The Ends of Art Criticism

Patricia Bickers

• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781848224315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte der zeitgenössischen Kunst

At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism seeks to dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously marginalised voices and new global and political perspectives to come to the fore. An essential book for anyone interested in contemporary art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism benefits from an author whose 30 years of experience as editor of Art Monthly magazine allows her to offer opinionated and thought-provoking insight into the many questions and debates surrounding current critical writing on art, including the relationship between artists and critics, the academicisation of critical discourse, and the relationship between art history and criticism.

Chapter 1

Criticism: Crisis? What crisis?

Art criticism is routinely described as being in – usually terminal – ‘crisis’. In 2003 James Elkins, for example, brought out a booklet with the provocative title What Happened to Art Criticism?, published by Prickly Paradigm Press, which has the stated aim of ‘publishing challenging and sometimes outrageous pamphlets’. If the title had not already alerted readers to the tenor of the publication, the opening sentence leaves us in no doubt: ‘Art criticism is in worldwide crisis.’¹ Elkins subsequently became a sought-after speaker at symposia and panel discussions on art criticism, delivering the annual lecture to the International Association of Art Critics at Tate Britain in December 2010, and has been regularly cited since in discussions over the state of art criticism.² His text is perhaps then a good place to start, beginning with that first sentence.

The extrapolation from a perceived crisis in western art criticism to the claim that it is a ‘worldwide’ crisis is problematical; such a comprehensive and western-centric view appears to ignore the ways in which art and criticism have been changed and reinvigorated by postcolonialist and non-western perspectives, both from within and without Europe, as well as by previously marginalised voices making themselves heard, including from ethnic minority, Black and LGBTQI+ communities. However, for Elkins, this ‘expanded field’ of art criticism, to appropriate Rosalind Krauss’s famous iteration with regard to sculpture,³ is partly why he believes that the ‘voice’ of the art critic ‘has become very weak’ in what is now an overcrowded field. Yet, despite its impending death there is no dearth of criticism; but this only compounds the problem: ‘Art criticism,’ Elkins observes, ‘is massively produced, and massively ignored.’⁴

Is he right? There are several points to consider here. To take the last point first: the 21st century has indeed seen a ‘massive’ increase in the production and circulation of art criticism, made easier by digital technology and by the internet which has facilitated the emergence of new outlets for all kinds of criticism, including art criticism. However, that all this production, or over production of art criticism as Elkins would have it, is ‘massively ignored’ suggests either that readers simply ignore it, or that potential readers have splintered into a multitude of mutually exclusive special interest groups, each representing a different art constituency, dissipating the power of art criticism and ‘weakening its voice’ in consequence. I would argue, however, that far from undermining the impact of art criticism, such alternative critical platforms find their own, self-selecting writers and readers, who navigate easily between different formats while, yes, ignoring others.

Art criticism works like osmosis: it is gradually, indirectly – even unconsciously – assimilated and transferred via these online and other platforms and, while some are indeed ephemeral, or are replaced or even integrated into other more conventional outlets like magazines and journals, they are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, social media can be a means by which readers can pass on information directly, including long-form articles, by posting links or likes. One example of this is a comment from 2019 posted on Art Monthly’s Instagram account: ‘I found Kader Attia’s current show at Hayward Gallery engaging but pretty sprawling. Maria Walsh’s review for @ArtMonthly helped me find a route through it by focusing on the linking theme of “repair”.’⁵ The post not only demonstrates the way in which digital media, including social media, can extend art criticism’s reach, but also its efficacy. It could also be said to define one of the ends of art criticism: to help audiences, some of whom are engaging with it for the first time, to ‘find a route through’ contemporary art.

To the post-internet generation, the digital arena is just another platform and, thankfully, there is no shortage of new writers keen to contribute to analogue and other long-form formats. Many, indeed, relish the challenge of writing for a magazine of record and altering their approach accordingly, taking more time to develop an idea or response, while also agreeing to the editing and fact-checking process, after which proofs are exchanged until both parties are happy.

The massive output of criticism doesn’t render the art critical voice – or voices – weaker, merely more diverse, more far-reaching and, arguably, more influential. One wonders, therefore, whether lurking beneath this concern with overproduction, is the assumption that in the past – for Elkins, it was perhaps during the hegemony of Modernism and its postmodernist legacies in the West – art criticism was less plentiful but more authoritative. In this prelapsarian era critics did not have to raise their voice to be heard because they wrote for a small discerning readership of the like-minded that took art criticism more ‘seriously’. The inference being that, today, that kind of art critical voice can no longer be heard because it is being drowned out by the din of voices on the internet, and its evil spawn the blogosphere, which have driven the discerning reader away.

