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I had planned to respond to PAJ’s prompt for this issue by writing about my intimate year with incomparable women artists in their eighties. But then someone sent me “The Art of Editing No. 1,” a 1994 interview with Robert Gottlieb and a collection of famous writers he edited, talking about their writer-editor relationship. This redirected me, and I began thinking about my glancing blows with critics over the years. Not blows as in, I knocked out critics who wrote mean things (wouldn’t every artist reading this want to read that story!). But rather, glancing blows as in my brushes with conversion, and Bonnie Marranca’s role in my development as an artist-critic.
I first met Robert Gottlieb in the elevator at the Baryshnikov Arts Center sometime in the later aughts. We had just seen something, either William Forsythe’s performance installation, a grieving love letter to his wife, or a...