Given the aggressive and unabashed Germanness of the Anselm Kiefer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, it was fitting that, as I passed through its lugubrious halls, I found myself thinking of those famous words of Luther before the Diet of Worms: “I cannot and I will not retract, for it is neither safe nor advisable to act at variance with one’s own conscience.”
The truth is that we critics have to put up with a great deal of browbeating and intimidation. That this coercion is as subtle as it is constant in no way minimizes its power, causing even the most stalwart critics to wonder if their first and best instincts might just be wrong—causing them, after they have correctly rejected twenty daubers in a row, tentatively to embrace the 21st, for fear that they have become too intolerant and set in their ways. Now, if our compliance helped to erect as stately a structure as St. Peter’s in Rome (for it was efforts to fund that project that turned Luther against the Pope), then we would gladly comply. But when the best we can hope for is some paltry mud-hut compounded of straw, dung, and acrylics, like the one Anselm Kiefer recently set up at MOMA, is it not our obligation to revolt?
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