elephants on parade

Ya so I got busted having never read "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," which you can find part of here. There's also a good Art Forum piece on Manny Farber that contains a short speech by Greil Marcus. You can't help but feel the self-reflexivity Marcus must have meant when he wrote this:

"Ideas impossible to understand because they come through a fog of stupidity." It's scary for a writer to come across a sentence that so plainly says what it means, in which the prose is so exquisitely balanced, and you take pleasure in the way the words are put together, and you worry that you've written things about which something like that could be said over and over and over again.

Walter Benjamin once said that an author who teaches a writer nothing teaches nobody anything. One thing that I think happens for many writers reading Farber is that they feel themselves on trial. They feel this same scrutiny that's brought to bear on actors, on directors, on painters, on musicians, on comic-strip artists. Maybe they feel lucky that Manny Farber has never read them and therefore doesn't have an opinion on them.

Will have to get my hands on the rest of this here termite thing...