Why Write about Contemporary Art?
‘Art-criticism, like art, should furnish something more and better than we can expect from life without it. What might that be?’
PETER SCHJELDAHL, 20118
Why write about art? What can an art-text ‘say’ that an artwork, on its own, cannot? ‘The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art […] more, rather than less, real to us’, said critic Susan Sontag in the 1960s,9 and this may be a good place to start.
The first rule for good art-writing might be the attempt, sincerely, to render artwork more meaningful, more enjoyable, attaching ‘something more and better’ to art and life (Schjeldahl) than without it.
Bearing in mind this simple brief—when writing, try to add ‘something more and better’—might steer you on to a happy path right from the outset.
Notice that, in the opening quote to this section, The New Yorker senior critic Peter Schjeldahl refers to art-criticism, whereas the lion’s share of contemporary art-writing today is not fully defined that way. Although not mutually exclusive, myriad non-critical new forms have joined traditional criticism in this menagerie:
+ museum website texts and audios
+ educational tools (for every demographic)
+ museum brochures
+ grant applications
+ blogs
+ extended captions
+ newspaper clips
+ glossy magazine shorts
+ collection blurbs
+ online art journals.
These exist side-by-side with the steady production of conventional formats:
+ academic and art-historical papers
+ newspaper articles
+ display panels
+ magazine articles and reviews
+ exhibition catalogue essays
+ artist’s statements.
The initial distinction for an art-writer to make is between text that explains art (often, ‘unsigned’), and text that evaluates art (often ‘signed’). This distinction is blurry, but it is imperative that you consider this difference as you embark on your writing.
Become aware of these two basic art-writing functions: explaining (contextualizing and describing) and evaluating (judging and interpreting) art. Some art-writing formats demand that you stick solely to one, but many overlap and require that you administer a dosage of each—such as the solo-exhibition catalogue text, in which details of an artwork are described (explained) in terms of their importance within contemporary art history (evaluated).
‘Explaining’ Texts
+ short news articles
+ museum wall captions
+ web collection entries
+ press releases
+ auction catalogue entries
Traditionally, ‘explaining’ texts were left unsigned. This voiceless anonymity is a fiction; there is always a flesh-and-blood person (or committee) with tastes and preferences coloring the ‘objective’ views implied by unsigned words. For example, even without a label, an artwork held in the collection of a world-renowned museum, purchased with state funds and on public display, speaks of opinionated value judgments. Increasingly, traditionally authorless texts are turning up with a named writer attached—such as museum labels bearing the author’s initials, or press releases signed by curators or artists.
All texts are partisan and never truly objective, always penned by opinionated individuals or teams, whether signed or not.
Nonetheless, when producing a mostly ‘explaining’ piece you are usually asked to put your personal prejudices aside, and distill the most essential factual and interpretative information that you have researched, including:
+ artist’s statements;
+ verifiable background information, gleaned from critics, historians, curators, gallerists, and others;
+ recognized themes or concerns observed in the art.
‘Explaining’ texts are meant to assist anyone approaching the work, whether for the first time or for the hundredth. You, the writer, are not asked to speculate excessively on its meaning, much less presume the viewer’s reaction. ‘Explaining’ texts usually succeed when facts and ideas are communicated plainly, and specialists and non-specialists alike find them informative—rather than incomprehensible or patronizing.
A quote from an artist (or from a curator, or anyone else) is not a ‘fact’ for its content. It is only a fact that the artist said those words; its message might be perfectly outrageous. The artist may state his or her intentions, but we can question that self-appraisal, or ask whether these intentions are observable—or perhaps surpassed, or redirected, or negated—in the resulting art.
