This essay first appeared in the November 2024 issue of The Critic.
“A good critic always puts more into writing about art than the artist put into making it.” This deadly serious 2021 tweet by the veteran New York art critic Jerry Saltz prompted widespread derision. No artist would tolerate such a slight and Saltz has half a million of them as followers. “The critic must […] create a thing of beauty itself”, he continued. Sure, they replied, but what are art critics for anyway?
Saltz deleted the post, but not before making plain his métier’s greatest frustration: of all the creative professions, criticism of contemporary art is the most futile. Its path to obsolescence has finally reached an end at which the critic may as well renounce judgment and declare himself an artist. Might this dead-end mark an opening for a new generation of critics?
The symptoms of art criticism’s illness are many. For one, the public has little interest in the subject. Compared to gaming, film, or even opera, what goes on in contemporary art centres and commercial art galleries is of little cultural consequence. It is a source of even greater anxiety for the critic, however, that the making of art is now fully estranged from considered critical opinion. While as recently as in the 1980s, a review by Robert Hughes could ruin an artist’s career, it soon after became a sign of coolness for artists not to bother reading what critics wrote about them. Today, the art world’s lack of interest in getting “press” is proof that the practice doesn’t matter at all.
Despite this critical crisis, contemporary art has never been so verbose. Any visit to a gallery today involves a “press release” being thrust into the visitor’s hand. These documents are often written anonymously by jobbing critics. They name-check theoretical fads or dwell on the artist’s identity, equipping the viewer with enough information to ‘get’ the work. In museums, exhibition labels compete with the works for attention, too. The artist Pio Abad’s entry to this year’s Turner Prize, for example, consisted in part of dry interpretative tombstones the artist wrote for a bunch of museum objects himself.
This internalisation of criticism into art production isn’t new. The critic JJ Charlesworth’s recent book on the history of British art discourse describes the post-1968 tussles for legitimacy in mediating art as “The Critical War”. As the influence of post-war writers like the champion of formalism Clement Greenberg faded, criticism mapped a new, radical way for the arts. Magazines like Studio International or October were the forums in which art’s politics was contested.
Contrary to the legend of progress, the outcomes of such debates were not always predetermined. The writer Peter Fuller, for example, was originally a proponent of avant-garde art. By the late 1970s, he became a fierce critic of contemporary art’s decadence and his writing berated the Arts Council for funding the production of what he thought was meaningless, impenetrable art. By the 1990s, however, postmodernism’s cultural pluralism turned discernment into a dirty word. That judgment should follow principles and cultivate discipline became tantamount to hostile power-play.
Such arguments will resonate with readers today who should be wary of both contemporary art writing’s liberal dogmas and the knee-jerk reactionary “my child could have made that” opposition it often inspires among conservative thinkers. The truth is that neither attitude has anything to do with criticism. For each, the wilful departure from the object at hand has been catastrophic.
For the contemporary art world, the crisis is one of confidence. Twenty years ago, the Time Out critic Sarah Kent said that writing about art was akin to cutting one’s own hair without fearing public mockery. In 2021, Patricia Bickers, who edits one of the few remaining UK art magazines, noted that her writers now eschew the very title of ‘critic’. This is an abdication of the critical initiative. Indeed, much of the writing Art Monthlypublishes is symptomatic of the uncritical turn: more interested in using works of art as props in pre-determined political or theoretical arguments than in discussing them as objects of inquiry.
Because artists, curators, and institutions are nearly always already in political accord, critics must suffer from chronic politeness, too. Writers who churn out copy for one gallery the next day review exhibitions blurbed by their colleagues elsewhere. The competition is fierce. Magazines constantly refresh their writers’ rosters to keep costs down, so critical stances rarely develop. A handful of blue-chip galleries, meanwhile, maintain in-house magazines as retirement homes for once-daring critics.
The critic is thus the art world lackey whose role is to prop up the poorly articulated ideas of his peers. Negative criticism becomes an act of treason. At the recent preview of Haegue Yang’s retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones’ one-star review of the show was the top gossip. Staring directly at the work but unable to articulate a defence of the Korean artist’s practice, one guest suggested that Jones disliked the exhibition because he is “quite conservative”. This sentiment, surely, turns all criticism void. Would a left-wing critic champion Yang (whose work is not visibly politically progressive) as a matter of party discipline?
