21. Aisha Sabatini Sloan

“Let me preface this by saying: I wasn’t in a great mood that day.” -Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Maybe the film critic had an argument with her spouse just before sitting down to watch the movie she so flippantly dismissed in her review. Maybe the book critic’s mother was dying the whole time he was making his way through his galley of the bestselling novel. Or maybe, in the case of essayist Aisha Sabatini Sloan, she was simply visiting her family for Thanksgiving, the twin irritations of being cut off from her daily routine and being in close proximity to that of other people putting her in a sour frame of mind when she went to check out the museum exhibition.

Although it’s not something we generally think about, the way in which a critic responds to a particular work depends, to a greater or lesser degree, on the specific circumstances of the interaction. In my days as a film critic, I liked to think of myself as reasonably objective, but there were certainly moments when irritation, fatigue, or the distractions of life caused me to not give certain movies the consideration they warranted. (Occasionally other factors were at play as well: I had four beers before going to the press screening of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, although I do think I gave that particular film all the due it deserved.) But, at least in most cases, I think my takes on whatever movie I was reviewing, while they may have been influenced by external factors, were not fundamentally altered by them.

The same would seem to apply to Sloan who, despite a general mood of irritation, exacerbated by a minor scuffle involving her father, some security guards, and a selfie stick, remains reasonably confident in her reading of the exhibition under consideration: the artwork is great, but the surrounding circumstances suck. The show in question, which she sees at the Detroit Institute of Arts in late 2015, is called 30 Americans and features the work of 30 Americans (which you would expect from the title) all of whom are black (which you wouldn’t.) This kind of artful dodge (“You’ve tricked them into coming here,” one of the artists accuses the curator) is typical of the way that the show has been carried out, according to Sloan. A show in which black artists create the work but all of it is owned (loaded word) by a white collector, 30 Americans both plays it coy with its post-racial title and seems to exploit the fact that, as Sloan puts it, “black is hot right now.”

Sloan’s “review,” then, which appeared on the online magazine Autrostraddle and was later included in her collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, is a critique not so much of the show itself as its context. She gets the artwork out of the way at the jump, offering up a paragraph with a half-dozen quick takes on the exhibition’s paintings, sculptures, and mixed media pieces before cutting it off abruptly with an “Etcetera” and telling us, “This is not what I’ve come here to talk about.” What she is here to talk about: the audio tour that accompanies the show, the show’s promotional DVD, her wading into a Facebook kerfuffle, her own mixed-race family. She is here to discuss the specific, paradoxical racial dynamic of the exhibition and how that corresponds to her wider understanding and experience of the world, and she does this to fine, edifying effect. If we must be categorical about it, her review is more cultural criticism than art criticism, but the two are not—or should not be—easily distinguishable. Just as our understanding of a work of art is enriched by considering its various contexts, so can our perception be positively altered by seeing it through the eyes of a specific individual. This is, at least in theory, a lot of power to place in the hands of a single critic; she must therefore act carefully, keep the faith with her readers, and reveal her own context just as she does that of the work of art she is ostensibly there to review.