemly to be so categorical, but the fact that Schjeldahl himself is an art critic — in its heyday for The Village Voice, since 1998 for The New Yorker — necessitates the vehemence. Is criticism an art? It’s a valid, exhausting question. Criticism follows other people’s work; then again, so does all human invention. What lab-pure operant-conditioning chamber do we imagine “real” artists spring from?

Regardless of your position, anyway, Schjeldahl’s thrilling new collection, “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018,” takes that poor old beast of a debate out of harness and sets it free in rolling country pastures. For now.

His specialty is the searching, summative essay of a few pages on a single artist. (Spearing “that little eel in the middle — that marrow,” as Virginia Woolf wrote.) Journalism may have imposed the format upon him, but it’s also, by happy chance, the ideal medium for his gifts. Like Lydia Davis, he writes with remarkable tensile beauty and closeness of observation. Any dilation of either’s work tends to diminish it.