Past Lives: Melissa Smith

Past Lives is an interview series with School of the Arts Writing faculty, students, and alumni who began their professional lives on different career paths. In this series, we discuss the lives they led before they became artists—and how their work in other industries informs the creative work they do now. Here, we talk to Adjunct Assistant Professor Melissa Smith about finding your path, tech-savviness, and the recent evolution of arts journalism. 

Why did you first decide to study art history?

I was really indecisive when I got to college. I thought [my major] would just kind of come to me. Then I had this really great professor, an art history professor. He said, “you have a good eye for this and I really feel like you should consider making it your major.”

I'd always been kind of visually inclined. So I thought, “Hey, why not?” Once I got into it, I really got more obsessed with the field. But the obsession didn't come before deciding to major in art. It was kind of like I had reached the end of my rope. I had to decide on something. The teacher gave me some positive encouragement. I signed on, and then I got much more obsessed with it as I was taking more and more courses as part of the discipline.
 

What signs of skill did he see in your work?

Maybe it was what I wrote in one of my critical papers. I'm not really sure. He didn't pinpoint why he thought I'd be a promising student. But he said I would, and I took his word for it. I thought, “All right, you know what? I like this anyway, so it seems to be a good match.”

My minor was English, so it all makes sense. I knew that writing was a component I wanted to add to my career in the future. I didn't necessarily think it was going to be the thing I did in the future, but let's say I was going to go down the curatorial track: I would definitely need a good background in writing. So, that’s what I landed on and then that essentially set my path.
 

Can you describe your time working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for almost a decade, seven or eight years. I got the job shortly after I graduated college. Obviously, it wasn't a very high-profile role. I was an administrative assistant. I was getting paid a very little amount of money—I feel like people definitely need to put that out there. I don't know if things have changed over the course of the last however-many years, but the salary is definitely hard to live on for somebody in New York. But I took the opportunity because obviously I wanted to get into the museum and [this position] really was invaluable in that I could see how the museum operated from the inside.
 

What could you observe in your day-to-day work life?

I was an administrative assistant in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The work did run the gamut, which was pretty nice because I could get involved with a lot of things. I was helping curators by typing up their acquisition papers—some of the curators were a little bit older at the time that I was working there, so some of them didn't have computers.. It helped me get a sense of what the job was about, how they acquire work for the museum, who they’re writing to, what those letters entail, whether they’re trying to get loans for a show, how they're organizing that show. I got to see what goes into putting together an exhibition, even just the day-to-day curatorial work that goes into the permanent collections.  

But I was on the administrative track. I didn't have a graduate degree in art history, and at that time, you really needed to get a graduate degree, if not a PhD, in order to move up at the museum. At that point, I thought, okay, I'm at this critical juncture in my career. Am I going to go back and get that graduate degree and then try to get back to the museum, and see where that takes my career—or am I going to do something different? I weighed my options and I decided that since writing has always been in the back of my mind, it was something I wanted to do.
 

How did you end up studying journalism at Columbia? Did you have many opportunities to study writing about art while in the program?

I wanted to figure out how to incorporate art and writing. The museum paid for my tuition for the two years it took me to get the degree. I went part-time, so I was taking classes and also working. Writing about art depended. It was really about the courses that they offered. I picked a class called something like “the Art of the Profile” because I knew that arts journalism was a lot of profile writing. There was an arts journalism class, but it wasn't specific to visual arts. “Arts” was more of an all-encompassing term. It was TV, film, theater, art, whatever. I took that class. Then there were other classes that were more in the literary journalism style. Those are the classes that I gravitated toward and the ones I wanted to take.
 

How has art criticism changed since you first began writing?

Honestly, I can count the amount of reviews that I've written on one hand. I'm writing a lot more profiles, a lot more profiles, a lot more investigative pieces on how the art world works. The great thing about journalism is that you're pitching ideas, and then you get a sense of what you like and gravitate to as far as subject matter. It seems like the ideas that I'm pitching have a lot more to do with the business of art and how that works. It happened organically, and then once I started getting a bit more traction with editors, they gave me the freedom to choose what I liked [to write.]
 

Do you prefer writing profiles and investigative pieces more than reviews? Why?

Let's just say this: reviews have gotten far less critical than they used to be. I also felt, at the time—and this is one of those imposter syndrome things that people need to get over—I only had an undergraduate degree in art history. I didn’t feel equipped to write about this stuff critically, because what the hell do I know?

Then I realized that everyone feels that way. In the class I taught last semester, Art Criticism Now, I assigned readings about how critics started their careers, because it's really informative to know that some people just started going to gallery shows, and then they started feeling more and more confident to talk critically about art. It wasn't necessarily within an academic environment. They didn't need the degrees in order to feel like they were equipped to talk about art. When I was young and starting out in the career, I did not have that confidence. But looking back, I would tell myself, “Just get over it and go out on a limb and tell 'em what you think," and it has value, trust me, it has value.
 

