Geoff Dyer on Michael Fried

Geoff Dyer explains here that he's not a fan of Michael Fried's prose :(  Too much metadiscourse for Dyer's liking, it seems.

Make up your own mind by reading some of Fried's work for yourself in a Critical Inquiry article about Jeff Wall here.  Part of the problem seems to be that Fried has virtually published a spoken lecture verbatim; here's the lecture:

Since Fried certainly knows that spoken and written language have different conventions, I suppose he simply didn't see any reason to bother making more than a few superficial revisions to the lecture before publishing it.  Some version of this lecture may be in the book on photography that Dyer critiques, although I'm not sure whether it's been more substantially revised there, since it's hard to find excerpts of the book online...  But probably the underlying cause is Fried's haste to rush to publish, and the failure of his publisher, Yale University Press, to devote editorial resources to improving the manuscript.  This is probably just a case of melted gorgonzola—a big cheese becoming sloppy.  Fried's published eleven books and knows that he can get away with this.  His early work is better written; compare the opening of "Art and Objecthood," from 1967:

The enterprise known variously as Minimal Art, ABC Art, Primary Structures, and Specific Objects is largely ideological. It seeks to declare and occupy a position—one that can be formulated in words, and in fact has been formulated by—some of its leading practitioners.

...with the opening of the Jeff Wall essay:

I want to begin by considering a well-known picture by the contemporary Vancouver- based photographer Jeff Wall, the full title of which is Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (1992; Fig. 1).  Technically, it is a large Cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox, which is to say illuminated from behind by fluorescent lights (Wall's preferred medium).

UPDATE: Michael Fried's response (scroll to the bottom of the letters web page) basically seems to  amount to a tacit acknowledgement of the problem and its cause.  He refrains from commenting on the substance of Dyer's criticism, instead simply plugging his newest book.  In other words , Fried isn't really too concerned about whether his books are well written; he just wants to write lots of them and make sure that lots of people know it.  Quality succumbs to quantity...