‘Evaluating’ Texts
+ academic assignments
+ exhibition and book reviews
+ op-ed journalism
+ magazine articles
+ catalogue essays
+ grant, exhibition, or book proposals
‘Evaluating’ texts are usually signed. Such authored texts—literally bearing your name, as their author—should not merely provide knowledgeable information but delineate a singular, substantiated opinion or argument. ‘Having an opinion is part of your social contract with readers’, is how Peter Schjeldahl describes the pact between himself and his readership.10 You need to gather accurate information, and then tell your reader what you think, and why. You need to take a risk. This may entail posing astute questions, then attempting to answer them—perhaps prompting further, more penetrating questions. In an evaluating text, you are not merely encouraged to take some interpretative leap but positively compelled to do so. As The Nation’s Barry Schwabsky puts it, ‘You must be putting to the test, not just the artwork, but yourself in your response to it’.11
Fledgling art-writers can fail to recognize the crucial difference between a principally ‘explaining’ text, and an ‘evaluating’ one. This confusion may account for at least two common art-writing calamities:
+ the rambling ‘conceptual discourse’ attempted in a news-oriented gallery press release;
+ a ‘review’ composed of little more than a descriptive list of the artworks, perhaps couched within the curator’s mission statement.
The dividing line between ‘explaining’ and ‘evaluating’ is vital to grasp but, in practice, porous. Moreover, a fiction or poem that adopts the artwork as a springboard to launch the writer’s unbridled imagination might not set out to accomplish either ‘explanation’ or ‘evaluation’. Much contemporary art-writing is a hybrid:
+ a skilful newspaper exhibition review must explain to the layman the nuts-and-bolts while offering probing insight for the artist’s dedicated followers;
+ opinionated journalism that evaluates art-industry behaviors must be upheld by convincing arguments that are clearly explained;
+ a ‘factual’ museum label may be supported by a skewed selection of evidence; its ‘objective’ voice concealing deep-seated ideological undercurrents and value-judgments;
+ a catalogue essay will often both explain the details of an artwork’s fabrication and history, and propose terms for its positive evaluation;
+ an ‘explaining’ news brief, written by a thoroughly opinionless reporter who has culled ‘evidence’ from a gallery press release, might be as factual as a Disney feature;
+ a magazine such as e-flux journal straddles art-critical and academic styles, pulling in historical and statistical information to support highly biased opinions;
+ an ‘unopinionated’ press release about an unknown talent, which may constitute that artist’s first-ever text, may be written by a struggling young gallerist who is taking more real risks—personal and financial—than an art-critic typing up her opinion after a brief gallery visit.
Even so, ‘explaining’ and ‘evaluating’ art remain the two poles of the job, and, traditionally, distinguish art-criticism from any other type of art-writing.
Why the volumes of art-texts, anyway? As I mentioned in the Introduction, audiences are widening, and levels of contemporary-art preparation vastly diverge. The most common defense for contemporary art-writing, critical or not, is that new art is unintelligible without the rescue of a written or spoken explanation. ‘My task as a critic is to provide the context my readers need to get much out of [art] at all’,12 the late critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto once wrote, summarizing this basic assumption: unfamiliar new art is mystifying without the provision of a context, which can be provided by the artist or another specialist art-writer, such as a curator, academic, or critic.
The expectation for artwork to gain meaning thanks to context—a pivotal contemporary-art concept and one revised countless times, particularly since the 1960s—originates for some in Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, about a century ago.13 When in 1913 Duchamp kidnapped ordinary objects (a bicycle wheel, bottle rack) and forced them to perform as art in a gallery, viewers could appreciate these unconventional sculptures only when supplied with a special nugget of information: that readymades qualify as art because they express a radical artistic gesture, not because they are finely wrought feats of craftsmanship. To judge Duchamp’s signed urinal solely on centuries-old standards of measure (shape, color, subject matter, technique) was suddenly untenable. Supporters of avant-garde art across the 20th century also required new words:
+ readymade
+ abstract art
+ Minimalism
+ Conceptual art
+ time-based media.
