Zoë Halaban
Jackson Arn always wanted to end up in New York. After he came to Yale for a college tea and visited my class on “writing about figurative painting,” and students from the class pestered him for meetings, feedback on the work and interviews for the News, I talked with him at a Think Coffee — one of his spots in the East Village — to ask about replacing Peter Schjeldahl as The New Yorker’s newest art critic, and find out what this guy actually does.
In the poster that advertised his Pierson College Tea, he appeared to have a ponytail, which he must’ve shorn on his Metro ride over. Though we expected to greet someone dripping in a slouchy designer pashmina, he talked to us like a normal guy, patiently dignifying our questions, going overtime, until he was rushed to his next on-campus appointment. I sought him out in New York City, where I took the subway alone for the first time and got lost in New York like some wannabe Macaulay Culkin, until I stumbled into the right coffee shop.
Very few parts of this interview are edited, save the number of times I used the word “like.”
LIZZIE CONKLIN, INTERVIEWER
Can you tell me about your life? Maybe an abridged version?
JACKSON ARN
A Brief History of me. Okay. Yeah. Well, let’s see, I am from Arizona. I always wanted to be in New York eventually. I never appreciated Arizona until I moved to New York, and then would come back and go on hikes and appreciate the sunsets and the purple mountains and all that good stuff.
CONKLIN
Do you have a daily routine?
ARN
It involves waking up. Oh, yes, that’s the key one. Everything else follows from there. Waking up, fiddling around on my phone for far longer than I should. Reading ideally 20 to 30 pages of whatever paperback is by my desk. At the moment it is “To The Lighthouse.” Quick side note. There aren’t really that many works of art that rock your world when you’re 16 years old. And then rock your world again when you’re in college and then rock your world a third time when you’re in your early 30s. Yeah, but “To The Lighthouse” is certainly one for me. Wow.
Where was I? I get up, I make coffee from my French press. I eat a light breakfast, which is usually the leftovers of whatever dinner I had the night before. I walk to the Brooklyn Public Library and go up to the third floor where all the art books are. And I work, usually from 9:30 to 5:30 or 6:00. I say usually because that’s the time that I aspire to. But admittedly, sometimes what happens is that I’ll go home early and then end up working far too late. It sounds like a lot of other writers write at night.
CONKLIN
What do you read?
ARN
Oh, gosh, yes. I read a lot of poetry. Yeah. I think prose writers probably should read a lot of poetry just so you’re always reminding yourself of the absolute capacity of the English language. So I always come back to Larkin, Murray, Heaney, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbury. Those are my big people. For whatever reason, I always go back to Arizona for Thanksgiving and just read poetry for like a week. I can’t read novels when I’m with my family. But I read a lot of poems. Probably something to do with attention spans and there being lots of people in the house and being sort of loud.
I got really good at tuning people out because I grew up in a house with two loud siblings. I would always just be reading by myself in the corner. But it is definitely easier to focus on a one-page Wallace Stevens poem than, you know, a 300-page standalone novel for the week. But yeah, I don’t know any other authors who I love. I’ve been rereading a lot of Amis’ novels since he died this past year and “Money” is even funnier than I remember it being. What else, what else? I read “The Line of Beauty” once a year. I like to dip back into that one every once in a while and I’ve never read anything so good: “The Line of Beauty” by Alan Hollinghurst. Yeah, I read it for the first time in college or a class. So the novel was in one of the best classes I took with Nick Dames as the professor; a spectacular, spectacular teacher. But yeah, it’s a sort of novel of manners. So there is like the young friend who goes to the big English country house, and he gets involved with people who are there. And it’s very inflected, like Henry James, and evil and blah, and all those fun people. But it’s also set in the 1980s. So there’s a ton of cocaine and partying and decadent sacks and they go see “Scarface” and all that. But just sentence for sentence. I think it’s one of the best books by a living author, for sure. And because I aspire to write like this person. And you know, Amis and Hollinghurst would definitely be examples of that. I also really love the more recent Coetzee’s books, though, like, do you know like the “Schooldays of Jesus” and “The Childhood of Jesus?” Yeah, the Jesus Trilogy, I guess they call it?
