Any open-minded person curious about avant-garde art in New York City in the late 1960s or early 1970s encountered a fermenting stew, in which the ideas of choreographers, composers, theater directors, writers, and visual artists jostled against one another. Creators associated with minimalism were never timid about reducing dancing to walking, a sculpture to a railroad tie, music to two wrangling sounds, and theater that transgressed the spectator–performer boundary.

Noël Carroll was an adventurous observer back then. Now, after producing fifteen important books, Carroll—currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York's Graduate Center—has published Living in an Artworld, a collection of erudite, stimulating essays and reviews that he wrote for Artforum, The Village Voice, Soho Weekly News, and various scholarly journals. The writings cover a period ranging from the 1970s through the 1980s, with two from the 1990s and one from 2007. Three of those dealing with dance were coauthored by the dance critic and historian Sally Banes.

Carroll is an amiable and perceptive guide to the dance, theater, and gallery exhibitions that aroused his interest. He is also rigorous—examining works in diverse fields in relation to one another when relevant, and using them as fodder to illustrate his arguments and queries about, say, the minimalist aesthetic as a response to modernism, or the return of outspoken narrative and expression to the art of the 1980s as a counter to minimalism. He bores his intellect into a topic—tweezing generalities apart with a masterly precision.

Arthur C. Danto, who wrote the Foreword to Living in an Artworld (“Diderot Downtown: Noël Carroll's Critico-Philosophical Writings”), likens Carroll to a participant observer, one able to function within a culture yet retain a critical distance:

The “closeness” that Danto notes is one of the things that makes Carroll's analysis of art works and the ideas embedded in them rewarding to read. For Carroll, the object he is writing about must stay in clear view. In his discussion of what he terms “alternate cultural criticism,” as applied to dance, he supports applying a critical framework from a different discipline, provided it is appropriate to do so (perhaps in terms of a stated or perceived influence on the work in question). But he goes on to say:

And though he frequently mentions relevant critical theory with respect, he avoids (and is seemingly averse to) its jargon and some of the uses to which it is put. In reviewing Perry Hoberman's 3-D slide shows (“Semiotics in 3-D,” 1983), he remarks that he deplores “the kind of semiotic metaphysics Hoberman presumes; nowadays the concepts of codes, language, discourse, and text have been wildly overextended, beyond even metaphorical value.” However, with typical evenhandedness, he admits that “Hoberman's ingenuity in making artistic emblems for this persuasion is irresistible” and if he “is not a rigorous thinker, he is a rigorous artist” (242).

However assertive Carroll may be, he remains able to see and consider several sides to an issue; he also maintains an engaging degree of modesty and self-deprecation. In the course of a 1992 talk at Ohio State University's Wexner Center on the occasion of Peter Brook's receiving the Wexner Prize (“The Claim of Immediacy: Peter Brook's Philosophy of Theater”), he slyly told the audience: “Of course I could be wrong in this. Maybe Peter Brook has no philosophy of theater. But even if that is the case, I can't do too much damage since, in the first place, I won't be talking that long, and, in the second place, Peter Brook is here to correct me” (243).

The reviews are insightful, both in terms of Carroll's perceptions of the work before him and the ideas that strike him after seeing it. Having discussed the space patterns and time structures of Lucinda Childs’ plain, repetitive early dances (“Lucinda Childs and Laura Dean,” 1974), he revisits Dean's work in 1983 (“Introducing Laura Dean”) and has this to say: “… the powerful physical address of rhythm—feet stamping in audible patterns—separates Dean from the Minimalists because that rhythm shatters the sense of distance that was a fundamental Minimalist quality. That is, when we feel the beat pulsing inside of us, we cannot play the role of the cool, detached observer” (109).

The above quote raises a perplexing issue. In his essay “Options for Contemporary Dance Criticism” (1987), Carroll uses the terms “objectivity” and “objective criticism” without, to my mind, satisfactorily defining them. Those who write about works of art may attempt to elude the partiality and biases they have acquired over time and focus on the facts before them; objectivity defined as “fairness” is a goal of many critics. But if by “objective,” Carroll and others mean neutral or detached or dispassionate, such objectivity, to my mind, ill serves the art it wishes to illumine. We may rein in subjectivity, but we can't make it disappear. The beat indeed pulses within us. And Carroll's writing, as Danto points out, often conveys an individual and sensuous perception of an experience.

Objectivity comes up in Carroll's above-mentioned essay in connection with what he labels “descriptive criticism,” which he discusses in relation to alternative cultural criticism and (his term and his preference) “situational criticism.” (By the last, he means assaying a choreographer's apparent choices and how they shape and define the resulting dance; Isadora Duncan, for example, chose to dance barefoot to underline her devotion to nature and the natural and to rebel against existing ballet practice in America around 1900).

But description is an aspect of criticism that Carroll doesn't fully elucidate. At times, he seems to be talking about a dry account of structures and actions—a “just the facts, ma'am” kind of reporting. I do not think that is the kind of descriptive criticism that Susan Sontag was championing in her influential 1966 essay “Against Interpretation” (quoted on p. 137).

In a footnote on page 379, Carroll mentions that Michael Kirby, during his tenure as editor of The Drama Review, was remorseless about cutting every word that could hint at interpretation or opinion on the part of his writers. However, “A Select View of Earthlings: Ping Chong,” a piece of Carroll's heavily edited by Kirby, abandons only a very narrow definition of interpretation (as in, “this means that”). For instance, of the music in Chong's work, Carroll writes, “Frequently, it has a haunting quality” (227). Surely this is a kind of interpretation—in the service of description and spiced with a dash of subjectivity. Evocative language of the sort that Carroll uses himself tells us about how something was done—not just what was done, and it goes beyond the kind of description that he characterizes derogatorily as a “bare chronicle of what happened,” which he, rightly, considers can be hard to follow (139).

Carroll's investigations of these (and other) issues are far more nuanced than I've been able to convey. As a philosopher, he is well versed in both setting up categories and making distinctions among them. He dissects the slipperiness of the label “postmodern” in relation to the arts. He wades deep into “performance” (as applied to vanguard manifestations rather than mainstream theater), further dividing this category into “performance art” (rooted in theater and influenced by the ideas of Antonin Artaud) and “art performance” (rooted in the visual arts—Happenings, for instance).

Someone made an unwise decision about the layout of this thought-provoking collection. Instead of finding a date after each essay, the interested reader is forced to search through the Acknowledgments at the front of the volume or flip to the Notes at the back (provided a title is footnoted). When Carroll wrote these reviews and essays matters. Interested virtual travellers in the art world between 1974 and 2007 need navigational data—especially those voyagers for whom memories of the 1970s, if any, may be of after-school games rather than artists’ manifestos.