Theorist Boris Groys has suggested that art-writing provides artworks with ‘protective text-clothes’: as if, without the cloak of written explanation, unfamiliar artworks enter the world naked, demanding to be dressed in words.14
Unlike ancient objects, recent art does not beg a written explanation because its distant meaning has dimmed over time,15 but in order for viewers to tap into an artwork’s conceptual or material entry points, and appreciate its contribution(s) to contemporary culture and thought. Since the advent of Modernist art, we assume that important new art—almost by definition—resists instant disclosure. Many cherish art as a special haven within an over-schematized world, where ambiguities can thrive. If an artwork’s message is self-evident, maybe it’s just an illustration, a decorative non-entity, a well-executed craft object, hardly counting as ‘significant’ art at all. It’s not just that without an explanation the viewer is lost; without some written framework to steady it, the art itself risks losing its way, never gaining traction in the contemporary art system. From this perspective, both viewer and artwork alike are as if handicapped without the art-words’ special assistance. As curator Andrew Hunt writes, it may even seem that contemporary art is completed through criticism16—for better or worse, since many artists and other art-lovers resent art’s quasi-reliance today on the written word.
In this scenario, an art-writer is a conduit, possessing specialist information that enables her to link unfamiliar artworks to a curious audience and pin down an artwork’s potential meanings. An artist knows how and why she made it. Veteran art-critics have seen heaps of contemporary art over years, are in conversation with the artists, and may even make art themselves.17 Rarely, if ever, is worthwhile art-writing produced from ignorance.
To write well in any art-writing format, the more you know and look, the better your writing will be.
For art-writing to add ‘something more and better’ to art,18 readers must trust their author. Museum wall labels once stood guard dependably next to an artwork, unassailably expressing the expertise of the august institution behind them; that implicit authority has today gone the way of the velvet-lined display case. To avoid the ‘tombstone-label’ effect, some museums offer multiple interpretative panels for a single work—a tactic with a potentially detrimental effect, alienating and confusing inexperienced gallery visitors rather than ‘opening up discussion’.
In contrast to the often unnamed writer (frequently a curator and/or communications officer) of these ‘unsigned’ labels, the art-critic—who emphatically attaches her name to her art-words—must repeatedly demonstrate that she is a reliable informant. Critics lose credibility if we suspect that they are ill-prepared, rushed, or—worst of all—picking favorites for private gain. ‘You don’t buy art and you don’t write about your best friends’, says New York Times critic Roberta Smith regarding her own self-imposed ethical restrictions.19 Any partiality must, at least, be openly disclosed:
+ the artist or curator is the critic’s wife, boyfriend, best pal, student, teacher, or other close associate;
+ the critic works or has worked for the gallery or museum;
+ the critic (or her family) owns a lot of this guy’s stuff.
Private collection or auction catalogues may strain to sound objective but they hold great stake in the value of artworks, and are never impartial. Publicity or marketing material—from a gallery, a private collection, or an exhibition—must never be mistaken for ‘criticism’. By definition, and however disguised as ‘neutral’ commentary or factual art history, such texts always serve a promotional purpose: to entice, publicize, and—often—sell.
Once upon a time, the art-world assiduously guarded against conflicts of interest; but the lines across the commercial, critical, academic, and public sectors are steadily eroding. Art-workers now move fluidly across the old divides, criss-crossing commercial/critical or private/public lines in a single career, and often devising new roles. A case in point is the role of Frieze as both a critical authority, publishing the eponymous specialist art magazine since 1991, and as an economic stakeholder, organizing massive art fairs in London since 2003 (and in New York since 2012). This schizophrenia may not seem more troublesome than the balance that magazines have always struck between review-content and advertising revenue, but Frieze’s chiasmic identity split was unprecedented.20 The conflict was perhaps lessened with the fairs’ inclusion of a respected talks program (adopted from some existing art fairs, such as ARCO Madrid) and well-curated artists’ projects, returning the Frieze brand to critical content.
In practice, Frieze’s two-pronged identity may emblematize the figure/ground inversion of art-world priorities. On the printed page of the magazine, art commentary and criticism hold center stage while the ads huddle mostly near the exits, the front and back covers. In the Big Top at the fair, the spotlight shines on the private galleries, and critical reflection from guest speakers is pushed to the edges: a class act, but a sideshow. Frieze’s critical/commercial inversion—from the magazine’s founding in the early 1990s to its first London art fair in the early 2000s—might endure as a lasting symbol of the broader market-driven makeover across the art-world at the turn of this century.