Is it difficult to find language for works that are meant to be experienced visually? Do you have a method for approaching that challenge?

Not really. I just go into it knowing that I'm going to have to describe these things in a way that translates to a general audience, to people who have not gone to see this stuff, or may not even go to see it. But they may read about the work anyway, or they may read the piece for different reasons because it has broader cultural appeal. But you really have to describe the work and you have to make people feel like they were there.

It is one of the harder parts of art journalism, to be honest. That's why in my class, for one of my first writing assignments, my students had to go to a show and pick a piece of art and describe it. Then, we tried to see whether or not we could actually visualize what it was.
 

Did you notice any patterns in the results? Did people who were describing paintings have an easier job than people who were describing statues, for example?

Not really. It was funny though because some people picked a performance art piece—with performance art, I feel like there's a higher bar, because it is a one-time performance and your audiences will not have a chance to see it. There's so many components to it. I always find that a little bit more difficult, but also really a nice challenge. And I always find paintings to be a smidge easier.
 

When describing visual art, do you find yourself coming up with your own vocabulary or lexicon, or clueing into a vocabulary that already exists?

I do feel personally that I'd like arts journalism to be a bit more accessible and approachable to people, and I think language has a lot to do with that–using our historical jargon would not really help. There’s no reason why you need to [use that jargon], especially when you're really just describing what you see, because that should be something that anybody can relate to.
 

You’ve participated on several panels about the role of race and representation in the arts. Could you speak to that for a little bit?

That came out organically as I started learning more and more about the business of art, and how a lot of voices have been excluded over the years. It's not like I made it my mission to correct for that, but I was hardwired to at least address it and try to put that attention back on people that, I feel unfairly, haven't gotten it over the years.

What would you say to someone who is skeptical about breaking into that exclusionary world?

The field of artists is so large. I know that it seems really insular, the art world. It's so hard for me to have an objective view on this because I've been so immersed in it for so long. If I can recall back to grad school, I don't remember what my first piece of arts journalism was about—and God knows that I would not want to bring it back up again. I don't ever want to read what I wrote, but I remember at the time talking about how I didn't feel like I could get inside the art world. I couldn't experience it as somebody who had the access that I didn’t have. Honestly, now I feel like that's total bullshit. Go to galleries. [Exclusion is] a feeling that the industry wants you to have, but it's also a feeling that is completely bullshit. Don't buy into it. Go to galleries, go see artists. You can definitely do it. There's no reason why you can't, there's no access needed to just go to a gallery, walk in, see the work and decide whether or not you like it. And then try to describe what you see.
 

What are the joys and challenges of writing about art for the art world or for a general audience?

I feel like there is more of an urgency now to put some sort of broad cultural appeal around stories. I really like doing that. I like making stories accessible, not only for an art world audience. I don't know how much impact I'm having in that respect, but I hope people read what I write and they find it accessible, it’s something they can read even though they don't have the insider knowledge that other people have. That's what I find exciting about what I do. 

The challenges are really all based on how the business works. We talked about this in my class a little bit because I brought in one of my editors. She talked about the behind-the-scenes business and what goes into assigning a writer to a story. A lot of methods of assigning a writer crowd out the traditional art journalist. Obviously it's a business, it's a revenue model. So let's say there was a jewelry show, right? Julie wouldn't necessarily say, “Melissa, go out to that show and figure out all that you can about jewelry.” She would instead find somebody who knows about jewelry, likely an academic, and then she'd ask them, “would you be interested in writing about the show about jewelry?” As a result, the arts writer who has more of a general focus gets crowded out.
 

What would your advice be to students who want to start trying to break into arts journalism?

I don't want to say stuff like “just go to galleries and see shows and do all that” because, sure, that's a part of it, but there's so much more to it than that. Learn to look. Make sure to go to as many shows as you can—that way, you’ll be better able to describe a show and understand what the takeaways are. Link what’s going on in the art world to what’s going on in the world at large, because there are so many glaringly obvious parallels that people do not pay attention to. Make those connections, and make those pitches based on that, because I feel like that’s what’s going to be of more and more interest as art writing evolves.

Melissa Smith is a writer and art critic. After graduating from NYU with a degree in Fine Arts, she worked for nearly a decade at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She then received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artnet News, ARTnews, Robb Report, Momus, Sotheby’s, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Quartz, The Art Newspaper, and elsewhere. She has been invited to speak on a number of podcasts and panels, participating in discussions mainly about the role of race and representation in the arts. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.