An even more insidious issue is that neither the commercial art market nor the public institutions’ funders care about any of this. In the attention economies driven by investment capital, PR firms, and KPI culture, negative reviews are indistinguishable from high praise. And because the consequences of diligently separating good art from bad are so marginal, there is little incentive for art world insider writers to exercise their judgment at all.
Charlesworth recalls the artist Victor Burgin who in the 1980s rejected criticism’s tendency to impose a “master narrative” over the artist. Today, the same art world which views Jones’ supposed conservative tendencies as unpalatable extremes has little interest in criticism that originates outside its liberal consensus narrative. A write-up in the Financial Times may still set an art dealer’s heart racing but not fast enough to get him past the paper’s paywall. He’s not missing much anyway because the ‘low impact’ score turns critical writing milquetoast across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, plenty of conservative audiences still don’t believe that contemporary art is art at all. Their favourite broadsheet critics too often lack the conviction, if not the art historical knowledge, to try and change their minds.
Who, then, dares to believe that some works of art are better than others? There is a vast space for critique between the Kantian, disinterested judgment embodied by Greenberg, the contradiction-seeking Adornian negative dialectics championed by Rosalind Krauss, and the Derridean, deconstructionist approach practised by artist-critics like Donald Judd. Yet when Camille Paglia tried to reanimate critique with a dose of Nietzschean judgment in her sweeping art historical journey in Glittering Images of 2012, her fellow critics weren’t having it.
The art world has had plenty of time to figure all this out. It didn’t. Criticism’s current desperate turns to decolonial or queer theories are catastrophic for artists who, in the absence of principled judgment, bend to arbitrary agendas. They’re also bad for audiences who are made to feel stupid for not finding transcendence in galleries and remain unconvinced of contemporary art’s basic tenets. The result is that most new art finds only internal art world appreciation. Under these conditions, it matters little what’s good and what isn’t.
The void left by critical judgment makes room for ‘vibes’. The critic Jessa Crispin described the cultural ‘influencer’ as a machine for inspiring mimetic desire. Contemporary art once thought itself above such debasement. The American magazine Hyperallergic had exalted critical aspirations when it launched fifteen years ago. Today, it produces straight-to-Instagram content dominated by ‘top-five’ political art listicles and calls to ‘amplify’ flavour-of-the-month artistic slogans. Its influencer critics entice their followers to mimic their aesthetic choices without ever understanding why.
There have been plenty of attempts to save art criticism by principle, too. Writing in 2003, for example, the American art historian James Elkins exercised a bunch of impractical solutions. They included the historical (a return to Greenbergian, apolitical formalism), the stylistic (foregrounding of “strong” critical voices), and theoretical (investment in rigour and complexity). He even challenged Saltz, whose writing is full of ad-hoc ideas and eschews theory to take a defined “stand” in the name of his craft.
Elkins ultimately conceded that criticism must invest in understanding its own “flight from judgment”. But this is more the foundation of an epidemiological study than a cure. The past two decades have brought little hope of one. It’s too late for Saltz. The UK’s breakout critical influencer duo The White Pube put even Hyperallergic to shame. The incoherent prospectus of the prestigious MA art writing course at the Royal College of Art, meanwhile, inspires doubt in future critics’ very literacy.
These critics won’t contest the debates that dethroned their predecessors in the 1970s. But because the practice of judgment is today largely uncontested, the field is full of opportunities. The intellectual rewards of engaging with art in the dedicated, self-assured manner crudely promoted by Saltz’s tweet find few parallels in today’s hyper-creative culture. And art is just too important to stay hostage to the art world’s pseudo-critical navel-gazing.
For aspiring critics, earlier traditions highlight principles still useful today even if the subject has radically changed. In a post-script to the fatalistic What Happened to Art Criticism? Elkins called for judgment that is ambitious, self-reflective, and ready to contend with art history. The decades-long practice of contemporary art is now more than mature enough to withstand such rigour. Audiences, meanwhile, are yearning to understand what they’ve been looking at all this time.
