“The Crisis of Art Criticism” Panel

This event was live streamed on September 15, 2024.

Caesura hosts an online panel on “The Crisis of Art Criticism”, featuring Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review, Troy Sherman of Midwest Art Quarterly, and Gareth Thomas Kaye of Chicago Spleen.

The panelists will respond to the prompt below, followed by an audience Q&A.

The crisis of art criticism, festering now since at least the 90s, has reached such a state of decomposition that it can no longer be ignored by the established players — those few remaining — who see their own raison d’être quickly slipping away. Without funding, audience, or telos, nearly all critical writing on art has been reduced to a few lines on the artist’s CV sent out by galleries to prospective collectors as a kind of credential or stamp of approval. Recognizing the need to escape this stagnation, a new kind of publication has quietly emerged in the past couple of years, championing a return to actually ‘critical’ criticism, unabashed and seemingly unhindered by the intellectual baggage of the academy, with its emphasis on identity and half-baked postmodern theory. Instead, they have tried to resurrect quality as the proper measure for the value of art and judgment as the essential task of the critic. But if the assumptions of contemporary art discourse can longer be counted on, what criteria can the critic rely on for judgment? Does the situation call for a return to old standards — and which? Or do we need new ways of conceptualizing the quality of art? And how to develop these? What should critics’ relationship to artists look like? To the schools, residencies, programs, etc. where artists are educated? To the galleries and museums that show and invest in the work? In the long run, what is the goal of criticism? Who is its audience? What can it do? Can the crisis of criticism be overcome without changing the kind of art that is made and promoted today? Can criticism lead the way out?