Content area
Full Text
Some convictions are part of one's identity.
-Michael Fried1
"I keep toying with the idea, crazy as it sounds, of having a section in this sculpture-theater essay on how corrupt sensibility is par excellence faggot sensibility!. * * -ľ'2
I came across this statement while conducting research at the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. It comes from a letter, dated March 16, 1967, written by Michael Fried to Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum. The "sculpture-theater essay" Fried names is his deeply influential text, "Art and Objecthood," which was published in the magazine's June issue that year. The letter is one of several Fried wrote to Leider, updating him on the progress of a "big sculpture essay" that Fried had pitched, early in 1967, for Artį'orum's summer issue.3 Fried and Leider began exchanging letters in 1965 when Fried first started writing for Artforum. The tone of these exchanges between a writer and his editor, which span nearly thirty years, begins quite professionally. But as the letters progress, it is apparent that the two had begun to develop a special kinship, despite the fact that it took them over two years to meet in person. That kinship is registered in a playful banter that often accompanied an equally serious discussion of art, theory, and criticism. The use of the term "faggot" in the context of a discussion of Fried's "sculpture-theater essay" is just one example of the manner by which Fried's language in the letters often drifts from the professional into the vernacular and the defamatory.
We might classify my reporting on the March '67 letter as amounting to little more than gossip-a kind of "'idle' curiosit[y]" or "unsanctioned knowledge," as Gavin Butt characterizes this particular discursive form.4 Fried himself might so classify it, dismissing the letter's casualness and pointing to its "informality"5 and intimacy as evidence that it lacks a requisite "seriousness"-a term Fried used with some frequency, following his close friend Stanley Cavell, in order to make aesthetic and moral distinctions among artistic activities.0 In other words, it is easy to dismiss this private exchange as merely anecdotal and, as such, hardly worthy of the serious consideration of an art historical study. But in doing so, we overlook the value of what...