Part of talking about writing in art history, theory, and criticism is therefore indulgence: writing is what people think about when they can, when they have leisure time, but it’s not a required subject. Another part of talking about writing is the plain style and its companions in classical rhetoric: direct speech, reasonably free of jargon, which pays attention to its argument. Both of these operate in university seminars, sometimes in succession, sometimes in opposition.
I have in mind both those ways of thinking about art historical writing, and two others. The third is a way of critiquing writing that pays attention the way one pays attention to a novel, a poem, or any other work of serious literature. This is close reading: attending to voice, pace, style, manner, word choice. Being patient and demanding about how the writing becomes expressive, how its message finds its form. Here I would want to apply the full arsenal of literary criticism from Empson to De Man, from Derrida to Perloff. This is an inherently unfair thing to do to writing that hasn’t been made for that kind of reading, but my criterion will always be that whatever is said about style, manner, and voice has to be connected to what the scholar meant to communicate. In other words: no carping about writing unless the writer’s choices have a nameable effect on what is being argued. In that way close reading, no matter how unusual it is in art history, is pertinent.
The fourth kind of reading is radical, and I will not be doing much of it, but it is presupposed in each of these three strategies. This is reading nonfiction as if it is fiction. It is probably not yet possible to do that with Krauss’s texts: they are still close to us in time, and their themes and dramatis personae are still largely our own. But a time will come, as it does for all writers, when Krauss’s concerns are more about her than about Picasso or Duchamp, and then her writing will exist as writing. Perhaps it is time to begin thinking about that possibility.
— James Elkins, What is Interesting Writing in Art History?