The Romance of Writing Art Criticism

Image by Kelly Sikkema.

This essay is for Hakim Bishara

Recently various commentators, myself amongst them, have pointed to the present crisis of art criticism. Some older publications have been rebooted or even closed, and there is general awareness of the severe financial problems facing writers. Thanks to gentrification, the traditional role of the independent intellectual has become increasingly difficult. And, given the problems faced also by our academic institutions, especially in the humanities, it’s obvious that their ability to support critics is limited. The practical problems now facing critics are very difficult.

I certainly don’t have any dramatic, upbeat answer to these questions. And I don’t want to pretend that practical financial concerns are unimportant. As I’ve occasionally noted in my publications, I was (and am) able to write criticism without much concern for the marketplace because I was a tenured professor of philosophy, now safely retired, in good institutions. That such positions are becoming rarer means that I am not a good role model. Here, however, I want to change the subject completely, and focus on why I (and, I believe, also some other scholars) write criticism.

For as long as I can remember, forty some years now, more than half of my lifetime, I have been enchanted by the romance of doing art criticism. I go to an exhibition, and with the aid of a handout or catalogue, I look at the art and compose a narrative. That process never fails to excite reflections. My personal background is in academic analytic philosophy, and so I tend to describe this process by contrasting the activity of a philosopher. When you have some philosophical issue to discuss, you need to read the literature and identify some important concern not previously dealt with adequately. In this way, doing philosophy is an essential communal issue. It is, I think, like art history but maybe unlike creative writing in this way. Writing art criticism is essentially different, because it usually involves one person looking at a show. Generally I prefer to be alone or, at least, not with friends who are offering their opinions. Often, of course, I am interested in what previous commentators have written. (This is what doing the first commentary on a young artist, where no such precedents are available, is such an important challenge. You really are on your own.) The danger, still, is that responding to prior comments distracts you from presenting your own distinctive point of view. It is better, in my experience, to focus on what you see, while acknowledging, perhaps in a footnote, contributions of other writers. This is very different from doing philosophy. A philosopher may consider varied viewpoints on some conceptual issue, but an art critic need to focus on one way of looking, developing its implications.

Here is the essential challenge as I see it. Walking through a show, you are likely to have any number of stray thoughts. And so what’s required is focused generalizing when writing in a way that’s truthful to your experience. How, from description of some of these varied works on display can you identify a common theme, and effectively judge the entirety of the art? As this question suggests, judging group shows is often especially difficult. This is especially true when the theme is large or ill-defined. What’s required then is the capacity to identify some commonalities amongst what may be very diverse works. Often commentators are concerned with the political implications of art criticism, which are important. But, still, whatever your partisan point of view, you face this dilemma: identifying the similarities of different artifacts. You can work out the details when you get home, but it’s best always to have an interpretative ‘line’ before you leave the show.

In my long experience, this general description describes very diverse cases of the practice of art criticism. It identifies the ways that when judging a one person exhibition, we trace that person’s development. It accurately points to the way in which we find the affinities of art from one period, whether that be Rome circa 1610, China in 1220 or Brooklyn today. And it notes the ways in which we describe the unity of geographically or temporally ambitious exhibits, twentieth century abstract painting in Nigeria for example. That’s why this plan, developed to deal in the 1980s with contemporary painting shows in Manhattan served me when I traveled to write about art in China and Japan, or judge shows from Asia or Africa presented in the West.

There has been serious debate about how much a critic needs to know about the artist’s culture. Do you need to master the scholarly historical literature to evaluate old regime Western art, or be acquainted with the political cultures of China and India to judge their art? Personal identity may matter too. Do you need be Black in order to critique African or African-American artworks? Female to judge women artists? Or gay to review shows of gay artists? Roger Fry, who knew nothing about Africa, was prepared to praise African sculpture. Other formalist critics, Clement Greenberg for example, believed that they could judge all art from anywhere. And the gestalt theorist Rudolf Arnheim held that even someone who knew nothing about Christianity could properly judge the frescoes of Piero della Francesca. But if the diverse human cultures have distinctive qualities, determined in part (at least) by the originating culture, then perhaps someone who is ignorant will miss something important. And so maybe the belief in the universality of great art is overoptimistic. Nowadays when there is so much great interest in multiculturalism, the art critic needs to have some view of this situation. You need to decide what reading you should do before looking and what shows you will feel comfortable judging.

Were I writing for philosophers, I would develop this analysis of aesthetic judgment with reference to the theorizing of Immanuel Kant (who described its disinterested character), Friedrich Schiller (whose account of play is essential) and G. W. F. Hegel (who places that judgment in historical perspective). And no doubt I would want, also to say something about Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of this tradition. Here, however, since I am merely describing my activity as an everyday working critic, I will drop these scholarly allusions. I certainly do not believe that the practicing critic needs to deal these large philosophical questions. Indeed, no one faced with a deadline to meet could hope to accomplish that. But I do think that these issues are in the background of the everyday practice of art critics. As I said earlier, that activity for me remains always challenging and fascinating, for it poses deep, not easily resolved critical issues. And this is what I meant when I spoke of the romance of criticism. Judging visual artworks poses seductive challenges, which are difficult to resolve. That’s why, for all of the practical difficulties, I love being an art critic. For me, the romance has never gone away. I am very lucky!