Unless it's told by someone who knows how to tell it

So. New York. Installments, I think, and not chronological. These things happen.

It is not true that no news is good news. It is also not true that any press is good press. Nonetheless, I should thank Peter Schjeldahl for the couple of hours I spent yesterday at the Museum of Modern Art, because he reviewed their new retrospective of Martin Kippenberger so harshly in the latest New Yorker, I wanted to see it.

The full text of the article cannot be accessed online without a subscription, so I excerpt: "He was extraordinarily intelligent as well as gifted, especially in drawing. But nothing he made has the inevitable feel of satisfying art. The hundreds of pictures and objects (counting discrete components of suites and ensembles) at MOMA seem undermotivated or supererogatory, leaning on tortured concepts, obscure in-jokes, and random impulses . . . Why, then, does the show . . . exude a distinct, hard-to-deny majesty? I think that it's because Kippenberger's career, as a whole, was consciously his one actual work . . . Kippenberger's works, from then on, might be considered a series of studied insults to that legacy, even as he took on the mantle of its prestige, as the crown prince of German genius. (He left the succession in poor shape, with no heir apparent to this day.) . . . That project's forced wit and laborious execution are echt Kippenberger: faintly amusing and patently obvious . . . It sometimes seems that for an idea to be viable to Kippenberger it had to reek of hapless mediocrity . . . I can think of few other artists so richly deserved by their times. For that very reason, whenever I go to contemplate a contemporary art work for pleasure, it will not be a Kippenberger." All of which is very entertaining to read, especially when illustrated by a self-portrait entitled "Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (Martin, ab in die Ecke und Scham dich)" and a corresponding photograph of the artist, a year before his death in 1997, in which he meets the viewer's eye with a dissipated, challenging cockiness, rather like a devil whose hell has just kicked him out and put a hold on his bar tab, but I found it hard to believe the problem was all Kippenberger.

Indeed, I don't think it is. I couldn't tell how I felt about his paintings, except that I would like to give them more attention, but I liked very much the variously styled posters Kippenberger designed for his own shows and for his colleagues, and his three-dimensional work is wonderful. Do not ask me to explain the Ford Capri covered in rust-colored paint and oatmeal. Or the crucified cartoon frog, really. But one of the installations on the sixth floor is a wood of cantilevered birch trees full of sinuous lampposts and medications the size of softballs, carved out of undyed wood as the trees are constructed of cardboard and paper, with the occasional disco ball for contrast; it is titled "Jetzt geh ich in den Birkenwald, denn meine Pillen wirken bald (I'm going into the birch wood now, soon my pills are going to start working)" and I have no idea if it was meant to suggest selva oscura, but I kept thinking of Dante on a really bad night, or maybe C.S. Lewis. Most of the second floor is taken up by "Das glückliche Ende von Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' (The happy ending of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika')," a football pitch of furniture—mostly desks and chairs, but not excluding ejection seats, burl sculptures, slide projectors, bleachers, photographs, wickerwork swings, and a gigantic, mechanized fried egg—arranged as in a progression of interviews; the mélange does have a whimsical air, a surrealist's unemployment agency, but it also suggests a bureaucratic obstacle course, quintessentially Kafkaesque. I forgot to mention the self-portrait as Spider-Man, didn't I. Made out of bent wire, weirdly masked. I don't know why. For all I know, Schjeldahl is right: these pieces are in-jokes, pointless and meaningless to anyone other than Martin Kippenberger. Nonplus even with curator's notes. I still do not see how that makes them not art. Go away, reader-response criticism; the exhibition is running until May and I plan to go back.

It's snowing straight down. Possibly it's freezing rain. Some of it bounces. Either way, I'm glad we're not driving back six hours in this.