Who could be indifferent to the news that two of America’s most celebrated writers—John Updike and John Ashbery—are publishing collections of art criticism this fall? They’ve each won nearly every prize the literary establishment has to offer, one for fiction, the other for poetry. We approach their collections of art criticism with high expectations; we might assume, and not unfairly, that their writing will be a model of intelligence and clarity, that it will soar above the muddle that nowadays passes for serious discourse in art magazines and exhibition catalogues, that perhaps it will even establish its authors as rightful heirs to a tradition exemplified by Baudelaire, Valéry, Proust, Apollinaire, etc.—the tradition of the literary art critic. But we are soon disappointed.
Just Looking, the collection by Updike, has a cute, self-dismissive title that seems to apologize for the book’s existence. At first, we feel a bit charmed by Updike’s unnecessary modesty. Yet as we start reading, we’re surprised to realize that the tide isn’t intended ironically. Updike really is just looking—looking at paintings and describing what he sees. In a typical piece, he offers an elegantly phrased discussion of a favorite work of art, yet he rarely goes beyond surface details. And while his longer pieces attempt to proffer critical judgments, it would be hard to call them sharp or decisive. Reviewing the Renoir show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1985, for example, he writes: “Renoir does not quite rank with the heroic