Hilton Als
By the guide of language, I mean our propensity to adopt a role, a particular tone, when we talk about those paintings, those photographs, that moved us in the first place. I suppose one could call that tone authoritative, for want of a better word, but I would be a completely unreliable narrator if I started to imitate here or anywhere, really, the language I learned in academia, or learned to imitate in the 1980s, when the goal was to be Rosalind Krauss, or Barthes, or someone other than yourself, certainly in terms of voice, a time when fracture—forced humanism—was essential in conveying the life of the text or the death of the author, I could never determine which as I read those various texts, an admixture of the personal and knowingness, resulting in an unimpeachable intellectual and thus moral rectitude that wasn’t so far removed from all those men Krauss, Barthes and others had studied with to begin with, guys who didn’t deal in the equivocal, saying painting was thus, a sculpture meant this, writing could only be that.
From an article on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in The Believer