We walk by faith, and not by sight, but how do we critique?

In Hilton Als’ critique of the seminal film adaptation “Moonlight” by Barry Jenkins and in Peter Schjeldahl’s critique of Kerry James Marshall’s retrospective “Mastry,” readers are offered the red and blue pills of critical intimacy and critical distance.

Take me there, immerse me, show me.

Both critics zoom in on illuminating details of their larger subject. For Als, the colors of description are mixed directly onto the palette of analysis, experience, and information. The reader is taken to a specific moment of the film while simultaneously being taken to a current social climate, to a conflict. It is impossible to divorce Als from his descriptions. He is not as concerned with painting a picture or piecing together a puzzle as he is with creating a diverse collage of the certain, the unsure, the personal.

“As he works his hand down Chiron’s shorts, the camera pulls back; this is the only moment of physical intimacy in the film, and Jenkins knows that in this study of black male closeness the point isn’t to show fucking; it’s to show the stops and starts, the hesitation, and the rush that comes when one black male body finds pleasure and something like liberation in another.”

For Schjeldahl, description asserts itself as its own entity, transforming the reader into a viewer. He translates the material into the verbal presenting a full but cold description. Everything aesthetic is there, the colors, the characters, the numbers, the poses–but Schjeldahl is nowhere to be found.

“School of Beauty, School of Culture’ (2012) convenes eight women, two men, two toddlers, and the artist, who is seen in a mirror, his face obscured by a camera flash. The adults sport smart styles of dress, hair, and posture, in luscious colors pegged to a dominant coral and blue-green. Background details done in gold glitter pop forward from the wonderfully handled deep space.”

Open up to me, share with me, situate me.

Als’ sentences are hand-stitched, sewn with pricked fingertips and attentive care. His critique of Moonlight is as urgent as the film itself. Sometimes his effortless prose flows uninhibited—a burst of consciousness, a rainfall of realizations.

“As we watch, another movie plays in our minds, real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance. As Juan squires his fatherless friend about, we can’t help thinking, will he abuse him? Will it happen now?”

Other times his prose slows with an honest viscosity. His own experiences conflating into Chiron’s and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s lives. An archaeological experience stratified by the chapters of the film.

“Intimacy makes the world, the body, feel strange. How does it make a boy who’s been rejected because of his skin color, his sexual interests, and his sensitivity feel?”

He exposes the evolution of his thought process as it unfurls and unloads, as it tenses and releases. This film is unmistakably important to Als and his narrative makes it exponentially more important to the reader regardless of if they ever actually see the film.

But if Als’ essay is an evolution, Schjeldahl’s is presented as creationism. This is a critique of the retrospective willed into existence by the almighty and everlasting Met Breuer and evangelized by Kerry James Marshall. Schjeldahl does not focus on the deep historical, art historical, and political contexts of the show, but instead confines the immense power of Mastry to its physical space.

His leading sentence sucks the air out of the room: “Mastry,’ an exhilarating Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Met Breuer, is a big deal for three reasons: it marks the museum’s blessing of Marshall and, in turn, Marshall’s benediction of the museum, and it affirms a revival of grandly scaled, thematic figurative painting.” Is Marshall’s work not a response? To Schjeldahl, the wall hang proves more powerful than the message or the context.

Schjeldahl attempts to tie a bow on American race relations as neatly as a museum can finitely define a living artist through a retrospective. He writes, “But the show’s cumulative, epic effect is neither political protest nor an appeal for progress in race relations…it’s a ratification of advances already made.” The cost of timelessness bankrupts Schjeldahl in his careful praise. This exhibition is not Marshall beginning to ratify blackness. This exhibition is Marshall’s ratified blackness united together. A mural-scaled reminder that Marshall was an army of one, battling canon after canon to bring black faces onto the museum walls—to transform the technical artistic representation of blackness from tertiary slaves and magi into primary roles as everyday as they may be. His figure work travels through an art historical time machine, slowly chipping away the accepted white power structure…but overall this retrospective is a groundbreaking because grand scale figure painting has finally been revived.

This static approach to Marshall’s work disregards the dynamic intersections of the now with those of Marshall’s then. The reader cannot forget the gross understatement of Marshall’s retrospective in the opening line. While Schjeldahl sporadically adds lines like, “[Mastry is] the suggestion of a new normal, in art and in the national consciousness,” he is largely referring to Marshall’s style and scale rather than the content of the prolific artist’s work. There is no discussion of the duality of the title “Mastry,” rather, Schjeldahl centers the entirety of his critique around the Old Masters half of the dichotomy.

Don’t just enlighten me, empower me, leave me to think.

When groundbreaking works debut, it only makes sense for us mere mortals to interpret their awesome power in terms of faith and belief. Faith in the feeling and belief in the experience. While Schjeldahl was able to pin down specific sights in the show and provide specific interview snippets of the artist, Als’ rawness, his gusto, his respect, allows him to give “Moonlight” the weight and honor it deserves.

When cultural criticism is the beginning of a dialogue between art and the greater world, a critique like Schjeldahl’s reads as nervous small talk. His essay was missing the vital faith and conviction necessary to inspire deeper thought and second looks. After all, at the center of cultural criticism is the implication of culture itself. The paradoxical relationship between the shared experience of culture and the personal interpretations of criticism boil down to a sense of connection. Can the reader connect to the art, to the critic, to the themes, the questions, the passion, the politics, the history, the form, the pace, the photo—any of the countless facets—in full and endless sight?

Only if the critic can.