Richard Nilsen at Monet's Garden in Giverny, France (photo by his wife, Carole Steele)

After 25 years with the Arizona Republic, art critic Richard Nilsen has retired.  His “Farewell to the Arts” appeared in last Sunday’s paper – and provides fascinating insight into just how far the Valley’s arts & cultural sector has grown – as seen by someone who has watched it incredibly carefully.

With heartfelt thanks for his years of service (including – and perhaps especially – for all those times when we vehemently disagreed with him), I am delighted to share this Exit Interview:

1.  Over the course of an art criticism career spanning 25 years, are there any particular performances or exhibitions that stand out as being perfectly sublime experiences?

The final story I wrote for The Arizona Republic covers exactly this question … it specifically mentions things in Arizona and Phoenix that I have covered over the past 25 years. There are, however, a bunch of things I got to cover outside the state that should also be mentioned.

There was a time when The Republic regularly paid for reporters to travel for the paper. I used to go at least annually to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco to cover important art shows, and some of these were the most sublime experiences of my tenure.

I went to the Jackson Pollock show at MOMA, the Cezanne show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Van Gogh show in LA, and my surprising favorite of them, a huge Audubon Show in Chicago that really blew my socks off.

There were also concerts that blew out my neural circuits: When in Chicago, I heard the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch play Strauss’s “Don Juan,” and the thrill — I can use no other word for it — of eight horns playing the big horn call in unison, changed my idea of the importance of live performance. I felt it through my fundament as much as heard it through my ears. It was a peak experience for me.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to take an NEA fellowship in New York and in the span of 10 days heard so much good music, I almost overloaded. Among them were the Met production of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” a couple of Prokofiev concerts by the Kirov Orchestra and Gergiev, and — this was almost as comic as it was sublime — the Israel Philharmonic playing the Tchaikovsky Fourth at Carnegie Hall with Gustavo Dudamel conducting. The sight of all those old Jewish guys, old pros who had played this music a billion times by actual count, all balding and gray and as jaded as an old pro can be, played like little boys opening their Christmas presents. Dudamel woke them up and it was a delight; it was as exciting as music can get.

Oh, and there were others: a recital by Maurizio Pollini in which he played all the Chopin Preludes in the first half, and finished up with both the Stravinsky “Three Scenes from Petrushka” and the Prokofiev Seventh Sonata. That was the most ambitious program I ever heard, at least until my NEA week, when I heard Jeremy Denk play the Ives “Concord Sonata” in the first half and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” in the second. I’ve heard Denk several times since then, and he is magnificent.

There are others, but I’m writing too long here. It’s my vice: I can’t comfortably be succinct. I expatiate. Ask my editors and watch their eyes roll.

I should also mention that before about the year 2000, about a third of my writing was about travel. I have taken many long trips on The Republic’s dime. Most gloriously was the time they generously gave me to drive from Laredo, Texas, to the Canadian border along the 100th Meridian, which was the traditional dividing line between the East and the West, the line that demarcated approximately the limits of rain: East of the 100th Meridian got more than 20 inches a year, west of it, fewer. I wrote an entire Travel section of the paper on that trip. And since I was already way up north, I came south again by traveling the length of the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca — its traditional source — to the Gulf of Mexico, and wrote three Travel centerpieces from that.

Other trips include driving from Tijuana to Vancouver up the Pacific Coast. I gleaned about 30 stories from that trip when I was writing a travel column every week, called “Being There.”

In 1988, I went to South Africa for the paper, and other trips that ended up as extended series of stories include traveling up the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to the Gaspe Peninsula.

Overall, writing for The Republic has been a postgraduate course I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

2.  How have you evolved most as a critic over 25 years?  How have you most changed – and what has remained substantially the same?

“Panta Horein,” as Heraclitus said. “Everything changes,” it all flows. But although I have gotten more professional as a newspaperman, there is an unchanging core to my work. The single most central tenet is that it is all the same thing. When asked how I can possibly be an art critic as well as a music and dance critic, and an architecture critic and a film critic, the question does not make sense to me. It is all the same. All the arts are merely different vocabularies to discuss the same basic issues, and I am more concerned with those issues than with the vocabularies.

