Searle’s gone and done it again. Finding little or nothing to criticize in the two concurrent Bill Viola shows in London (the Haunch of Venison one is over now, I think), Adrian Searle decides to lay into the critical texts around the work (the pieces on the wall and in the catalogue).
Surely he’s smart enough to have learned, even if only after the Candice Breitz show, that reading the crits upsets him so? As it stands, we’ve another review totally derailed by his inability to ignore the written word. I’d be so much happier if he told us what the work meant to him and went on from there. Can he really mean that the words of the artist, or the curator, invalidate his enjoyment of a piece of art?