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What makes Sebastian Smee’s Pulitzer-winning criticism tick?
At the beginning of Rachel Cusk’s 2014 novel Outline, the narrator, a writer, is speaking to her neighbour on an aeroplane flying to Athens. He is embarrassed that the book he has with him is by Wilbur Smith, (the Africa-action-thriller airport novelist). He wants to make clear that he has better taste than this, usually. But she doesn’t care what he’s reading.
“I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another,” she thinks. “In fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
Sebastian Smee, the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning art critic, has been thinking a lot about this idea. As a critic, says Smee, “That could be said to be a problem. Because you’re supposed to be telling people about things and persuading them of how great things are.”
“But I knew exactly what she meant.”
We’re speaking in the green room at the Byron Bay Writers festival, where Smee is promoting his book, The Art of Rivalry. He is on leave in Australia, his home country, for the whole of 2017, and when we meet he seems like the most content person in the world. Maybe it’s the Vegemite. (You can catch him in conversation with Patricia Anderson at Storyology Sydney on August 31. Get tickets).
The thought in Outline reminds him of something Lucien Freud once said (Smee has written five books on the eminent portraitist, who also features heavily in The Art of Rivalry): “When you find something very moving you almost want to know less about it. He said that it’s rather like when falling in love — you don’t want to meet the parents.”
“I keep thinking about that, all the time.”
Later, at a talk with other critics — of books, of music, of film — the conversation turns to the role of personal feeling in criticism. One critic says that since nobody would give a damn about the way he feels about anchovies, why then should he bring his emotions into the way he feels about anything else? Another says he had to become a critic or he’d be grabbing people on the street and imploring them to see this or that film.
Smee says in turn that for him, criticism is the process of getting his head around art and what it moves in him, and then sharing that. His love of art grew through a series of epiphanies whipped up by artworks that “moved my heart off the peg it was on to somewhere else.”
It’s like something New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl once said, adds Smee: That through criticism, you want to be able “to hopscotch from an I and a you, to a we.”
Back in the green room he explains that sometimes the best way to do this is to take refuge in facts. He comes back to Cusk’s novel and the notion of an outline: “You talk around something and you leave the very precious thing, the moving thing at the heart of it, almost unsaid,” says Smee. “But the way you’ve talked around it can suggest or evoke it.”
In 2010, the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Smee wrote of Edward Hopper, “Again and again, Hopper’s pictures conjure feelings — only some of them dire — that we all recognize, if ever we have gone solo to a movie, traveled through twilit landscapes by train, or let ourselves, unaccompanied, into an empty hotel room, enfolded in silence.”
For his next book, Smee is considering writing about the idea of interior life, the innermost thoughts and feelings evoked by Hopper and silent hotel rooms. He wants to look at how might protect it in an age where — “What’s the name of that book?,” he asks. “Everything is Illuminated.”
Smee has read that after a person hits “like” 250–300 times on Facebook, the platform can tell more about a person than their parents or partner can. He’s not convinced. “I still feel like there are parts of us that cannot be known, and we need to pay more attention to them.”
This goes to the heart of his purpose. “It’s art and writing that let us be in touch with those hidden parts of us that are hard to access otherwise.”
Sebastian Smee will be in conversation with Patricia Anderson at Storyology, The Walkley Foundation’s journalism festival, on Thursday, August 31 in Sydney. Buy tickets and check out the full program (including events in Brisbane and Melbourne).