Sometimes I jokingly call what I write “Nilsenology,” because no matter if I’m discussing a local artist or a television sitcom or a writer like Mickey Spillane or the Iliad, the central message is, to paraphrase Al Franken from SNL: “How does this affect me, Richard Nilsen.” Everything I write is filtered through my sensibility. Not because I am egotistical, but because this is how EVERYONE filters the world, and I am merely modeling for my readers a way of approaching art. Really, the job of the critic is not to pass judgment — which history tells us is often wrong — but to model for readers a way to understand, think about and talk about art, which is infamously difficult to reduce to words.

Art has a central job to do and that is, to wake us up to a world we have been inured to through habit. It slaps us into consciousness like a doctor bringing a baby into the world. When the world becomes a routine, like driving to work every day so that we no longer notice the colors of the cars we pass, or the typography of the billboards, or the way supposedly straight gridlike streets are actually not quite perfectly lined up, then art can blow into our faces and pull us out of our lethargy and dream. Because, as I’ve said many many times over the years, every bush is the Burning Bush.

3.       Having read your opinions and followed your critiques for many years, a lot of people think they understand you pretty well.  What is something about you personally that avid readers would be surprised to discover?

I’m not sure anything would surprise them. I live a pretty ordinary life. I suppose most people don’t know I used to work at the zoo in Seattle, or that I once lived for a year in a coal bin, but that is pretty much standard fare for my biography. They might not know I used to be a Black journalist, that is I wrote for and edited a weekly Black paper in Greensboro, N.C., “The Carolina Peacemaker,” where I not only wrote the editorials advising the African-American community in Greensboro on who to vote for, but I also wrote “The Kitchen Magician” cooking column and the “Dear Carol” advice to the lovelorn column — which I wrote from the point of view of a militant Black feminist, and for which I not only wrote the answers, but wrote the letters, too. That was great fun. Later, I worked also for “The Winston-Salem Chronicle,” the Black paper in that city. I knew about rap music when the rest of White America still thought the word described what nuns did to knuckles. They may also not know that I once taught police cadets how to photograph crime scenes.

Oh, and I once jumped off the Empire State Building. Admittedly, it was from the first floor, but not too many people can say that.

4.       If you could send a Tweet (limit 140 characters) back in time 25 years to the Richard Nilsen who was just starting his career at the Arizona Republic, what would you write?

I wouldn’t tell him anything: He needs to find it out for himself.

5.       Thinking about Richard Nilsen’s “Greatest Hits” – of what specific reviews, articles or interviews from your career with the Arizona Republic are you most proud and why?

The stories that I am proudest of are probably not art stories at all. I once spent time alone north of the the Grand Canyon in an area so unpopulated, the nearest person to me was at least 20 miles away, and wrote about what I learned from that experience. It took me on a voyage not only to a remote space, but a remote depth inside me that flipped inside out to be the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Along with being awaked by a hoot owl outside my tent. I loved that story.

My most anthologized story online is one I wrote about animal rights, (one version can be found HERE.)

And I wrote a long rumination on morality, with a slap on the cheek to Bill Bennett, that challenged the idea that morality devolves from “rules” but rather stems from the imagination and compassion.

Oh, and the story about washing dishes is one several people continue to bring up, although it was written some 20 years ago. It can be found, with some other stories on a website called richardnilsen.com, which, by the way, I had nothing to do with. I don’t know who created this site, but it contains a selection of some of the stories I’ve written (I do have my suspicions as to who the guilty party is, but I don’t know for sure).

I had a story that explained why Chase Field (then Bank One Ballpark), like so many new baseball fields, is oriented the wrong way celestially, and another that explained how becoming president of the United States may have more to do with DNA than we think: 20 percent of our presidents have been related to other presidents, and if you expand the relationships to third, fourth, and sixth cousins, the number grows to nearly 60 percent.

