So here’s my gripe. Nobody believes me when I say I’m not an art critic. I’ve gotten this from a few different angles now, but most recently when I was taking a walk through the woods with my friend, who I won’t identify, except to call her Anja Sieger. She said, quote, “Stop doing that.”

It’s a fair point. Ultimately, I’m a guy who spends hours each week thinking about art, then writing down the things I think. Sometimes, these things could even be called, broadly speaking, criticisms. I guess it’s pretty clear-cut when you put it like that.

It’s just that the word has always sounded like a slur to me. I mean, who comes to mind when you hear ‘critic’? Anyone nice? A person more fun-loving than the badguy from Ratatouille? Or that old man from Twitter? People don’t like art critics. We know instinctively, though maybe not correctly, that explaining art is about as useful as explaining a joke.

All of which ran through my mind in the several seconds following Anja’s injunction. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything more clever to say than, “Why?” So that’s what I said. I didn’t expect her to have a reason so readily at hand.

“Because people want to know what they’re reading!”

Which is also fair, I think, though I’m not entirely sure. After turning it over all week, my best guess is that it comes to tangles.

I’m staying firm in my commitment to avoid the P-word. If you’re wondering why tangles has been pluralized, it’s because, crucially, they’re not just one thing. Every artist and writer has their own, but it’s what they do with them that matters. In this respect, we all fall into two broad groups, entanglers and untanglers.

On my best days, I’m an entangler. Whether I’m writing, scrubbing shower grout, or trying to flip the unwieldy quesadilla that I packed too full. Actually, the quesadilla is a great litmus test. Imagine yourself in my shoes this past Sunday, standing before a searing-hot pan full of bent tortilla fragments, burning cheese, and wilting lettuce. (Don’t persecute me. I like the extra crunch.) You’re starving, dinner is ruined, and the threat of a fire hazard looms.

Choose your adventure. Do you…

A) Calmly scrape all ingredients into the nearest trash receptacle, and resolve to work toward becoming wiser a more humble quesadilla-builder.

B) Scream.

C) Throw the whole thing in the sink, and run out the door.

D) Scream, throw the whole thing in the sink, and hide under a blanket while your kind and patient spouse handles dinner tonight.

We’ll keep our answers private, but if you chose anything other than A, you’re an entangler. Congratulations. We are the people who fly each day a little closer to the sun, whose hubris demands ever-fuller quesadillas, the beautiful souls who, when handed a knotted-up ball of string, just start tugging at it randomly. Maybe it’s not the most productive energy for quesadillas and balls of string, but it’s perfect for painting, certain forms of writing, and all sorts of improvisation.

You don’t have to be an entangler to make art, but it helps. Because something special happens when you pile problems on problems. I can’t explain how, so you’ll have to take it as I do, on faith, that beauty comes from nowhere else.

Critics, by trade, are untangelers. A critic sees a big quesadilla mess and instinctively draws the shortest possible path to a clean kitchen. They make a habit of traveling to all the most well-known kitchens in their city, cleaning them, and after several years begin to wonder whether they can convince Artforum to pay them to clean kitchens. My metaphor is in tatters by now, but you see what I’m getting at. An untangler has a goal in mind, a specific one, always. That’s what makes them an untangler.

There’s nothing necessarily insidious about this. Their goal might be to give a boost to a painter who needs one. Or to invite attention to a community or cause that’d otherwise remain invisible. The point is not that untanglers are unfun or unimaginative, just that they have a fundamentally different relationship to problem-solving.

And that’s more or less where I meant to land with this week’s newsletter. Untanglers are great, but I’m obviously not one, so quit pigeonholing me.

Except then I started scrolling Instagram.

I met Bianca Bova years ago, when I was trying to be a Chicago art critic. Back then, she wasn’t quite as well-known as she is today, though I can tell she’s always been someone devoted to her work as a curator, critic, and a dozen other things. My impression has always been that she’s more than a careerist, despite her career. She reminds me of Polly Morris in this sense, and in the sense that she’s probably smarter than I am.

So I’m a fan of Bianca’s, generally. But in the spirit of problem-making, could I mention my least favorite of her professional endeavors? It’s this, her 300-word review on the current show at Chicago’s Patron gallery. I’ll let you read it for yourself. The TLDR is that she’s not an Alice Tippit fan.

I think criticising art is fine, and sometimes even useful. I don’t believe critics should be cheerleaders. But, as someone who’s written their share of unimaginative take-down reviews (please never google my name) I say with no loss of irony that this specific piece of writing stinks.

It stinks for the exact reason art criticism often does, because it’s too concerned with tidiness, and too satisfied with its ability to clean up messes. The review has no other purpose but to tell the reader not to look, to stay home, to remain confident that they’re not missing anything at Patron gallery. It’s the worst form of untangling, when an otherwise thoughtful person claims to have solved a problem they haven’t yet touched. And for what? So Bianca can imagine herself as a caricature of an art critic, believing that people will take her harshness as proof of intelligence, incisiveness, or anything other than what it is, a moral lapse.

I raise this example to make the line I’m drawing perfectly clear. The distinction between Bianca and myself is not the stinky writing. (I’ve done much worse.) And it’s not even our different approaches to problem-solving. (I’m an untangler too, at least sometimes.) It’s about our willingness to attach. If you want to dedicate your life to untangling, fine, but don’t leave us hanging.

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