Holland Cotter's review today in the NYT about the Song Dong installation Waste Not at MoMA is typical both of what I appreciate and of what I find lacking in his writing. Lots of people have applauded the award, and I somehow get the feeling that Cotter is the most pleasant of human beings, so this is nothing to do with any sort of backstage beef. (I've never met the man.) But I've been thinking about this since he won the Pulitzer Prize, trying to determine what type of art criticism was advocated by the giving of the award.

There's something bland there, something that feels like holding back, something that feels more featureish than critic-like. Is this the so-called little-critic of the 00s? The one who is supposed to be morally allergic to his or her own institutional power because we're in an age of blogs and software and everybody-has-access-to-everything-so-nobody-needs-a-critic-who-acts-like-a-critic? As a reader, that's the last thing I want.

I've been hesitant to share my opinion on Cotter's writings because usually I don't see the original material he's dealing with and therefore am unsure of my own reactions, but this time I did see Song Dong at MoMA. I took this photograph from above the installation on opening night (a popular view, it turns out).

Cotter is an expert on Chinese contemporary art, but spends most of his review talking not about what you see in the gallery but about the background of the artist and the story of how this installation came to be. It's a beautiful story: After Song's father died, he and his mother banded together to catalog every single thing his mother owned. In a space in Beijing, she led the organization of the stuff—laying down layered rows of colored plastic shopping bags as if they were strokes of paint, setting radiators next to one another like congruent skeletons, building grids of used toothpaste tubes and a city of white styrofoam packing shapes on the floor. Above all this Song hung a lighted sign that read, "Dad, don't worry, we're fine." Then, she died.

Cotter's analysis is this:

Seen in the museum’s immaculate surroundings, the installation sends out mixed signals. On the one hand, it is fascinating to be wandering, right here in New York, through a time capsule of a lost era of Chinese culture. On the other, it is disturbing to imagine anyone growing up, as Mr. Song did, in so smothering a physical environment. Finally, it is deeply moving to see the span of one person’s life — his mother’s — summed up, monument style, in a work of art that is every bit as much about loss as it is about muchness.

I agree with him: this is a moving exhibition overflowing with absence. But that's almost on the level of fact. He doesn't say how it works. It's not just a bunch of stuff in a room, it's a series of moves.

What's partly inspiring is that the moves were made, according to an essay printed on the wall of the gallery, not by the artist but chiefly by his mother. She organized her own things at the end of her life. She decided that the electrical wires should be a riotous heap of colored coils, while the smaller-scaled coils of colored thread should be delicately separated. She was brutally unsentimental and orderly; this is the opposite of, say, a Rembrandt late self-portrait. Like things went with like things. There were pre-ordained systems and the systems keep secrets despite all this naked confession.

And in places—especially at the edges of the room—these moves fall apart. There is, presumably, no more room, and you find stacks of boxes full of who knows what, and this is at times touching and at times offputting, like: why am I looking at these boxes? They're just boxes. Forget it.

Knowing what he knows about Chinese art, Holland Cotter could do far better than what I've just done. I guess I just want more of Holland Cotter in Holland Cotter reviews.