The three-part travel story about the Mississippi River is one of the best things I’ve done. In general, I think I may have been a better travel writer than art critic. I loved writing about travel, although my approach to it had nothing in common with the standard “Places to go, things to do” stories, and was just another extension of Nilsenology.

For a couple of years, my editor prompted me to write a series of “Arts 101″ stories, with huge maga-packages about opera, ballet, jazz, film scores, architecture and many other topics that attempted to get at the nugget of each subject and make it comprehensible in direct language. I did perhaps 25 or 30 of those 101 stories, including some oddball ones, such as “Typography 101,” “Landscape Architecture 101,” and “Glass Art 101.” Several of those, or at least pieces of them, are included at richardnilsen.com. (Again, I did not post this website and have nothing to do with it, but I am tickled it exists).

As for links, I don’t know of many. You can find my film reviews under my name at rottentomatoes.com. But most of my stories, like all daily journalism, is best found at the bottom of canary cages, and any links to the newspaper’s digital morgue costs outsiders money to access.

 6.       What concerns do you have for the future of arts journalism given how the business is so rapidly and profoundly changing?

I’m getting out of the business at the right time: There doesn’t seem to be much future for newspapers, or for newspaper criticism. (By the way, I want to say a good word for newspaper criticism: There are those who disparage daily journalism as not “real” criticism. I remember an academic back in Virginia, where I first wrote art reviews for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, and at a panel discussion she haughtily told the audience that newspaper writing wasn’t criticism, but merely reviewing, that criticism required at least 15 pages to do. I, on the other hand, remembered Percy Shelley, the poet, once explaining that great criticism need not take more than a sentence, if it’s the right sentence. I’m with Shelley on this one. And reading those 15 pages by that academic was too much like eating an old mattress.)

But, newspapers are dying, and blogs are metastasizing and the future of criticism looks like it’s open to anyone. Currently, the received wisdom is that this is a good thing, that democratization can only be a plus. I’m not so sure. In the snowstorm of blog criticism, there is so much tendentious writing, and so little way to separate the wheat from the chaff, that many of us are put off even trying to find an intelligent source of online criticism. Most of it never rises above the level of T-shirt slogan or bumper sticker. And those blogs by established names, such as Alex Ross, are written by those who have proven their bona fides in print. Their online presence is more tail-of-the-comet.

Not everyone with an opinion is a writer; and not everyone who can write well has an opinion (just ask a dyed-in-the-wool reporter sometime for an opinion and enjoy the blank face). The combination is essential. I was just born that way: Being a critic was never something I did, it was always something I was.

7.       Thinking about the growth of the Valley’s arts & cultural scene over the last 25 years, what are some of the changes about which you’re most gratified and proud?

How about, Cowboy Artists of America no longer shows at the Phoenix Art Museum? I take no credit for that, but I do take some pleasure in having outlasted them. Now, I can depart in peace.

But seriously, the major arts institutions have grown significantly in that quarter century. The symphony is better and more professional than it ever was; the art museum has gone through several major expansions; the Heard Museum as well. We have SMOCA now and the ASU Art Museum has grown from a tiny pet project by the late Rudy Turk, into a great academic art museum, which tackles some of the knottiest problems of contemporary art and culture.

And the ballet has grown into one that warrants coverage by the New York Times. Ib Andersen took a very good ballet company, bequeathed to him by Jean-Paul Comelin and Michael Uthoff, and made it a great company that major talents want to dance for. I feel better about the future of ballet in Phoenix than for any other major performance company.

And although it hasn’t been my main focus, Phoenix has become a great place for theater. For more on that, talk to my compadre, Kerry Lengel, who remains at The Republic, playing “Nearer My God To Thee” on the deck.

Finally, the level of art produced in the city has jumped significantly. The artists here are less provincial, less amateur than they used to be (admitting that there is still a lot of goo being produced here by those who think it’s cutting edge to make torn-paper collages or cartoon-character political paintings). The number of blue coyotes in cowboy boots is WAY down.

