A few years back, when I was teaching a class on art criticism in Salzburg, one of the participants said something that’s stayed with me: that art critics, as they get older, tend to use the first person more. On the one hand, I think that’s true – see this very column, or any of the earlier ones – and is something to do with confusing having your sketchy opinions published for years with them mattering much. For a useful corrective, a critic might pay attention to where they’re placed at the gallery dinner; enjoy getting to know the technicians. On the other hand, grizzled art writers starting every other sentence with ‘I’ are no longer the exception. If anything’s changed in art criticism within living memory, aside from the latter-day ‘crisis’ it seems continually able to stagger through, it’s that the first-person exhibition review has mainstreamed.
If you question the merchants of Chinatown, which amounts to about 24 blocks, many old-timers say an era has ended. Some blame the pandemic and cite rising xenophobia. Some blame Amazon for undermining their bricks-and-mortar livelihoods. Some blame the rising tourist appetite for experiences and Instagram fodder instead of conventional merchandise.
These problems have hobbled Chinatowns across North America, including Los Angeles and New York, and they take on a special resonance in San Francisco, home to this continent’s oldest Chinatown.
Bold and italics are the oils that grace my palette. Cut and paste the strings upon my lyre. Fonts, bullets, columns, indentations—these stubborn materials are no match for the alchemy with which I extract meaning and impose order. For I am proficient in Microsoft Word.
Joudah has an impeccable ear, and the poem is a song that rides on its internal rhymes and half-rhymes, assonance and consonance. He has a scientist’s mind, landing on the unusual coupling of “unified” with “nucleotides.” His ability to see the body for what it is — water, blood, food for worms, a mass of nucleotides, adding up to our fully functioning biosphere and microbiome, both clarifies and mystifies.
By exploring the spectrum of commitment — from doubts about one's career and cultural identity, as depicted in Wang's debut novel Chemistry, to a deep passion for one's calling that seems tantamount to faith in Joan is Okay — Weike Wang has shown us myriad ways to build a sense of home, myriad ways to feel okay in our skin.
But it just came bagged from an isle of maggots squirming
in beehives. As love, reckless, as some wind loves sound