The Late Correction

Twenty years ago, critic Mara Venn opened her review of Lio Sato's first exhibition with a bellicose challenge to anyone who admired it. She called the paintings “decorative evasions,” a pejorative label that made appreciation sound like a failure of intelligence. Most sharply, she dismissed their scenes of neighbors sharing food as didactic fables, arguing that art should complicate conduct rather than instruct viewers in kindness.

This spring, preparing an anniversary essay, Venn returned to Sato's canvases and found that time had not confirmed her certainty. The city's redevelopment had been inexorable: workshops vanished, rents climbed, and the modest storefronts Sato painted became glass towers. Against that loss, details she once scorned now seemed exact: variegated awnings striped red, green, and faded gold, bruised fruit, and coats patched in mismatched cloth. Her notes grew almost rhapsodic as she described the painted light, repeatedly circling phrases of astonishment and delight.

Venn also recognized how the era's critical hegemony had narrowed her sight; a small circle of theorists determined which ambitions counted as serious. Young reviewers competed for entry to that circle, while rapacious galleries sought fashionable canvases they could acquire cheaply and sell after lavish promotion. She had mistaken allegiance for rigor, echoing senior critics in a servile manner whenever her private reactions threatened their approval.

To test this revision, Venn interviewed Sato, now an indefatigable muralist who still spent ten-hour days painting public clinics and schools. He was solicitous about former neighbors, asking first whether each family had found stable housing and refusing to center his own disappointments. Yet he was not querulous; when discussing Venn's review, he neither whined about its cruelty nor itemized the opportunities it had cost him. Indeed, proceeds from his recent retrospective had funded a munificent grant, large enough to keep three neighborhood studios open for years.

Venn's new essay does more than repudiate her old claims; it reconstructs the professional incentives that once made those claims feel self-evident. Because a published judgment cannot simply disappear, she does not pretend she can rescind the review as an official might revoke a ruling. Instead, she reprints its harshest passages and places her present reasoning beside them, leaving readers to measure both. Such candor may be inimical to the critic's customary pose of authority, since admitting error weakens the illusion of unbroken judgment. But Venn concludes that criticism earns trust not by appearing timeless, but by showing how honestly a mind can change.