One job that art-writing remains oddly unable or resistant to assume openly is the declared selling of art. Even publications plainly functioning as sales devices—auction catalogues, or the Frieze Art Fair Yearbook—commission texts cloaked in a language unlike that of any other sales brochure. This may partially account for the permanent identity crisis suffered by the gallery press release—disparagingly described by artist Martha Rosler as ‘a long-form piece of advertising copy, with embedded key words’21—unable just to scream ‘New! Bigger and shinier than ever!’ or ‘Sale! Everything must go!’ For even the most unabashed commercial pitch—whose admitted purpose is to sell—to succeed, it must mimic the voice of serious art-criticism, unbought and unbiased. This may explain why new art-writing alternatives (fiction, journalism, diary-writing, philosophy) have recently gained appeal in some camps over straight art-criticism, which can sound like a dead ringer for the art-world’s uniquely veiled style of sales pitch.
The art-critic as fully impartial, free-wheeling, and incorruptible independent, staking out uncharted ground with each ripping new text, remains a popular myth. The critic ‘doesn’t work for the Man’ is how longtime art-world mascot Dave Hickey put it,22 summing up the lone-wolf image of the job: the hero/heroine who ‘asks hard questions that boosters may not want to hear’, as Art in America contributing editor Eleanor Heartney asserts.23 However, much run-of-the-mill art-writing that does not qualify as criticism—such as promotional blurbs from the commercial galleries, or private collection websites—is probably where this chorus of boosting is sung the loudest.
The old-school picture of the critic as a solitary crank, working feverishly as the impoverished good conscience of the art-world, is wearing thin. The hard-working single-minded critic of the past, ‘armed with little more than her or his well-tuned sensibility, facing off against a similarly delimited object, a framed artwork’, now must don many hats, building multiple links and circulations in order to operate, writes Lane Relyea in ‘After Criticism’ (2013).24 Along with responding to artworks, a front-running 21st-century art-commentator chases the ever-shifting goal-posts of the art-world, reporting back with eye-witness accounts from the front line: the Biennale rush, the art-fair hangover, the pub conversation after the symposium, the auction buzz. New printed publications and online magazines emerge, and demands for art-writing in the burgeoning art-industry multiply: for MA program web-pages; squeaky-new art services and consultancies; purpose-built private museums; art-specialized public relations companies, funding bodies, and investment firms; ‘alternative’ art fairs and summer schools. The best art blogs have proven adept at creating less self-conscious, unprecedented art-writing forms that chronicle a life spent on the art circuit, combining several formats:
+ journal-writing
+ art-criticism
+ gossip
+ market news
+ news-oriented journalism
+ interviews
+ opinionated editorial
+ academic theory
+ social analysis.
The successful 21st-century art-writer is publicized (or self-publicized) as a fully immersed jack-of-all-trades. Pablo León de la Barra25 is described as an
+ exhibition maker
+ Kunstworker
+ independent curator
+ researcher
+ editor
+ blogger
+ museum/art fairs/collections adviser
+ occasional writer
+ snap-shot photographer
+ retired architect
+ aesthetic dilettante
+ ‘and more’.
Artist/critic/dealer John Kelsey—who prefers to describe himself as a ‘hack’, ‘fan’, and ‘smuggler’ rather than use the staid term ‘critic’—has simultaneously figured in the magazines as advertiser, reviewer, and reviewee. Kelsey has suggested that art-criticism must invent ‘new ways of making itself strange’, perhaps corrupting its cloistered social position even at the risk of ‘losing the proper distance from the object’ and operating at the very center of the business transaction, both to prevent obsolescence and reassert criticism’s ethical influence.26 As an inspiring precedent for today’s multi-tasking art-critic, Kelsey recalls (among others) the 1960s–70s Italian art-critic/poet/translator/journalist/novelist/actor/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was able to adopt an incisive voice across multiple intersecting roles. For Kelsey the risk for the 21st-century critic is that—like so many of today’s jobless—he will paradoxically become unemployed and be working all the time.27 Frances Stark—another among the best-known of today’s artist–writers, a list that includes Liam Gillick, Seth Price, Hito Steyerl, and others—suggests that critics should finally admit that their traditional job of understanding art forms is being phased out, replaced by tracking the complicated behaviors of a relentlessly shape-shifting art industry.28
fig. 2 LORI WAXMAN, 60 wrd/min art critic, 2005–ongoing.