I take no credit for any of this: It is a natural evolution for a city that is growing as Phoenix has. I have always said that no one reads my reviews except the artists and their mothers. I don’t feel as if my tenure has made any significant difference other than the fact that a daily newspaper thought it important enough to cover art and culture that they hired me. Sadly, that attitude seems as antique as typewriters and home cooking.

8.       If you could have dinner with any 3 artists from history, who would you invite and why?

Jim Waid, Marie Navarre and Mayme Kratz. Because they are still alive. And even if Rembrandt or Hokusai or Praxiteles were still alive, I don’t speak Dutch, Japanese or Greek. Oh, but wouldn’t it be a great table with spaghetti all around and a good red table wine, and bring in Anne Coe, and Kate Breakey and Mark Klett. Send out an RSVP to Steve Yazzie, Peggy Doogan, Mat Moore and Annie Lopez.

And I wouldn’t want to leave out Jeff Falk, Annie’s husband and my favorite thorn. Falk once sent me a piece of coal at Christmas after a bad review I gave him. And my favorite hate mail of all time came from him: He sent me one of those plastic toy food things that kids play with nowadays (a trend I will never understand). He sent me a plastic sandwich on which he wrote “This is art.” Inside was a slice of plastic balogna on which he wrote “This is your opinion on art.”

Oh, and Jim White. He always livens up a party.

What a great meal that would be.

I did once take Richard Avedon out for lunch at Eliana’s Salvadoran restaurant. He’d written me a letter after a review I’d given his Whitney show in New York, and he was in Phoenix to photograph boxer Oscar de la Hoya for the New Yorker. He was a delight and a real mensch.

But too often, talking with a big name — whether it’s Philip Glass or Larry Rivers — is too much just “Ooh, I’m your biggest fan” crap, and the poor artist involved doesn’t really want to spend time with a stranger. He’d rather be making art or drinking with friends.

As for James Turrell, he’s a great artist but I’ve had dinner with him and he’s not a great conversationalist. He doesn’t have to be.

9.       Rumor has it you’ll soon be moving to North Carolina.  Why there?

My wife and I are moving to Asheville, N.C., in the next month or so. We met in the Blue Ridge some 30 years ago and we miss the Eastern mountains. Besides, our daughter and twin granddaughters live there now, and we’ll be happy grandparents. We found a house there about a hundred yards from the Blue Ridge Parkway in East Asheville. Asheville, by the way, like Austin, Texas, is a blue city in a red state.

10.   You’ve used some pretty big vocabulary in your pieces over the years and rumors persist that you actually invented a number of those words and somehow maneuvered them past your editors.  Is there any truth to that and will you now tell that tale? 

Without sounding too disingenuous about this, I’ve never been aware of using an exceptional vocabulary. I just use the words I know. It is true that I love words and especially love the fine shades of meaning between them — I’ve always said there are no synonyms in English, each has a particular connotation that comes in handy at just the right time. But it has been made clear to me that, yes, sometimes I exceeded the mandated sixth-grade vocabulary that is supposed to be the standard for newspapers in America. I hope I’ve never used a word just to show off, but have used any word because it means just what I need it to mean in a particular instance.

It is obvious, also, that the copy editors at The Arizona Republic have been kindly indulgent to me and let me get away with murder. For that, I am grateful. A part of journalism few civilians understand is the importance of copy editors (and page designers, too) to making a story successful. I have always valued the work of the copy editors who have worked on my stories. They have saved my butt many times when I’ve had a slight case of brain freeze and written that Abraham Lincoln was the president of Liberia or something.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my fun with them. There was a period of six or seven months back in the late 1980s, when, as a kind of game, I included a made-up word in every story I wrote, just to see if I could get it past the watchful eyes of the copy desk. I am proud to say, every single one of them made it through. The words I made up were usually onomatopoetic or derived from common Latin or Greek word roots, so they could be easily understood, or at least, the context I put them in made them clear. But after six months of doing this, the edge of the joke wore dull, and I stopped doing it. At some point, I believe, the copy editors just threw up their hands and surrendered.

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