The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022
...filled with terrific examples of Peter doing what he did best. The writing is not sharply different from anything he wrote before the diagnosis. But I think these pieces are gently warmed by new, heart-expanding levels of humility and humor ... Funny, raw, wise and clipped, The Art of Dying is an astonishingly brave piece of writing, hard-packed with tough truths.
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What’s perhaps most startling about The Art of Dying is that there’s so little here that seems final. There’s no self-pity here, no parting words, no wistful look back at a long career ... Some less convincing, weaker passages seep through the capacious filter of Schjeldahl’s critical sensorium. There’s the occasional trite cliche ... Schjeldahl is at his best when he abandons academic box-checking and forms sentences in which meaning and sound fuse perfectly and transcripts of his personal experiences become paeans to an artwork’s anarchic power to mesmerize its viewer across a gap of centuries.
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Schjeldahl’s writing serves as a model for criticism in some ways and falls short in others ... One notices that the forty-five reviews he published between 2019 and 2022 focus predominantly on white artists ... Nevertheless, The Art of Dying offers clear lessons in style and craft ... At its best, Schjeldahl’s late prose models how criticism might resemble a brief intersection of two or many lives, as well as how critics can, despite social and political uncertainty, place wholehearted trust in the work that artists do.
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