Few concepts are as vexing for the field of contemporary art as that of judgment—a notion, often understood to originate from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), that refers to a decision one makes with regard to whether a work of art is good or not. Commentators in the 1980s often said that aesthetic judgments were essentialist in constitution because of their implicit universalism. In the 1990s, when cultural difference was both emphasized and prized, and where works of art, exhibitions, and criticism attempted to critique normative conceptions of race, sexuality, and gender, writers as well as curators continued to downplay aesthetic judgments in favor of tactical maneuvers. It is this history that is at the core of João Ribas’s essay “Judgment’s Troubled Objects,” in which he focuses on the political efficacy of aesthetic judgments in today’s contemporary art world.
The at best ambivalent views toward the levying of distinctions, of admitting to or even following one’s intuition, have continued in the 2000s less because of the social and political issues marking the previous decades but, as Frank Smigiel describes in “A Producer’s Journal, or Judgment A Go-Go,” because of the sheer scale of the international art world, whose heterogeneity has created an accidental pluralism in which market forces rather than critical faculties determine value of all kinds. And yet, judgments are made constantly: in the artists included in exhibitions, in the artists discussed in articles and reviews, in the way certain artists become more important than others. In most instances, the judgment of taste is primarily an exercise of selection: one that often goes unsaid and rarely materializes as public record.
Yet, few issues could be more important for the understanding of contemporary art, especially in an art world trying to determine, as Lane Relyea suggests in “After Criticism,” how to stay relevant in highly networked and diversified circumstances. It is precisely because of the immense scale of the art world that judgments and distinctions between objects (kinds of objects as well as experiences; objects by the same artist; objects by different artists; and so on) need to be made. Yet, what still must be worked out is how to apply aesthetic judgments while accommodating the concerns of its critique, which additionally might suggest ways in which to think about contemporary art beyond particular, context-based circumstances.
Writing in Artforum in 1967, Clement Greenberg attempted an exasperated defense of his critical position, its formalism confronted by the artistic and critical practices of the 1960s.1 With the rhetorical brilliance and interpretive certainty that typifies his prose, “Complaints of an Art Critic” outlines the criteria for Greenberg’s evaluative form of art criticism. Aesthetic judgments, he argues, are “immediate, intuitive, undeliberate, and involuntary.” What validity they can claim results from taste as a kind of aesthetic intuition, where the “immediate experience of art” serves as the basis for the expression of judgments. As taste and judgment can neither be proven, argued, nor categorically defined, no verifiable criteria can exist besides the faculties of the critic and the paragon of quality handed down by history. From this authority of judgment arises the function of criticism to prescribe blame or approbation, as the only corrective to what David Hume had called “the variety and caprice of taste.”2
The force of such impassioned argument reflects the fact that Greenberg’s central assertion—that “value judgments constitute the substance of aesthetic experience”—was largely in contention.3 Notably, Sol Lewitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Robert Smithson’s “The Monuments of Passaic,” Dan Graham’s “The Book as Object,” and Mel Bochner’s “Serial Art Systems: Solipsism,” all texts suggesting critical and artistic paradigms freed from Greenberg’s strictures, were published around the time of his “complaint.”4 The publication in which Greenberg’s essay appeared was itself initially concerned with proposing his formalist model of criticism in reaction to the sensibilities of the New York School poets and the allusive prose found in publications such as ARTnews.5 By the 1970s, the rise of conceptual, minimal, and post-minimal art, and the attendant discourse of critical theory, led to a revision of Greenberg’s evaluative claims. If the modernist sense of judgment centered on notions of value and quality, many of the artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s were developed in direct antagonism to them. The resulting pluralistic expansion of critical models in the following decades effectively repositioned the object of judgment itself.
Of particular challenge to Greenbergian formalism was the way conceptual practices attempted to negate judgment through the self-reflexive absorption of critique. Artists such as LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth proposed that “conceptual art annex[ed] the function of the critic.”6 Such a seizure of criteria invalidated the epistemological authority of critical judgment, in favor of analytic, propositional, or social forms of artistic value.7 The dissolution of quality and judgment as central to critical discourse discounted the traditional role of criticism of identifying and evaluating, and so its “capacity to legitimate.”8 The “dematerialization of the art object,” as documented by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, had as its corollary a reframing of the terms of what constituted the object of criticism as well. “A judgment on contemporary art is tentatively true,” Lippard wrote, “like a scientist’s law and unlike a legislator’s law.”9
What this devaluation of judgment adumbrates is the recent “crisis of criticism” announced throughout the last decade.10 There has been, by most accounts, an “ebb of judgment’ ” in art critical writing since the late 1990s. Judgment and evaluative criteria have been traded for “informal opinions or transitory thoughts,” with critics “shy[ing] from strong commitments” and making judgments coming to seem “inappropriate,” in the words of one critic.11 Assessments of this “crisis” seem to concur that criticism no longer concerns itself mainly with questions of judgment, and that value and quality, abiding notions in Greenberg’s conception of modern art, are less central to the critical enterprise.12 Criticism offers literary description instead of critical discernment, connoisseurship, or an evaluative verdict. The causes offered are manifold, from the increasing role played by the art market in “arbitrating” value, to the “democratization” of opinion through social media, or the rise of the curator as displacing the adjudicating role of the critic.13
Such a “crisis” is perhaps the fate of judgment in the wake of postmodernism: the way its pluralism vitiates cultural value, and its relativism proliferates criteria; how its skepticism disputes the epistemological basis of judgment; and how the notion of socially situated knowledge affirms the ideological foundations of critical standards.14 Critical theory and poststructuralist thought effectively discredited traditional concepts of aesthetic value by politicizing judgment and demystifying cultural values. The political critique of taste as the basis for making judgments was shown to rely on normative conceptions of race, class, and gender, with aesthetic criteria naturalizing what are in fact relations of power and knowledge. The critic as arbiter of taste, as well as the contingency of value occluded by Greenberg’s model of criticism, was replaced by a critique of the hermeneutical and historical relativity of critical standards. The “pyrrhic victory” of postmodernism was to derail the validity of normative criteria for judging art.15
