Crisis of Criticism
Why is it that so much writing on art today — ostensibly criticism — only skates on the surface of artworks, providing description, identifying a handful subjects and themes, maybe some precedents, and then a conclusion — or rather, an ending. The writing stops. But after 500 to 1,000 words, no new insights to glean.
Now, more often than not, it’s galleries themselves that set the terms of engagement, over and above the heads of critics. Armed with consultants, boutique PR firms, and in-house communications departments, large and mid-sized galleries alike have managed to successfully integrate the “press” into the rhythm of the sales cycle, drumming up buzz to induce an artificial sense of urgency among collectors: better buy now before the prices go up. The role of the critic shrinks to that of a low level bureaucrat issuing stamps of approval — a guarantee that certain professional standards have been observed and that the work is up to snuff.
This helps to explain the emerging cottage industry of freelance writers offering their services direct to galleries (who, in any case, are better equipped to pay for their writing than the traditional venues), as well as the rise of online “magazines” that publish poorly paraphrased press releases under the guise of reviews. These marketing efforts are enough to provide a rough semblance of art’s relevance or, really, of its timeliness — a guarantee of the nowness of art, without which the aesthetic quality of much recent work might reasonably be questioned. The value of contemporaneity serves as a deferral of judgment, fending off the claims of an expectant past and an unrealized future.
The present reigns supreme over history — that is, of course, if one forgets that the interest of art, i.e., the interest of freedom, lies in the utter transformation of all that exists. But criticism, it seems, has given up the ghost. If a work is made by the right kind of artist and deals with the right kind of themes, what more can be said? The fact that buyers exist for every medium, genre, and style of work only confirms the democratic nature of taste. But the popular perception of the critic as tastemaker has always been a distortion of the true telos of criticism, which is not to bestow laurels on the brows of genius (or even to disparage the efforts of middling amateurs) but to illuminate the enigmatic core, that “heart of darkness,” from which the artwork draws its power.
At the center of the mystery is life — life as such. The totality of creation and total destruction. The dialectic of being and non-being — “the absolute movement of becoming.” [1] Art is concerned, above all, with the relationship between imagination and reality mediated by the mimetic faculty. The work of art is a screen on which both the unrealized desires of the subject and the conditions of possibility furnished by the object are projected as phantoms. A shadow play of existence in which the subject mimics the object and the object mirrors the subject. This exchange, however, is not without remainder. The resemblance that appears between the two is not reducible to either subject or object, in whole or in part, but points beyond both to new modes of becoming yet to be realized. The artwork is a negation of life in the interest of life. The form that freedom must take when not yet free from itself.
Criticism is a reminder of what remains to be done.
Edgar Degas, Portraits at the Stock Exchange, 1878-79. Oil on canvas, 39 x 32 in. Musée d'Orsay.
1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marxists.org