Last night I went to the Franklin Murphy lecture which had a fairly significant name for once – Roberta Smith, the senior art critic for the New York Times, and a Lawrence native. I have never seen the Spencer Auditorium as packed as it was, I think her title, her knowledge, and her history carries a lot of authority. That said, I had mixed feelings. Technology malfunctions happen to the best of us, but I was surprised that someone of her stature and experience could manage to “lose” her notes (she couldn’t figure out where she saved that word document on her laptop), end several sentences with “I know, that’s not clear”, and have a double-projector slideshow out of order and partially upside-down. She has been in town for nearly a week – they even gave her an office, can it really be that hard? That said thecontent of her message was actually interesting, insightful, and mostly true. She talked about the fact that artists, critics, and the public at large have been misusing and confusing the terms subject matter and content for a long time – especially with art. I couldn’t agree more. Subject matter is what we see, content is what it means. With that distinction, she showed us the artists that she thinks do a better job of producing and manipulating their own content, instead of simply subject matter. She made some interesting connections, and most insightful of all was the notion that we as artists have very little control over our actual content – and the struggle is to have content at all. Most of the time artists are lazy, and go with subject matter – which may say more, but leaves the viewer with less to actually think about (which ultimately leaves much less to be said). Right on. This got me thinking – whether you are an “artist” or not, you probably seriously overestimate your ability to control your own “content”. In conversations or discussions from the last twenty-four hours alone, I can think of several times the ideas and emotions running about in my mind weren’t properly understood or accepted by the people I attempted to express them to. Similarly, it is sort of astonishing to see how far in another direction people can take your badly communicated content, and present content of their own that is equally weak and hard to follow. I think we’d all be better for it if we just realized and accepted that we are all poor communicators at best. But if you ask me, poor communication has no relationship with poor art. A good designer, public speaker, journalist, etc. doesn’t make a good artist. In fact, a lack of communication can even contribute to the quality of art – so long as their is that ever-so-popular buzz word, content. So needless to say, when it got down to the nitty-gritty ideas, I enjoyed what Roberta had to say. However her points were constantly weakened by her lust for all things Donald Judd (funny how she worked with him early in her career). I actually think he is one of the more important artists from the last forty years, but she tried to compare dozens of pieces from all corners of modernism to his work alone – as the standard for True Content. That and the fact that her slides were crooked and out of tune made me wish she tried much harder than she did (she had the content, but not the control), because she is a smart lady, with a Lawrence High School Diploma and a lot of clout.