So both poetry and art criticism took up with theory after their divorce in the 1960s; this is informative, but how does it trip up my nifty formulation? No one studying art (or curatorial practice) graduates without a sidebar of feminism, film theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, Foucault, and so on; on the other hand, it is not just imaginable but likely that they have achieved their graduate degree having never been asked to read a poem.

You could rightly ask why we needed to choose; or which was more effective for instating regimes of exclusion; or, why a coterie between poets and painters is more righteous than whatever social structure applies to the present (the market, sure, but only that?)

Brent, you say that “O’Hara manifests (for Bernstein) a useful model for creating some kind of borders or rigor to a critical practice that also manages to avoid devolving into negatively-defined, exclusionary hierarchies,” and say he evokes a “nearly utopian promise of a critical/social space that’s both definable/marked yet open-ended, expansive, anti-universalist.” I am sure you’re right – this is what CB’s after. But would that we were discussing actual practices rather than utopian promises. And while I’ve asked whether these qualities might not exist in contemporary art criticism, they assume there a different – and certainly not a utopian – cast.

First, I agree with Jasper’s points by and large, except for his sense that for Bernstein “theatricality” is bad–unless J. means it in some strict or narrow sense a la Fried’s definition of it. Value for theatricality is precisely what Bernstein is advocating in the penultimate sentence: “On the contrary, art criticism, insofar as it succumbs to a paranoiac fear of theatricality that induces frame-lock, lags behind poetry at its peril.”

Secondly, and I don’t know what difference this makes, but wanted to say that I think Goldsmith himself may be using that “50 years behind” line as an oblique and possibly even ironic reference to Ezra Pound, who was really the original obsessive user of that conceptual shorthand well before Gysin, although Pound probably got it from somewheres himself. I recall Pound saying that before he went to London he was 20 years behind the times, but when he left he was thirty years ahead, or something to that effect, etc. I very much agree, Julian, that it’s a bizarre & confusing figure (time/history as a detached entity traveling at a fixed rate that people can somehow get in front of or fall behind by specific intervals) but by now I think it’s maybe better read, in the case of Bernstein and maybe also Goldsmith, as just a kind of light riff on modernist historicist megalomania.

Maybe this last point is obvious, but my feeling is that the energy of these discussions isn’t really about the historical but largely about the present & future–there are lots of practicing poets weighing in, and I assume practicing artists. Thinking of it that way reveals that what Bernstein and Shaw are claiming is certainly not that ideas of “criticality, rigor, and discipline” should be jettisoned. Rather, as I read it, they seem to be arguing that O’Hara manifests exactly a useful model for creating some kind of borders or rigor to a critical practice that also manages to avoid devolving into negatively-defined, exclusionary hierarchies. They name the model “coterie,” or maybe “good coterie.” What drives the Bernstein’s piece is just such a nearly utopian promise of a critical/social space that’s both definable/marked yet open-ended, expansive, anti-universalist.

Is that already the case in current art criticism, as Julian suggests? That’s lovely, and I’m intrigued. But philosophically speaking I’m generally skeptical of claims of this sort for either poetics or art criticism, and also of the political implications. It’s kind of the perpetual motion machine of aesthetic theory, this idea that there are ways to advance critical ideas that also don’t denigrate anybody or anything, or at least only denigrate those who deserve it. Still, what matters here is less whether Bernstein come to the debate belatedly or whether he is up on art criticism, but rather whether there really are approaches to thinking and opining that can help avoid “academic gate-keeping and market validation.” Practically speaking let’s talk about how to create conditions that cultivate artistic reformation and innovation rather than stifle it, and importantly how to measure what does and doesn’t cultivate that reformation. Maybe coterie isn’t it, maybe Elkins’ “criticism important enough to count as history” is it, maybe some third thing, maybe every kind of speaking aloud follows the same laws of power, etc., but the foundational question is really about criticism’s relationship to power & validation and how to exercise it.

Your brief here readily paraphrases many of my own feelings about the Bernstein piece when I read it. You probably already know all this, but a couple of points of detail might bring things into focus a little bit, even if they don’t exactly explain what he’s on about:

1)Bernstein’s title is a simple inversion of Kenny Goldsmith’s deliberately provocative claim that the reception of conceptual writing “is still fifty years behind art,” and that poets–even and especially language poets–never really took advantage of the radical possibilities of conceptual and post-conceptual art for writing. But given that Goldsmith’s references mostly consist of 80s postmodernism and poststucturalism–Baudrillard, Jeff Koons, etc.–he’s not exactly on the leading edge of history either.

2)Bernstein has had a dialogue with Fried for a good, long while–his poem-essay “The Artifice of Absorption” and his short piece “On Theatricality” clearly have Fried as their main (though unacknowledged in the latter) inspiration, and as with many critical readers of Fried in art departments, his call for an anti-absorptive poetics essentially accepts the terms that Fried offers but changes the evaluative poles around: absorption is “bad,” not good. (“Theatricality” is also bad for Bernstein, so it’s not exactly a simple reversal of the binary). I’m not sure many people realize just how indebted Bernstein is to Fried, whatever their opposed stances.

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I will say, however, that I think Bernstein is correct about one thing: few art critics and art historians, and few working artists, take any direction from or interest in poetry of the last fifty years. . .It’s rare to come across a reference to a poet more recent than Apollinaire in the pages of a journal like Parkett or October. (Frank O’Hara is really the exception here). This is all anecdotal, of course, but in my experience, the reverse is not true, or not as true, and the people who write contemporary poetry and write about it are rather interested in (and sometimes even knowledgeable about!) recent and not-so-recent art. Why is this? I don’t know. I’m tempted to offer “money” as a short answer, though.

Lastly, Michael Fried’s poetry is awful, just awful.

Is the bohemian lineage Bernstein sets out – the legacy of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Stein and (maybe) O’Hara – at all retrievable? Greenberg and Fried are taken to be a more or less “luminous” part of this happy lineage; it is their postmodern offspring who really get bashed in his essay. Perhaps one reason O’Hara’s status is fraught is that he sits with them atop a massive fault: a shift from poetry and art as the mutual productions of a bohemian social circle, to poetry and art as relatively disconnected professionalized spheres of activity with different institutions, public discourses, circuits of exchange etc. Conceived in this way, though, the idea that such a massive shift, which tracks across multiple spheres beyond art and poetry, could be the result of the efforts of Greenberg, Fried et al., seems wrong on the face of it. What is interesting then is the way that the force of this splitting off is registered in the texture of individual judgments and relations and productions. But this is an historical line of thinking – and not a poetic or critical one.