Theoretical tongue lashings

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For me theory only matters in how it informs my work-making and my work-viewing, and most of the time language just can't handle art. I've read everything I can get my hands on about Cubism, from Apollinaire to Steinberg to Hockney and I've never read an explanation or "theory" that works nearly as well as just looking. It's irreducible. Theory, history, an artist's personal story - these can all enhance looking at something, but they can't replace it. A lot of art today relies on words to support it, to prop it up and give it the legs it should have by itself. This stuff is championed by curators, who are writers and readers and not always lookers, and too frequently good useful philosophy gets lost in jargon and labyrinthine crap.

That said, I do see a value in theory for those with a taste for it. I've known lots of artists and others with temperaments that fit well with the dense, dry theory laden way of dealing with making and looking at art, and it may be the soggy liberal in me, but if that's their way in, then that's ok with me. What has bothered me is both the reliance on it to pump up boring art, and the use of it a bludgeon for those of us who don't value it as much.

I told this story in the comments at Thinking About Art... Back in the early 90s I was at Skowhegan for the summer and many of my pals were big theory-heads. They could go on and on about the stuff and though they never beat me with it, I felt really dumb because I was so unversed in theory and had a really hard time reading it at all. Near the end of the summer I made a fantastic discovery - my theory-head pals read a lot, but didn't read any literature at all - no Faulkner, no Joyce, no nothing. They even argued with me about whether literature had any value to us today at all. We had different ways in. I didn't feel dumb anymore, I felt lucky.

UPDATE: J.T. Kirkland over at Thinking About Art just posted about this...