Elkins is not the first commentator, nor will he be the last, to bewail the state of art criticism – he cites my own former professor, Quentin Bell, who bemoaned the lack of a ‘grand pundit’, a ‘Diderot, a Baudelaire, a Ruskin or a Roger Fry’; such complaints have probably dogged art criticism since its inception, according to its first historian Lionello Venturi, in antiquity.⁶ It could be argued that what these complaints have in common is a sense of the loss of power not of art criticism, but of the critic. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that, until the second half of the 20th century, the critical voices that were being heard were invariably male: from Giorgio Vasari and later Venturi himself, to John Ruskin, whose bicentenary was celebrated in 2019, and Clement Greenberg.

No incident more clearly illustrates the former dominance of the ‘authoritative critical voice’, perhaps, than the often-cited (James Abbott McNeill) Whistler v Ruskin libel trial of 1878, which, in the words of art historian Linda Merrill, became what today would be called a ‘media event’. The painter, who represented himself in the subsequent trial, sued the famous critic for libel over his review in Fors Clavigera of an exhibition at London’s Grosvenor Gallery which included Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, painted c.1875. ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now,’ wrote Ruskin, ‘but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’⁷

This was strong language at the time. Ruskin believed that art should not only have a moral and didactic purpose, but should also demonstrate skill, evidenced by the labour, and therefore time, expended on the work. Indeed, to the derision of the court, when challenged that he was asking two hundred guineas for ‘the labour of two days’, Whistler replied defiantly, ‘No; I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.’ However, to Ruskin (who, in an earlier review, had dismissed another of Whistler’s paintings in similar terms: ‘It was a daub professing to be a “harmony in pink and white” (or some such nonsense); absolute rubbish, and which had taken about a quarter of an hour to scrawl or daub’⁸), the work offered the potential buyer poor value for money. Whistler won his case, but the judge awarded him the derisory damages of one farthing. However, it was Whistler, the apostle of ‘art for art’s sake’, or l’art pour l’art (a term associated with the French poet and critic, Théophile Gautier and the ‘Parnassians’ of Paris), who had the last laugh when in 1892 – some 14 years after the trial – he sold the painting to an American collector, Samuel Untermyer, for eight hundred guineas, three times the original asking price. Whistler called it a ‘slap in the face’ for the critic.⁹

In the context of a discussion about the critic’s ‘voice’, what is of interest here is the status accorded Ruskin by his peers. According to Whistler’s account, the Attorney General no less, defending (Ruskin was ‘indisposed’ and did not appear in person), appealed to the court by pointing out that, ‘“It would be an evil day for art in this country, when Mr. Ruskin would be prevented from indulging in legitimate and proper criticism, by pointing out what was beautiful and what was not”.’¹⁰

Any critic either arrogating to himself such power or being endowed with it by others would be considered the contemporary equivalent of a ‘coxcomb’ today – not that there haven’t been contenders for the position that critics have vacated, or from which they have arguably been ousted by the rise of the curator. In 1988, for instance, the year of the seminal three-part Freeze exhibition in London’s Docklands – organised by Damien Hirst (b.1965) while still a student at Goldsmiths – the critic Peter Fuller published the first issue of his own magazine, founded the year before and titled Modern Painters after the monumental work of the same name by his hero Ruskin. The title made a kind of sense, since in some ways Hirst and his generation were to Fuller as Whistler was to Ruskin. The editorial in the Autumn 1994 issue, for instance, praised the launch of the now defunct Jerwood Painting Prize, set up to ‘defend painting’. In words that echoed those of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (who, when testifying for the defence, accused Whistler of evading the ‘difficulties’ of his art), Fuller wrote: ‘Painting is difficult: it is as hard to do well as it is to become a concert violinist. Years of effort and thought are required. It’s scarcely surprising that some young artists turn to the easy cleverness and the less demanding techniques of installation and video.’¹¹ That last comment was directed at artists shortlisted for the annual Turner Prize, launched ten years earlier.

