In yesterday’s New York Times, Roberta Smith finds a strange bone to pick with the art world’s use of the word practice (as in, “I’m getting an MFA to take my practice to the next level”). Her entire critique seems to stem from the equation of this use of the term with the usage of doctors and lawyers, which, for her, “turns the artist into an utterly conventional authority figure.” That Smith would choose this particular word to harp on is baffling to me, considering all the superfluous, obtuse language thrown about in art-critical circles. But it is the form her critique takes that really bothers me.

There are a lot of preconceptions and implications to unpack here, and Andrew Berardini at The Expanded Field has already written a fairly long response to the piece. I’ll start by noting that Smith doesn’t introduce any kind of etymological arguments in her article, and she might be jumping the gun by assuming that when artists talk about their practice it is equivalent to a dentist talking about his practice. As one of The Expanded Fields’ readers points out, it is common for Zen Buddhists to talk about their spiritual practice (which often includes artistic pursuits). Smith does introduce the notion that artists could be using this term because it emphasizes routine over revelation. Berardini’s defense of the usage falls along similar lines; he points out the liberating effects of valuing the process of making art over the product. And this is exactly the point of the Buddhist usage: you don’t have a static faith, you are engaged in an evolving practice.

An important implication of Smith’s frustration with practice is that it points to a desire to ignore the value of craft in an artist’s work. She doesn’t want the artist to be an authority on how to make objects with certain materials; she wants the artist to “operate outside accepted limits”; to constantly innovate. She wants artists to be messy, rather than to know what they are doing. That’s all well and good, artists should take more risks than doctors, but it is often the process of developing a craft that leads to important artistic breakthroughs. As Tyler Green pointed out recently, Matisse worked very conservatively in his early painting, and indeed it is rare to find innovative artists who didn’t initially work in timid ways. It is Marek Cecula’s very knowledge of commercial ceramic production that allows him to subvert the process as an artist.

It would be interesting to learn when practice began to be used in the way that riles up Roberta Smith so much, and what motivated those who drove the change. To me it seems much more likely that the common understanding of practice in the art world derives from the Buddhist usage (or something similar) than from the usage of the white collar professional community. Even if this etymology were resolved, we would still have the question of whether using practice in this way makes those outside the art community associate artists with lawyers, but this will have more to do with how artists go about doing their work, than the word they use to signify it.

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