Word: kimmelman
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...Michel Kimmelman is not the kind of art critic who spends all his time in museums. He's the kind who finds himself trudging up the side of Mont Ste.-Victoire, the peak in Provence that was Paul Cézanne's perennial motif. Or getting lost in the darkness of the Nevada desert while pondering Michael Heizer's massive earthworks. Or setting out to visit the world's largest collection of light bulbs, only to detour to a museum of hunting decoys, musing all the while on the history of connoisseurship and the evolving notion of the marvelous...
...Kimmelman sets out on most of these cultural pilgrimages in search of a transcendent experience. He doesn't always get one, but we do. Though he is the art critic of the New York Times, his light-footed and surprising book The Accidental Masterpiece (Penguin Press; 245 pages) is anything but a dutiful gathering of old clips. It's the work of a man who is both intellectually and physically intrepid, somebody who peregrinates between art-world topics and his own life experience, shedding light on such questions as the uses of suffering in the creative process or the sources...
...Kimmelman's ascent of Ste.-Victoire--a bit of a disappointment, as it turns out--sets off a chain of thoughts about how people can disagree on what is beautiful, which leads to a review of the challenges that Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp made to the very idea of beauty. And that brings Kimmelman to reflect on the changing Western response to mountains--the Romans found them desolate, Martin Luther even thought they were part of God's punishment for man's fall--and how the dangers and hardship of a mountain trek, the very things that made mountains...
...Kimmelman doesn't have to climb mountains to find inspiration. A trip to the supermarket with his 5-year-old leads him to think about how art transfigures the commonplace, which puts him in mind of the hushed brown crockery in the still lifes of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and the pulsating gum balls of Wayne Thiebaud, which in turn bring him to a wise and lovely conclusion: "Artists who push us to look more carefully at simple things may also strike a slightly melancholic note. They remind us of a childlike condition of wonderment that we abandoned once...
...Kimmelman initially dismissed the final entries as a “disappointment” and “unmemorable,” suggesting that the populism of the process was its flaw and that the memorial’s design should be limited to entrants of the jury’s choosing. What Kimmelman proudly touts as “elitism,” Van Valkenburgh views as problematic. “Excellence isn’t necessarily the consequence of either picking a star or of a public process, but the consequence of the evolution of the design which...