Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

Author:Tom Robbins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

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jiminy critic

When at age five I announced my intention to be a writer, I had not the skinniest notion that that job description might include writing art criticism. Yet here I was in my early thirties writing critiques instead of literature, which is to say, producing carob instead of chocolate -- or, worse, itch power instead of lubricant. On the other hand, because I’d yet to find my literary voice, my personal style, or my subject, functioning as a critic on a regular basis served to sharpen my wits, deepen my insight, and steel me to face looming deadlines without a twitch or a flinch. Moreover, I was consistently in close contact with creative minds.

Some of those minds, naturally, were more advanced, more original, more possessed than others, and I made it my mission to separate, to the best of my ability, tough minds from the weak, the driven from the lazy, the radiant from the dull. This had never been done in Seattle before, and there was considerable brush (no pun intended) in the so-called art world to clear away, a number of undeserved reputations to bolster or deflate; an approach, of course, that endeared me to some quarters, made me a pariah -- and a target -- in others.

Not surprisingly, I was attracted to the unconventional, and when I was moved by some radically inventive work, I was reckless enough to climb out on a limb and sing its praises, even when there was a posse down below shaking the tree. Never, however, was this a question of my taste being superior -- or inferior -- to that of others in the art community. To respond to art in a meaningful way, notions of “taste” must be set aside or tossed out the window. Taste becomes legitimately operational only when expressing preference between works of relatively equal aesthetic weight. To prefer Matisse to Picasso, for example, can be a valid expression of taste, but to prefer Thomas Kinkade to Picasso isn’t taste at all, it’s aesthetic vulgarity. (Please feel free to shake my tree.)

When the assistant director of the Seattle Art Museum labeled me “a Hell’s Angel,” I took it as a compliment, thinking it was because of my two-fisted, impolite treatment of certain sacred cows and venerated charlatans, but it turned out that it was my practice of arriving at museum exhibitions aboard my black Jawa motorcycle that offended his effete sensibilities. The wife of the director of said museum did at one point attempt to take out a full-page ad in the Times to denounce me, but the paper, to its credit, refused to accept it, an act of loyalty that cost it a hunk of money.

To be embraced by some, despised by others, is usually the mark of an effective critic. I cannot pretend, however, that I excelled at my job. Oh, I could “stir up the animals,” as H. L. Mencken liked to put it, but at deconstructing a painting from an informed, formalistic

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