Performance as part of dOCUMENTA (13), June 9–September 16, 2012
In fact, the age-old demand for art-writers—often the artists themselves—to verbalize how an art-object or -process might carry meaning still persists. In the summer of 2012, when Triple Canopy/Levine and Rule were reporting on the sorry state of the gallery press-release (see ‘International Art English’), young art-critic Lori Waxman spent long days in a makeshift office erected at dOCUMENTA (13), performing 60 wrd/min art critic (fig. 2).29 Waxman penned on-the-spot ‘opinionated descriptions’ of art, as she called them, in 20-minute pre-scheduled appointments with interested artists. This fast-food-style art commentary remarked not only on the dizzying rate at which volumes of instant responses to art are generated, but the swathes of artists eager for hard copy, left ignored by the art press.
Unlike art, art-criticism has no broadly agreed narrative history. Western art-criticism as a recognizable genre continuing into the present first emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries in relation to the Salons in Paris and (later) the Summer Exhibitions in London (established in 1769), with substantial shifts occurring across the mid 19th century: Charles Baudelaire in France, John Ruskin in England, and others.30 In 1846, Baudelaire—considered by some as a viable antecedent to the modern-day critic—described art-criticism as ‘partial, passionate, political’: a rousing definition with which some might still identify today. 31
In pre-Revolutionary times an artwork needed chiefly to please king and clergy to acquire validation; artists mostly (but not always) catered to the tastes of these and a few other powerful patrons, whose opinions were the only ones that mattered.32 Arguably, art-criticism can be counted among the side-effects of sweeping political changes, and was born when existing standards of measure were thrown into doubt, one by one—a gradual dismantling process arguably still underway. Without the thumbs up or down of king or cardinal, who could pronounce this wild new painting by Boucher or David good or bad? Enter the art-critic, whose early self-appointed role was to:
+ provide a compass to navigate unknown artistic waters;
+ offer informed opinion and new criteria of judgment;
+ vociferously defend artists whose work he believed in, often displaying extreme partisanship.
Once considered the principal function of art-criticism, ‘judgment’ is now a prickly term. In a survey taken among American newspaper art-critics in 2002, most professionals considered passing judgment as ‘the least important factor in reviewing art’; as art historian James Elkins wrote of this astonishing reversal, it’s ‘as if physicists had declared they would no longer try to understand the universe, but just appreciate it’.33 Art-critics today rarely climb the moral high ground of such luminaries as Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), who believed that his defensive championing of some avant-garde Modernist art and artists would actually help save the world from the dehumanizing effects of mass culture.
Conventional wisdom has it that once Greenberg—the last of that tremendous ilk—had had his Modernist ascendancy disputed by a subsequent generation (many of whom considered him a mentor), art-criticism fell irrevocably into crisis and has been languishing ever since. During the 1960s, artist and critic, hitherto separate players, in many ways overlapped in the one-man band of the Conceptual artist, who created artworks that simultaneously commented upon the conditions of their own display, as Duchamp’s readymade had done.34 Trained to verbalize meaning for their art, these artists definitively put to rest the cliché of the inspired but semi-mute creator, dependent upon the critic to supply the words. The invention of the portable tape-recorder in the same decade (a technology spearheaded, in its early days, by an artist: Andy Warhol) was quickly applied to produce instant art-copy in the form of the interview.
Many players besides the critic contribute to the validation of new art: curators, some of whom now occupy more high-profile public roles than critics; dealers and collectors, long influential behind-the-scenes figures whose heightened visibility today seems to have grown in direct proportion to the mounting uncertainty around the critic. Yet new art-critics emerge with every season, and established voices have proven indispensable, regularly summoned to contribute to art-industry debates or offer commentary on artworks on view in the gallery, museum, or booth. The art-critic remains an opinionated and credible insider whose influence persists—yet whose impact and sphere of influence, in practice, resists precise contours.
