Too long ago, I asked blogger and critic-at-large Jerry Cullum if he would grace this space with the benefit of his wisdom and decades of experience in the Atlanta art worlds. Several miscommunications later, this is what arrived in my inbox. Print it out, read it and be enlightened.

When Cinqué asked me to write a guest post on some topic of my choosing, I first wrote a couple of Atlanta-centric pieces that seemed to go nowhere. So I never submitted them.

But since Cinqué is quite aware that I tend to write 2000-word posts, I’ve realized that this is the opportunity to write one of those global self-justifications that I would feel awkward posting on either of my own blogs. Here goes:

Buying the catalogue of the Des Moines Art Center’s current “World Histories” show has reminded me that I began writing art criticism in the same year that William Gibson published Neuromancer, the novel that birthed the now-quaint genre of cyberpunk.

It was a good year to make a career shift from the multidisciplinary, but word- and concept-heavy, writing and research I had been doing (which I have revisited often, since 2006, on my joculum blog).

The digital revolution was in the fantasy-of-the-near-future stage. Visual art was already combining sociology and anthropology and poststructuralist and neo-Marxist philosophies on the one hand, and re-inventing depth psychology and traditional artistic genres on the other. And the third hand was doing all sorts of other stuff, such as the graffiti and popular genres that had already cycled through spilling over into serious art and were en route back to a renewed lack of respectability.

Exhibitions like “Les Immateriaux” (and their catalogues) presented visions of the hard facts already being birthed in technology and the world they seemed likely to spawn, one of global networks and late capitalism’s re-creation in the form then still being called postmodernity. (I had been involved with “the postmodern” for a decade or more already, my first major published post-dissertation essay in 1975 having been on “The Problem of a Postmodern Ethics.”)

What was also already underway but less obvious was the sheer scale of global migration, the offshoot of the phenomenon that Tolstoy or someone like him had described a century earlier as “the laborer’s travels in search of work, which beggar the wanderings of Odysseus.” (In many ways, as theorists were already commenting, the second era of globalization was remarkably parallel to the first era of globalization, the era of mass migration and globally linked capitalism facilitated by easy travel and communication circa 1860-1914 that was wiped out in the First World War.)

So by 1994 I was curating my first serious exhibition at Savannah’s Telfair Museum, the Artists in Georgia show called “Mapping the Self: Models of Identity in a Postmodernizing State” (the catalogue for which, I have just now learned, is listed on amazon.com under the name of the person who asked me to curate the exhibition). I pointed out in the catalogue essay that Gainesville, Georgia already had an ethnic composition that would place it surprisingly high in the ranks of emigrant Mexican-born populations.

At the same time, it was the dawn of the era in which the interaction of the art and culture of Africa and the Black Diaspora would sweep away the clichés of the 1960s about the place of postcolonial populations in the world. (I had discovered Derek Walcott and his fellow Caribbean writers, and belatedly studied some of the aftermath of the Négritude movement of Leopold Senghor and his inheritors, on my own around 1977. Also circa 1977, Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff were too unavoidable to require discovering. …Ishmael Reed had globalized the African-American imagination in wonderfully transgressive books by the end of the ‘60s. But in the mid-70s it was far from apparent what was about to burst forth in the second wave of an increasingly global African Diaspora aesthetics.)

But it was the era of identity politics, so I didn’t feel comfortable letting my writing (other than poems) venture very far outside the postmodern conceptual crisis that had come to birth with Nietzsche & Co. during the First Era of Globalization. So in 1984 I had to be lured into writing about contemporary art (which I noticed seemed to have gotten itself out of its minimalist love affair with mathematics) by way of commenting on art history, part two of the Wassily Kandinsky survey at the High.

And then I was lured into newspaper writing by being asked to provide context for Michael Murrell’s collection of New Guinea sculpture (traditional cultures plus the politics of Pacific independence movements having been one of my other interests of the 1970s).

And that brings me, finally, to the topics of my failed Atlanta-centric guest blog posts.

Atlanta was then (1988 or so) just past the end of the first decade of the cultural and economic experiment that had gotten started during the administration of Maynard Jackson, the attempt that one friend had called the wish to become “The World’s Next Great International City” without having been a great American city first. But the city did already have a small but flourishing contemporary art scene that included major representatives of what was then sometimes known as the Black Aesthetic (Wadsworth Jarrell of AFRICOBRA, and others too numerous to mention, some of whom are still on the scene hereabouts) and a healthy concentration of minimalists who were also women artists (and they are still decidedly on the scene). Atlanta was, in fact, one of the cities that made the dominant concerns of the art world in general seem odd, since so much of the aesthetic (as distinct from economic) power structure was already dominated by women and African-Americans.