CONKLIN
Do you have any particular kinds of works that you remember not being published? Did you ever write a secret novel or something?
ARN
Oh, boy. I’m trying to think how much I can tell you. Let’s see. I wrote a series of unpublished love letters. Of course, they’re unpublished. I wrote a series of love letters to a girl who I met at camp when I was about 15 years old. And I am pretty sure they’re somewhere in my closet in Arizona still. And if I ever read them again, I would have a heart attack and die of embarrassment.
CONKLIN
Are you a wordy person?
ARN
My theory is that I have an aural memory. Yeah, it’s slightly different from having a literary memory. I think in the way that you’re describing, but yeah, I’ve always had a really good memory for voices and pronunciations, and accents and things like that. I come from a family that has the magical gift of accents and impressions. I remember when I was a kid, my mom would read all sorts of books, and she would do voices for all the different characters. And she was always tremendously good at that. Having said that, I am terrible at doing accents and impressions. But I have come to realize that the thing that I remember best in life is sounds and voices and things like that. So, yes. And I don’t know, I suppose when I’m writing, I do imagine the sentences being spoken. And I will be walking down the street or I’ll be on the subway or chewing my dinner. And I’ll think of a quotation that I particularly like, but I won’t just think of it. I’ll sort of pronounce it to myself muttered under my breath.
CONKLIN
Do you make art, or did you ever make art?
ARN
Yes, definitely. Yes. I mean, I definitely wanted to be an artist when I was younger. I suppose that’s a pretty common thing for kids to want to be. In third grade, I was obsessed with drawing noses. Noses were always the tricky thing. You had to get the curvature just right. And even trickier in your head to get the shading at the edges of the noses just so. So when I see Rembrandt sketches or Leonardo drawings or things like that, I immediately clock the noses.
CONKLIN
What is your role as an art critic? Are you voicing public opinion? Are you influencing public opinion? Or are you trying to give a voice to an opinion that you think exists already? And that might be publicly held?
ARN
Yeah. I have to be strategic in how I think about my job. So I don’t like the idea that I am influencing public opinion. I really tried. I really make an effort not to think about my job through that lens at all. ’Cause in my head, what I’m doing is looking at a painting and figuring out how I think about it, and trying to explain how I think about it to myself as much as to other people. But no, I don’t think it’s useful for critics to dwell too much on their influence or their control over public opinion, in the same way that if you try to write an original book, then you’ll never actually write anything original. You sort of have to turn off that switch in your brain. And then maybe you do write something original. But if the goal is to be original, or if the goal is to influence public opinion, then I don’t think that’s going to turn out too well. Yeah.
CONKLIN
What is it like to succeed Peter Schjeldahl as an art critic for The New Yorker?
ARN
I try not to think about it. I feel sometimes like I’m walking across a tightrope and I’ll be okay as long as they don’t ever look down. But yeah, thinking too much about Schjeldahl would be like looking down. It’s tricky because I love his writing and I think about his writing all the time, and I’ll be walking down the street or waiting for the subway, and sentences come unbidden to my head. Schjeldahl was very funny actually. And all his humor — or at least my favorite humor in Schjeldahl — is about the academics not having a clue what art is. There’s a review that he wrote about some Picasso show, where he talks about some show where the academic who organized the show was speculating on whether it was this mistress or this mistress. So [Schjeldahl]’s like: “having carefully weighed all the evidence and considered all the available data. I don’t care.”
CONKLIN
Hahahaha.
CONKLIN
As someone who works at The New Yorker, this question has an obvious answer, but is New York your home now?
ARN
It is yeah, it is. But I have a theory about this which is that people for whom New York truly has their home, always complain about New York. To truly love New York is to hate it at least a little bit. So the archetypal New Yorker is not someone who goes around like Gene Kelly singing “New York, New York.” The archetypal New Yorker is someone who complains about New York all the time and constantly threatens to live. And there is definitely a lot of that in me, for sure. You’re calling me after I don’t know how many inches and days of snow, and however many horrible bleary-eyed subway rides home at two in the morning.