In Praise of Paumgarten, Nick

(on Zwirner, and on nailing the art of art writing)

By DIADEM Staff

Nick Paumgarten’s new piece on New York gallerist David Zwirner in the December 2, 2013 New Yorker is not merely the magaziney stuff that long post-turkey couch surfs—the soft clanking of hand washed dishes in the background—are made for. It is one of the best pieces of general appreciation art writing we’ve read in a long time.

We won’t spoil anything; everyone ought to read all eleven of the online pages in the piece, this weekend, at a commodious pace.

It suffices to offer here that Paumgarten finds all manner of insights, and along the way to showing what top-shelf periodical non-fiction looks like, places the reader both within and without the personal worldview of the protagonist of the piece, the aforementioned D. Zwirner.

Having finished the article, you might take away the hunch that Zwirner promises to have more than a helmsman’s influence on the ordinal direction of art in the coming two decades. Whether you react to that feeling as a portent of goodness, badness, or indifference, the bottom of the soundings are that Nick Paumgarten has provided a nuanced cartography of both man and moment that is, as the best maps are, inspiring and cautionary all at once.

Pre-Zwirner, Paumgarten’s most recent story was on Everest mountaineer Ueli Steck. Doesn’t the world have enough journos covering frostbite on that pinnaced rock, and can’t we draft Paumgarten to ply his sublime storytelling full-time against the canvassed sagas of On Kawara or Gerhard Richter?

N.1. This text courtesy of DIADEM by Cavendish Projects.

N.2. All copyright to this text reserved by Cavendish Projects.

N.3. Cavendish Projects is on Twitter @cavprojects.