For the Ordinary Artist Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces and More by Bill Berkson
"Opinions are not literature" Gertrude Stein famously admonished Ernest Hemingway. It's a maxim that puts most art critics behind the Eight-Ball. Not Bill Berkson. His criticism doesn't just deliver an opinion, it embodies an experience, matching the texture and plasticity of visual forms with a vividness and suppleness of language that gives the reader something shapely and immediate to respond to thereby opening path ways in the mind to the image or object being evoked and judged. His subject is art; his essays and critical prose poems are uncommonly graceful literary artifacts. —Robert Storr
"Opinions are not literature" Gertrude Stein famously admonished Ernest Hemingway. It's a maxim that puts most art critics behind the Eight-Ball. Not Bill Berkson. His criticism doesn't just deliver an opinion, it embodies an experience, matching the texture and plasticity of visual forms with a vividness and suppleness of language that gives the reader something shapely and immediate to respond to thereby opening path ways in the mind to the image or object being evoked and judged. His subject is art; his essays and critical prose poems are uncommonly graceful literary artifacts. —Robert Storr
"Opinions are not literature" Gertrude Stein famously admonished Ernest Hemingway. It's a maxim that puts most art critics behind the Eight-Ball. Not Bill Berkson. His criticism doesn't just deliver an opinion, it embodies an experience, matching the texture and plasticity of visual forms with a vividness and suppleness of language that gives the reader something shapely and immediate to respond to thereby opening path ways in the mind to the image or object being evoked and judged. His subject is art; his essays and critical prose poems are uncommonly graceful literary artifacts. —Robert Storr
"Opinions are not literature" Gertrude Stein famously admonished Ernest Hemingway. It's a maxim that puts most art critics behind the Eight-Ball. Not Bill Berkson. His criticism doesn't just deliver an opinion, it embodies an experience, matching the texture and plasticity of visual forms with a vividness and suppleness of language that gives the reader something shapely and immediate to respond to thereby opening path ways in the mind to the image or object being evoked and judged. His subject is art; his essays and critical prose poems are uncommonly graceful literary artifacts.
—Robert Storr
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Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet and critic who now lives in San Francisco. He taught art history and literature from 1984 to 2008 at the San Francisco Art Institute. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has published reviews and essays in such other magazines as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, ARTnews and artcritical.com. He is the author of some twenty books and pamphlets of poetry – most recently, Not an Exit and Lady Air-- and was awarded the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s 2008 Goldie for Literature as well as the 2010 Balcones Prize for his collection Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems. His previous books of criticism include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 and The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings 1985-2003. Jed Perl in The New Republic remarked that The Sweet Singer of Modernism “is animated by an easygoing prose style, an exact feeling for the power of images, a keen respect for the value of an artist’s words, and an abiding fascination with the art world as a social fabric.”
Book Information:
· Paperback: 294 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-005-7