So there was a lot to write about, and a lot of room in which to do it, the Atlanta daily newspaper being then amenable to in-depth art reviews not quite as long as the New York Review of Books’, but enough to get a few educational points across. And “educating the audience” was a hot topic of the day. The assumption was that if the collectors could be made to understand what was happening in contemporary art, and if the artists could be made to understand what was happening in contemporary theory, utopia would blossom.

It was a very Atlanta-type thing to think, in spite of the scene’s contempt for the city’s boosterism. It was the same kind of naïve optimism that got Atlanta the 1996 Olympics, in a move spearheaded by a financial bloc of whom some didn’t even own passports.

After the Cultural Olympiad had come and gone and the main result for art was that there were no longer any large empty spaces in which to hold artist-organized events like the Great Mattress Factory exhibitions (which had showcased the best and the worst of Atlanta’s under-recognized, all in the same venue)…after all of that, we were back to audiences that stubbornly refused to be “educated,” and artists who were getting tired and discouraged.

In spite of which, interesting things happened, in a manner of speaking. But it was all small-time and underfunded, and there were fewer and fewer opportunities to get the graffiti folk interested in global conceptual issues, or to get the lovers of Impressionism interested in the visually lovely paintings of young local artists whom they would like,

And with the reality of incompatible audiences who needed to be addressed in the shrinking number of column inches afforded by the print media (the broadcast media afforded next to nothing), serious art reviewing became increasingly impossible.

A good review should have set forth the social and historical context of the artist, evaluated the quality of the exhibition at hand in terms of the national scene with which it was competing (and the days when Fay Gold could bring in Basquiat and Keith Haring when they were still white-hot were already behind us, so the world’s new art of the ‘90s was being viewed at a distance), and suggested what type of person would most like the exhibition in question.

The space available and the parameters set by local preferences increasingly suggested that all that could be done was a sentence or two about the intent of the artist followed by the equivalent of “Go look at this” in whatever vernacular or archly allusive apothegm seemed most appropriate to the audience being addressed.

And the editors expected critics to address both skateboarders and sixtysomethings, often in the same review. Plus to pay for their own catalogues and travel expenses and time off from their real jobs if such was necessary. (The dirty little secret being that New York art reviewing was also compensated as a spare-time activity that did not get the bills paid, either.)

To get back to those skateboarders and sixtysomethings…all it takes is a few visits to every gallery opening in town to realize the degree to which the art audiences do not communicate with one another, or even acknowledge one another’s existence except in acts of mutually contemptuous stereotyping.

And since the art from elsewhere that gets exhibited is dependent on the taste of curators and the realities of the commercial market, the already blinkered multiple audiences in Atlanta are not even challenged by artwork from elsewhere that undercuts their presuppositions.

André Gregory, in a film that came out a couple of years before I became an art critic, suggested that theatre was in decline because everyone was already playing their own personal roles so well that they felt no need to go look at anyone else playing one. And the mutually exclusive art scenes of Atlanta are definitely as much about personal theatre as they are about art…but that has always been the case with art scenes everywhere, so that isn’t the problem.

But the audiences that aren’t aware of each other’s existence don’t seem tremendously conscious of their own theatricality, either. A lot of art gets validated, not because it is any good, but because the folks presenting it know how to stage a good party, whether the party is a PBR-lubricated sidewalk event for one group or a launch featuring the cool new liqueur of the moment for another coterie of gallerygoers, or your standard-issue bad wine and cheap cheese for the widely varied middle group that comes to openings for many different reasons.

Some of the gallery owners and others do make an effort to make sure the more thoughtful of their visitors have their horizons expanded. A creditable number of galleries show work that they know their clientele will not like and that those who like it cannot afford to buy, and that loyalty to a larger goal is what keeps this art community going.

But there seem to be fewer and fewer opportunities for critics to say more than “Y’all come look at this.” And that is dangerously close to the fabled Last Words of a Good Ol’ Boy: “Hey, y’all, watch this.”

And given the quantity of art that is tailored to the tastes of the audiences we already have, even would-be serious critics fall prey to the condition summed up by the ancient maxim, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you came here to drain the swamp.”

And in recent years, there has not been much interest either in the overall engineering project or in controlling the more obstreperously obstacle-creating critical conditions.

But that is where we get back to the problem that the theoreticians thus far have understood the world, but the task now is to change it. Except that we are all too busy fighting off the alligators to do a whole lot of swamp-draining.

And if you go back to the starting point of this essay, you can fill in for yourself the subject of at least a half-dozen other blog posts—if anyone had the leisure, breadth of vision, and mental clarity to write them, and that is part of the problem. (See the preceding paragraphs.)

Thanks, Cinqué. I never would have had the nerve to put this up on Counterforces and Other Little Jokes.