Peter Schjeldahl’s Pleasure Principle

Zachary Fne | The Nation | 9th December 2024

Schjeldahl, a smoker, greeted his lung cancer diagnosis with the pithy comment “no surprise”. He wrote for a few more years, dispensing his “chatty authority”. His death marked the end of a whole approach to writing about art. Art, he said, was “a holiday of the spirit”. In his role as a critic, he “doted” on his readership and felt “somebody [shouldn’t] have to crawl over broken glass to get to art.” The role of the critic, in his view, was to be “an instrument for nudging you closer to an artwork.”