The ‘new art history’ of the late 1960s and 1970s, often associated with October magazine in the USA, proposed (among other things) that the art-critic(/historian) does not so much judge art as examine the conditions of judgment. Figures such as Rosalind Krauss admired Greenberg but questioned his methods, and turned her attention toward artists and movements the elder critic had dismissed.35 Many of her generation set out to understand artworks not solely as ‘developments’ occupying their due place within an art-historical lineage based on form, style, and medium, but as objects able to possess multiple possibilities of meaning depending on chosen terms of interpretation. Suddenly, from the 1970s, an art-critic’s qualifications extended beyond traditional connoisseurship, which entailed:
+ scholarly training in art history;
+ the ability to attribute and appraise artworks;
+ technical knowledge of media (painting, sculpture);
+ familiarity with the artists’ lives and careers;
+ an instinctive sensibility for quality in art, code-name ‘taste’.
The critic’s job—like art itself—became more broadly situated within other currents of contemporary thought. It was proposed that the analysis of contemporary art might benefit from the tools offered by other fields, to include:
+ structuralism
+ postmodernism
+ post-colonialism
+ feminism
+ queer theory
+ gender theory
+ film theory
+ Marxist theory
+ psychoanalysis
+ anthropology
+ cultural studies
+ and literary theory.
For some, a set of lionized theorists (mostly) based in France,36 and the editorial teams at American journals such as October and Semiotext(e)—supposedly buoyed by a stream of mistranslation and earnest post-grads who mimicked the high-brow sound of stilted Anglo-French—are to be held accountable for much of the hyper-wordy, self-conscious art-writing we encounter today.37 In truth, that 1970s/80s generation of ‘new art historians’ (along with innumerable other critics working across the period, worldwide) helped revitalize a discipline sorely in need of updating. Across the 1960s, artists were thinking beyond Modernist painting and sculpture, and inventing vitally new artistic alternatives—from Happenings to Junk Art, Performance, Land Art, and much more. The art-language responding to this new art urgently needed to rejuvenate. Have a glance at stodgy 1960s specialist magazines to see how out-of-sync most of these were in relation to the game-changing art occurring all around them. Many articles and reviews from the period are bursting with antiquated art-talk:
‘virile painterly composition’
‘organic versus inorganic form’
‘receding picture planes’
‘contrasting impulses of harmony and dynamism’.
We can recognize that the heaviest 1980s and 1990s theory-drone has probably grown stale today, and welcome refreshing alternatives to that model, without tossing aside the achievements of the postmodern generation of art historians wholesale, or laying at their door the blame for scores of wannabe sound-alikes. Art-language evolves collectively, over time and in response to the new conditions of art—not as the outcome of some unholy plot, masterminded by a posse of nefarious art-writers.
Across the late 20th century, the critic’s age-old task of ‘judgment’ was gradually replaced by ‘interpretation’, which recognizes that there might be contradictory yet equally valid responses to art.38 ‘Interpretation’ explains why those who deem this art ‘good’ have arrived at their positive conclusion, but admits there are diverging responses, including the reader’s own. Another preferred term is ‘contextualization’, or the informational bedrock on which an artwork lies:
+ what the artwork is made of;
+ how it fits within the artist’s lifetime of activity;
+ what has been said about this art previously;
+ what else was happening when the work was created.
Such context may illuminate the conditions that brought the artist to reach certain art-making decisions. Rarely will an art-writer introduce all this background, but it remains at the core of any strongly research-based text, whether a two-line museum wall label or a multi-volume dissertation.
