Zachary Fine in The Nation:
It can be argued, with some important caveats and qualifications, that Peter Schjeldahl was the most inventive, entertaining, and self-observing art critic to have ever worked in the English language. For 60 years, give or take, he struck himself like a tuning fork against works of art and attempted to transcribe the way his nerves vibrated to the aesthetic. These transcriptions involved dense, epigrammatic sentences, zany metaphors, and a chatty authority that was both deceptively approachable and disarmingly smart. Although he put himself in the bloodline of poet-critics like Baudelaire and Frank O’Hara, their prose never approaches anything like the constant, look-at-me lexical wizardry of an exhibition review by Schjeldahl. His writing credo: “Concentrated. At least one idea per sentence. Melodious, I hope. With jokes.”
From his early pieces in ARTnews in the 1960s to his final review in The New Yorker in 2022, Schjeldahl’s career spanned from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Andy Warhol’s golden years to Bidenomics and Beeple, with only one brief interruption in the mid-1970s—when he tried to quit art criticism and get back to poetry (his true love), but realized “there was nothing else that I did very well that they pay you for.” Having a career that lasts over half a century is not unusual, but being an art critic for that long definitely is. An art critic must endure (or enjoy) the constant grind of gallery-going and press junkets, an oppressively swampy environment of mega-wealth and self-congratulation, and the never-ending churn of the “new.” It’s also a job that easily corrupts, as Schjeldahl discovered—gallerists try to buy you, artists try to sleep with you—and like many writers, critics have a talent for alienating friends and family (as Schjeldahl did), falling prey to substance abuse and addiction (as Schjeldahl did), and seesawing between narcissism and self-loathing (as Schjeldahl did). He was also, to the dismay of his family, prone to breakfasts of bacon and Entenmann’s chocolate donuts, negligent in matters of dental hygiene, and a lifelong smoker—typically three packs a day.
More here.
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