The only critic in modern times to come close to enjoying a similar position to Ruskin as the final arbiter of all things critical and aesthetic was the American, Clement Greenberg. The mantra ‘art for art’s sake’ had been taken up by English critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, with particular reference to Postimpressionism, a term coined by Fry. In his book, titled simply Art, published in 1914 on the eve of the First World War, Bell developed a theory of aesthetics that follows directly from Whistler, and which is essentially formalist. While Whistler, in explaining to the court his choice of title, described a ‘nocturne’ as ‘an arrangement of line, form and colour’,¹² Bell begins by asking rhetorically what quality is ‘shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions’ before supplying the answer, ‘significant form’, defined as ‘lines and colours combined in a particular way’, and as ‘certain forms and relations of forms’.¹³

Greenberg owed more than he at first acknowledged to both Fry and Bell. However, his insistence on abstraction over figuration apparently resolved the form/content conundrum of western art theory once and for all by fusing them. It was Greenberg’s particular brand of formalist art criticism, famously adumbrated in his essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, that came to dominate western critical discourse, particularly during the Cold War that immediately followed.¹⁴ Greenberg’s advocacy of an internationalist abstract, medium-specific, a-contextual art was partly in response to the anti-formalist language and ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ Socialist Realist and propagandist art promulgated by Stalin’s cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, in the USSR. However, it was also in reaction to developments in painting at home like Regionalism, which he regarded as narrowly nationalist in subject matter, if not in politics, and worryingly close to the kind of art being promoted in Germany under the Nazis. In retrospect, the fact that Greenberg was American reflected the political reality of the transfer of western power from Britain and Europe to the United States, and the post-war shift from Paris, as the centre of modern and avant-garde art, to New York.¹⁵

The political polarisation between the eastern Communist Bloc and the West during the Cold War era was also reflected in a cultural and critical divide, which in some ways mirrored each other. Two famous articles published in Artforum magazine in 1973 and 1974, by critic Max Kozloff and artist and art historian Eva Cockcroft respectively, traced the ways in which both cultural policy and artistic rhetoric were ideologically driven in the West just as in the Eastern Bloc.¹⁶ The artistic battle lines were clearly drawn, and critics took up positions and defended them to the utmost, deploying militaristic language like ‘avant-garde’ and, less often, its converse ‘rearguard’, as well as the forward-looking term ‘modernist’, redolent of progress in contradistinction to the use of ‘reactionary’ to describe figurative, narrative and other forms of non-formalist art that were seen as backward-looking. In the same way, the rhetoric of freedom of expression and individualism, and the associated cult of originality, was a riposte to Soviet social and cultural repression, collectivism and conformity. Above all, however, in the immediate post-war period Greenberg’s articulation of the formalist doctrine of art’s autonomy effectively depoliticised art at a time when anti-communism in the US reached fever pitch, culminating in the setting up of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which scrutinised the political affiliations of individuals, particularly those involved in the arts and the movie industry – so much for freedom of expression.

There have been many revisionist historical and critical studies of the era since, but in broad terms Kozloff and Cockcroft’s overall analysis still holds good. So much so that the emergence of Postmodernism not only coincided with the decline and eventual breakup of the Soviet Bloc, but the critical language used to formulate it was also largely predicated on that of Modernism and formalism in that, for many of its proponents, it stood in contradistinction to both. Thus, for instance, abstraction and theories of originality and objectivity were replaced with subject matter and subjectivity, or the concept of creative originality with those of repetition, appropriation and simulation (the latter derived from structuralism or so-called ‘French theory’). Critical voices had been raised before against the stranglehold of formalism – in its way as repressive as any Zhadanovian writ – given that there had been no place within Greenbergian formalism for Dada or Surrealism, or radical offshoots like the Situationist International. The artist, historian and Ruskin professor Samson Kambalu (b.1975) has said that, for him,

Situationism is the most African art I have ever seen in the West. This is because the Situationists think art has to be an infrastructure, not a superstructure. In Africa, art is infrastructure. It starts with the economy, with everyday life, and then art manifests. Art doesn’t start on canvas and then go into everyday life, it’s the other way around.¹⁷

Clearly this is the very opposite of a formalist approach. Then there is the enigma that was Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), who didn’t ‘fit’ but who was to become the darling of 1980s art and criticism in New York, partly for that very reason. Nor did formalism begin to address post-war German or European art in general, let alone art elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile, in the UK, Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) and Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) were among the first artists to embrace mass-produced images and popular culture – Greenberg’s despised ‘kitsch’ – in the 1950s, but Pop Art, a term coined by English critic Lawrence Alloway, was to take firmer root in the US, as did Alloway himself.

In 1960s America, against the background of the Space Race and an unprecedented economic boom – and also of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights struggle and the Women’s Liberation and Gay Rights movements – the arts exploded. Alongside the emergence of American Pop Art came Donald Judd’s seminal 1965 text in Arts Magazine, ‘Specific Objects’, which famously began with the observation that ‘Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.’¹⁸ Artforum, which was founded in San Francisco in 1962, eventually moving to New York via Los Angeles in 1967, was the most influential western art magazine of the se...