Some dispute the very assumption whereby artworks are begging to be ‘read’, to have meaning extracted and fixed through language, and instead prioritize their uniquely subjective art experience. In this scenario, art-writing ‘translates’ a visual and emotional experience into pure creative writing, untethered to any obligation toward artwork, artist, or audience. ‘Criticism is an art form in its own right’,39 claimed the late Stuart Morgan, echoing the words of Oscar Wilde (1856–1900) who, about a century earlier, had reversed the words of a much older treatise on the function of art-criticism. Wilde’s predecessor had claimed that the critic’s job was ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’; Wilde dryly inverted it:
‘The aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not’
Wilde’s transformative function for art-writing—to spin off in any direction from the artwork, and pen some fully idiosyncratic response—has been proposed as legitimate since the birth of modern art-criticism, particularly in the impassioned writing of Denis Diderot (1713–1784). An art-critic and philosopher, encyclopedist, and playwright, Diderot boldly re-interpreted paintings to embroider his own speculations about unseen, deeper meanings. For example, in responding to Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting Girl with a Dead Canary (1765), which shows an anguished girl weeping over the corpse of her little bird, Diderot surmised that the lifeless pet symbolized the girl’s real despair, over her lost virtue.41 At the time, Diderot’s proposal—that an artwork can carry implicit meanings that may not be explicitly apparent—was a daring move. Today, a writer responding to art enjoys far greater interpretative freedom. Written responses to art in the 21st century might belong to any genre whatsoever: a science-fiction tale or political manifesto; philosophical theory or screenplay; song lyric or software program; diary entry or opera libretto.
The love-child spawned by art-criticism and fiction has recently returned as a promising ‘new’ breed of art-writing; in fact this was pioneered in such exemplars as Guillaume Apollinaire’s Le Poète assassiné (The Poet Assassinated, 1916) and continues more recently in the work of art-inspired fiction-writers such as Lynne Tillman, active on the New York art scene since the late 1970s. The Wunderkammer-style journal Cabinet (founded in 2000), defines itself as a ‘sourcebook of ideas’, and rarely mentions the ‘A’ word (Art) at all.42 When in 2008 the writer, editor, and filmmaker Chris Kraus won the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism (among the most respected prizes in the field, given by America’s College Art Association) for her unconventional crossover style that overlaps autobiography, artist’s biography, criticism, and fiction, this was taken as an official stamp of approval for hybridized forms of criticism, even among academics. Despite an initial impression that ‘critico-fiction’ is undisciplined, free-form prose, the finest examples can reflect a level of preparation, imaginative thinking, and rigor in writing technique unmatched in more conventional art-writing.
Such innovators probably owe more to early 20th-century cultural commentator and literary scholar Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) than to Greenberg and October combined. Benjamin’s otherworldly discussion of a small, faint ink drawing from 1920, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (fig. 3), written some 75 years ago, remains a staggering instance of visionary art-writing:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage [1] and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise [2]; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Source Text 1 WALTER BENJAMIN, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 1940
Benjamin spins to vast proportions the impact of this, frankly, modest fellow, who is pushed center-stage in a world-changing tragedy, single-handedly stemming the whole tide of ‘progress’ and gathering round him the innumerable lost histories piling up at his feet. This text is hardly attempting to judge or contextualize Klee’s drawing—which Benjamin owned, and must have stared at a lot, until the strange man in the picture seemed actually to move. Benjamin is borderline hallucinating:
[1] the accumulation of ‘wreckage’ isn’t really there;
[2] the ‘storm from Paradise’ is an extraordinary invention, if not verifiably evidenced in the picture.
There is considerably more Benjamin than Klee in this text; for art-writers in training, that is a rocky road to follow. (Note: If you possess anything like Walter Benjamin’s astonishing intellect, fierce imagination, and writing craft, by all means: take a leap. But first, drop this guidebook immediately. You do not need it.)
Some critics have fully put into doubt whether even a poetic ‘mediation’—from art experience into language—is ever possible, following the influential 1950s literary critic Paul de Man who disputed any translation between disciplines. For de Man, the gap between the world of ‘spirit’ and that of ‘sentient substance’ is unbridgeable.43 De Man-like skepticism throws into question the ancient practice of ekphrasis.
fig. 3 PAUL KLEE, Angelus Novus, 1920
Ekphrasis: ‘a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art’ (Merriam-Webster), or the conversion from one discipline (art) to another (the written word)
‘Writing about art is like dancing about architecture, or knitting about music’, some have said, to drive home the paradox of the endeavor.44 In this scenario, all art-writing is a doomed, compensatory activity that will forever fall short of its subject. ‘Translating’ political art into language, in particular, can be accused of treacherously softening its blow, normalizing through language what antagonism sets out to destabilize.45
There is a long tradition of critic/poets:46
Charles Baudelaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Harold Rosenberg
Frank O’Hara
Richard Bartholomew
John Ashbery
Jacques Dupin
Carter Ratcliff
Peter Schjeldahl
Gordon Burn
John Yau
Barry Schwabsky
Tim Griffin.
