A Peter Schjeldahl stop and chat

Christian Viveros-Faun� chats with The New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl. “The only national chronicler of the expanding circus of art, Schjeldahl has spent four decades writing for publications like ARTnews, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and The Village Voice. At The New Yorker since 1998, Schjeldahl transitioned from writing weekly to bimonthly copy, while zeroing in on his favorite subjects. There is painting, on which he has had a schoolboy crush since ogling Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Italy (he describes a second life-changing epiphany, seeing Warhol’s flower paintings in Paris, as ‘someone kicking open the doors of a blast furnace’), and beauty, a concept he describes as ‘the A-bomb of art criticism.’ ‘Paintings are the longest, most important vacations from myself,’ Schjeldahl volunteers with characteristic frankness. On aesthetics, he can be just as personal: ‘Beauty is as important to the organism as digestion.'” Read more.