Mirroring the Headlines

I was dismayed to read David Pagel’s bitter and reactionary review of my exhibition, “The Paranoid Machine,” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Art Reviews, July 25.) His interest in pushing a narrow aesthetic agenda at the expense of interrogating the show’s real issues makes readers who turn to The Times for serious criticism the “ultimate losers,” rather than, as Pagel insists, the viewers of my exhibition.

Pagel seems obsessed with forcing “The Paranoid Machine” to function as a sequel to “Narcissistic Disturbance,” an exhibition I curated last year for the Otis College Gallery. His linking of the two shows is entirely superficial. While narcissism is by definition an isolated mind-set, Pagel’s claim that paranoia is symptomatic only of “private phobias and traumas” indicates that he is oblivious even to the front page of the newspaper he writes for. Terrorist attacks, corporate downsizing and random violence have made paranoia the watchword of the ‘90s. The exhibitions themselves mirror this specificity.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Pagel’s position is its mean-spirited attempt to punish artists, curators and the public for their engagement with interests of which he disapproves. Mistaking mudslinging for muckraking, Pagel’s liberal use of insults demonstrates exactly what “thwarts creative risk-taking” for Los Angeles curators and artists who produce edgy popular shows that diverge from his personal tastes.

Theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who invented the term “paranoid machine,” are justly famous for their explorations of the intersections of desire and culture. Pagel himself is well aware of their work and has used their concepts in his own reviews. But in Pagel’s world, ideas are acceptable only if they are applied to artworks after the fact by news writers. Curators are dismissed as offering “trendy theories” and “stock Freudian formulations,” and artists are said to “trot out hoary cliches” and accused of using art as therapy. This rote association of theory and social critique with therapy puts Pagel in the company of legions of anti-intellectuals, including a Southern prison warden who, after reinstating rock-breaking chain gangs for his black inmates, referred to his critics as “the therapeutic left.”

The “cramped, conservative thinking” Pagel refers to is, in fact, his own. If he is unable to expand his conceptual range to address the diverse concerns that have arisen in the art world over the last 30 years, The Times must consider adding new reviewers who are better equipped for the task.

MICHAEL COHEN

Los Angeles