Hasta La Ideas

(Photos: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

The capacity crowd that packed the largest auditorium of the SVA Theatre last Friday evening could be forgiven for having interpreted the sold-out New Yorker Festival event’s title—“Peter Schjeldahl talks with Steve Martin”—to mean that Schjeldahl, the magazine’s beloved art critic, would assume the role of interlocutor. But it wasn’t to be. After the two strode on stage, without introduction, Martin was the first to speak. “I’m very thrilled to be interviewing Peter Schjeldahl,” he said brightly. A hearty laugh erupted from the audience. “I’m not sure why that’s funny. It must be something I’m doing that I’m not aware of.”

And so the comedian, actor, author, banjo player, and art collector commenced his interviewing duties. (The couple sitting in front of us was not amused. “He’s interviewing him?” the man whispered to his female companion, after it was clear that this was not some sort of opening routine. “I thought it was the other way around.”) Martin began by asking Schjeldahl about the language of art criticism, first offering an example: a few impenentrable sentences excerpted from a review of the work of Ginger Wolfe-Suarez. “Every speciality has a ‘speak,’” said Schjeldahl. “There’s a kind of a wild poetry to it that’s enjoyable.” And he should know. After a brief stint at Carleton College, North Dakota-born Schjeldahl began his writing career as a “pre-postmodernist” poet. “I did tumble into clarity when I stopped trying to be John Ashbery and started trying to be Frank O’Hara,” said Schjeldahl, who started writing art criticism in the 1960s because “all the poets were doing it.”
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