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First Impressions of Geoff Dyer’s New NYT Column

By Emily Temple on

Beginning this weekend, formidable British author Geoff Dyer will begin writing a column for the New York Times Sunday Book Review entitled “Reading Life,” in which (the editors tell us) he will detail “the ups and down of his long relationship with the written word.” Today’s inaugural column, which you can and should read in its entirety over at the Sunday Book Review, is a delightfully witty takedown/celebration/parody of Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, that is, the kind of writing in which you explain what you are about to do before, after, and while doing it, if you get around to doing it at all. The message we take away is that he isn’t about to hand us a first column that blithely discusses what he might write about in weeks to come, but rather wants to show us, as any author who has listened to their composition teachers knows to do. Reading it, we also remember what a funny and smart guy that Geoff Dyer is, so we’re excited to start reading his column every week. What did you think of Dyer’s first column? Let us know in the comments!

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Geoff Dyer’s new column starts with an admittedly cleverly-wrought ‘take down’ of Michael Fried. A writer who very few of the readers of GD’s column will have read. Dyer appears to recognise Fried’s eminent standing & major contribution as an art critic but does so in a self-negating, ironic way that conveys more than an imputation that MF’s high reputation is not well-founded; indeed it might be a function of Fried’s own facility for self-promotion. Dyer gives the impression that the tortured locutions of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before are general within academic writing – which is not an especially acute, or even demonstrable, observation. WP reads like a set of lectures poorly assembled into a book. Fried takes the perceptions and theories developed to illuminate 18th C art in the brilliant Absorption & Theatricality and misapplies them to contemporary photography on the basis of a handful of examples. This, and the fact that Yale permitted Fried to perpetrate this in a book, much more than the shoddy style, is what is substantively wrong with WP. But arguing the substance would not have permitted Dyer the opportunity to exercise the sparkling felicities of his own style while making mock of a serious academic’s unhappy misstep.

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