Work long enough as a critic and you’re bound to hear the cliché, questionably attributed to Jean Sibelius, that “No statue has ever been built in honor of a critic.”
First of all, it’s a lie. There’s a very nice statue honoring Roger Ebert in Champaign, Illinois, not that Jean Sibelius would know that. There are a few others. It just isn’t common.
Second, you know what most critics would appreciate more than a brass likeness left to confuse people after our deaths? A work of art respecting, rather than just representing, the critic of art.
Ebert got one of those as well, Steve James’ very fine 2014 documentary, Life Itself.
It’s still a small field, but one that Alison Chernick‘s House of Criticism enters confidently.
House of Criticism isn’t just a documentary about a critic. It’s a documentary about a pair of critics, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz and New York Times co-chief art critic Roberta Smith, who have been married since 1992.
Sincere, smart and sweet without ever being saccharine, Chernick’s (Itzhak) film is also wisely limited, telling its paired story in an efficient 82 minutes — an economy that critics of all stripes will surely appreciate.
Saltz (like Ebert, the recipient of a Pulitzer for criticism) and Smith play their respective roles well. He’s the outgoing one, heading out into Greenwich Village on missions for their voluminous daily supply of coffee, enthusiastically chatting with strangers and slipping in sly references to their sex life because he knows those mentions embarrass her. But she’s playing up her discomfort because she’s clearly setting him up, time and time again.
Watching their dynamic, as they work on their respective pieces in adjoining rooms in their apartment, is heartening and, honestly, aspirational in every way. These are two incredibly intelligent people who each value what they gain from their interactions — the long sessions bickering and bantering in galleries, as well as their rapport when they assist each other (but never too much) in the writing process.
Each encourages and nurtures the other, a remarkable achievement for two people who are, ostensibly, competitors.
But they also understand they’re both part of an endangered species, as full-time arts critics employed at legacy publications, and they (especially Saltz) are determined to articulate the differences between the public perception of their job — the lazy good-bad binary — and the way they see their mission.
“You do not ask what a work of art means. You ask, what does it do? What does art do to you?” Saltz says.
That’s a version of the job, absolutely!
Or as artist Mickalene Thomas puts it, in a spirited chat with him, “Criticism is about having an opinion and saying, ‘Is this really important?'”
Saltz and Smith are both very aware as well of changes to how they think and how they approach their jobs. Saltz is very active on Instagram, even posting Smith’s reviews on her behalf and grumbling, in a wholly good-natured way, that they often get more likes than his do. Smith, for her part, beautifully grapples with an artist she didn’t like decades earlier, coming to the conclusion that the artist had matured but also, in a wholly ego-free way, recognizing that she has gotten better at seeing the artist’s intent.
While House of Criticism is very much about Smith and Saltz and their love story, at times, that’s when it’s least interesting. Saltz’s biography is complicated and twisty and he doesn’t always know or care when certain details make him look less than ideal. Smith tells beautiful stories of how she learned to stand up for her opinion in childhood when her mother asked her questions about interior decorating choices, but her actual professional journey never really sparks onscreen.
There are stretches when the documentary becomes structurally lax and Saltz becomes a de facto interviewer himself, asking pointed questions of their famous friends, including Cindy Sherman and Lena Dunham, who’s also their goddaughter. Dunham picks up the interrogator baton and asks a pointed question about the couple not having kids of their own and it yields a very strong answer. Still, these direct “Let’s talk about how great Jerry and Roberta are” segments can feel arbitrary, if never desperate.
The film moves best in a fly-on-the-wall mode, when it’s following its subjects around the city as they take in New York’s thriving art spaces both big — Saltz literally kneels in front of Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” at MoMa — and small. In more obscure corners, you can see the gratitude the owners and dealers have for these two people who have dedicated their lives to celebrating exhibitions by budding virtuosos in cramped studio spaces as fervently as they do retrospectives by legends at the city’s many renowned institutions. These relationships needn’t be adversarial.
It’s a love letter to New York City, a love letter to the necessity of caffeine consumption in the creative process, a love letter to the importance of criticism in valorizing and contextualizing art. And it’s a tribute to Chernick and her trio of editors, for having a mostly admirable sense of just how much adulation to pay this unique couple so that film critics would find House of Criticism adequately, but never overly, indulgent.
