Nancy Levison writing for Design Observer on the state of architectural criticism.
You can see the point. Cheap and easy access to a virtually limitless catalogue of artworks is no guarantee of great arts criticism — but it makes possible the sustained engagement and encyclopaedic learning that inspire it. (I am convinced that the incomparable David Thomson has seen every movie ever made.) How can architecture criticism compete? How can the individual critic amass the disciplinary equivalent? To write with in-the-bones insight about the output of any one of our era’s peripatetic architectural stars, let alone the collective production of the whole constellation, would take endless international travel and an unlimited expense account — and those are just the logistics. To claim with conviction that this artwork or that artist is at the top of the game is only convincing if you’ve paid keen attention to the rest of the field.
I think this helps explain why Nicolai Ouroussoff’s criticism is so unsatisfying. It’s the unexpected trap of inhabiting the tower of the Times. You’ve got the editorial charge to be national and international, like the rest of the paper, and you’ve got the budget to roam. So you rack up the datelines: Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Moscow, Stuttgart, Basel, etc. etc. But the view from the tower is broad not sharp, panoramic but not particular. The inevitable result is that you are writing at the thin edge of scant knowledge: you are critiquing places you know only as a tourist, and buildings you know only from brief and usually tightly programmed visits, often in the company of the watchful designer. This is no way to gain meaningful experience or serious knowledge of a building or landscape or how it fits within its local setting and larger environs.
Via Mammoth.
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