O Pulitzer para um crítico: Holland Cotter

A surpresa
Pulitzer In Criticism Goes To ... An Art Critic?!? - Los Angeles Times 04/20/09
latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/04/pulitzer-cotter-stop-the-presses-art-critic-wins-pulitzer.html

A notícia
www.pulitzer.org/citation/2009-Criticism
For distinguished criticism, in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000). Awarded to Holland Cotter of The New York Times for his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling.

Leituras:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/holland_cotter
No NYT, com acesso a alguns exemplos recentes de críticas legíveis, por exemplo a exposições de Martin Kippenberger e Gustave Caillebotte ou à trienal do New Museum.

E "The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!", February 12, 2009, www.nytimes.com

"LAST year Artforum magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art monthlies, felt as fat as a phone book, with issues running to 500 pages, most of them gallery advertisements. The current issue has just over 200 pages. Many ads have disappeared.
The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.
Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing."
(...)
"But there will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. What will artists do with this?
Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?
I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. Exactly. Crazy."

É um escrito importante, para lá da maior ou menor concordância.