You might expect these critic/poets to produce the diciest texts, but—perhaps out of their vocational respect for both art and language—they often compose sterling art-writing. Some artists write well not just about their own work but about other artists too; Minimalists Donald Judd and Robert Morris are two prime 1960s examples, among countless other influential artist/critics.
If text-based knowledge in support of an artwork is seen today as an almost indispensable framework, pressing questions come to the fore:
+ does meaning adhere to art, as an intrinsic core buried inside the artwork, extracted by the attentive writer/observer?
+ or is art’s meaning produced by the critic’s inventions?
+ do art-texts—as skeptics accuse—attempt to conjure a kind of spell, transforming ordinary things into precious art through the incantation of special words?
+ are art-writers ‘talking (or writing) artworks into existence’?
+ is art-writing a parasite, a surplus cleaving itself to artworks better off without them?
+ or is it like a helpful companion, trotting alongside artworks like a subservient, modest guide dog?
Do critics owe anything to art? Critics no longer uphold any recognized canon for the evaluation of art, with the result that their work hinges on the articulation of their own parameters of criteria. Do critics carry a primary responsibility toward artists, or their audience? Senior frieze critic Dan Fox, irritated by what he saw as a flood of sloppy newspaper criticism in the wake of Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’ exhibition at Tate Modern in 2009, declared:
Critics have responsibility to [their] readers—the responsibility of arguing why something is bad, rather than just dismissing it with one withering phrase. The responsibility of conveying facts. The responsibility of describing what a work looks like or actually taking the time to sit through an artist’s video, no matter how interminable it may be, before criticizing it.47
A critic’s methods, sense of ethics, and commitment will be assessed as much as their insight, choice of artist, or quality of published prose. Critic Jan Verwoert says that his art-writing impetus arises from a feeling of indebtedness to the art experience.48 Immersed and articulate art-writers can support artists by elucidating or furthering their ideas, and act more as collaborators than external commentators. At the very least, art-writers owe it to art and to their readers to be accurate. (In one carelessly proofread blog, an image from Carolee Schneemann’s performance Meat Joy [1964], which showed a scantily clad female performer striking a provocative pose, was erroneously—if invitingly—captioned Meet Joy.)
In 1926, Louis Aragon—a poet, political commentator, and fellow-traveler of the Surrealists—described arts-journalists as ‘morons, creeps, bastards, swine. All of you, without exception: glabrous bugs, bearded lice, burrowing your way into reviews […].’49 Today’s critics may not be as powerful as they once were, but we’re perhaps not as despised either. Occupying almost the bottom economic tier of the art-industry pyramid, critics are least affected by cycles of boom and bust. When art bubbles burst, art-writers often have more to write about and nothing special to worry about. As Boris Groys asserts, since nobody reads or invests in art-criticism anyway, its authors can feel liberated to be as frank as they please, writing with few or no strings attached.50
Leaving aside the weakest examples of art-blogging—with their inane commentary and disastrous fact-checking—in my view the most promising of the Internet independents have been a boon to art-writing (see ‘Art blogs and websites’, ‘Resources’). Somehow less self-conscious than when committing their words to paper, online art-critics have invented an unprecedented format combining first-hand insider information, sophisticated contemporary-art knowledge, and intensely opinionated commentary, from both the hosting website and anyone logging in and leaving a comment. As with professional art-writers, if these commentators have persuasive, substantiated ideas to offer, they may earn a place within broader contemporary art debates.51 If the democratization of art-opinion in Revolutionary France can be said, broadly speaking, to have ushered in art-criticism, the web’s open access and total collapse of borders may spell a new chapter for 21st-century multivocal art-writing.