In comparison to a dependence on theory, value and judgment were largely marginalized within the “anti-aesthetic” character art criticism from the 1980s onward.16 Concepts such as “the archive,” and the “unconscious” gained the same critical relevance “quality” and “medium” had for critics like Greenberg previously.17 Taste was replaced by critique; quality displaced by context. Judgments and quality were postponed in favor of what Rosalind Krauss called “method,” or the “process of constituting the object of criticism.”18 Criticism inquired into “what does it mean,” instead of deciding “why is it good?,” in the words of one critic.19 Value, as the means by which criticism arrives at determinant judgments about its object, and the identification of such judgments with aesthetic criteria, was effectively ruptured.20
While effected by postmodernism’s reframing of the social as the horizon of interpretation, the putative recent crisis also arose within a new set of artistic practices once again repositioning “the troubled objects” of criticism: value and judgment.21 This crisis corresponds with the emergence of a social turn in art in the late 1990s, with the rise of dialogic, collaborative, relational, and participatory forms of art. As theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud, such art was defined by “taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”22 Focused on forms of exchange and participation, these practices centered on the relations between participants instead of passive spectatorship or opticality, or the modernist notion of the autonomous artwork. For relational or socially collaborative forms of art, intersubjectivity is an aesthetic object in itself.23 By repositioning the artwork as a process of communication between active participants rather than contemplative viewers, such practices effectively ruptured aesthetic judgment from the criteria of critical appraisal. Bourriaud’s formation of a “relational art” sought non-formalist criteria to address these practices. Earlier varieties of art in the “expanded field,” in Krauss’s formulation, breached the formalist confines of medium specificity, and in so doing, the equation of this modernist premise with value and criteria for judgment.24 Social and relational practices further de-emphasized medium and aesthetic quality over sociability and community, further exacting a need for new non-normative critical models.
The focus of such models would be on judging artworks on the basis of the social relations they can produce, be said to represent, or reveal—based, in short, on “social effects” rather than criteria related to aesthetic judgment.25 Yet what aesthetic criteria can be used to judge practices privileging an ethics of participation? Bourriaud proposes a “co-existence criterion” for the forms of sociability produced by relational art: “Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?”26 As some critics suggest, such a measure equates aesthetic judgment with ethical and political criteria, and so fails to differentiate such interactions from social activism or forms of political agitation.27 Does their political concern still situate these practices within the domain of any formal or aesthetic criteria and so as artistic practices? How might judgment function within this ethical and social dimension to new artistic forms?
In proposing methodologies for the production of art, such practices have marked a return to the validity of judgment within discussions about contemporary artistic practice. As Paul de Man writes, “[the] notion of crisis and that of criticism are very closely linked, so much so that one could state that all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis.”28 The “crisis” of criticism of the past decade has prompted a polemical reassessment of what criteria can be brought to the heterogeneous field of contemporary art. The role of judgment has thus been reconceived from the arbitration of cultural value or taste, to a complex function within the varied aesthetic, institutional, ethical, and political aspects of current art. Such a reassessment has, however, ironically entailed a return to the very source of Greenberg’s formalist aesthetics, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).29
The aim of Kant’s inquiry into the aesthetic is to position judgment within the epistemology first announced in the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), concerned with the capacities of cognition, desire, and feeling of pleasure or displeasure.30 If understanding had its “proper domain” in the faculty of cognition, and reason in the faculty of desire, was the faculty of judgment, as intermediary between them, irreducible, or merely annexed, to those faculties?31 Could judging account for the feeling of pleasure or displeasure by which we find something beautiful or not? For Kant, aesthetic responses to “the beautiful and the sublime in nature or in art” must be grounded in an account of judgment that relates this faculty to some principle, as with the a priori principles of reason and understanding.32 Kant’s aim is thus to differentiate the faculty of taste and aesthetic judgments from the previously investigated principles of rational or moral judgment, while establishing their ground within the human faculties.
The critique of judgment centers on the capacity for judgments of taste, or a judgment on whether a particular object is deemed to be beautiful. To claim that something is beautiful does not ascribe a property to an object in the same manner that to claim that a pencil is made of lead, or that a table is made of wood.33 The claim that something is beautiful asserts, rather, a relation between that object and a subject’s reflection on that thing, rather than an observable property of the beautiful used to define it, or universal criteria for what the beautiful might be.34 To judge a particular rose beautiful, for example, is not to subsume that flower under the concept of “rose” or under what we might know about the category of those things called roses (such “that roses in general are beautiful,” as Kant explains).35 What might be deemed beautiful cannot be reduced to any objective concept, as there “can be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful.”36 To judge something as beautiful is to do so independently of a concern for its purpose or exchange value; such a claim does not rely on the fact that it may be agreeable or on any practical utility derived from the object. The decisive aspect of judgments of taste is that they are aesthetic, that is, they are based on feeling, not determinate concepts, and thus about the subject’s representation of an object, rather than referring to the qualities or character of that thing.37
Yet to claim that something is beautiful is also to assert “validity for everyone,” or that the claim “this is beautiful” ascribes agreement or assent by others.38 Such a judgment implies normativity, asserting that everyone else ought to agree with it. Even if such a claim appears to be subjective, the judgment contains an appeal for agreement that is comparable to a demand based on an objective principle, such as a moral or cognitive one.39 To judge something as beautiful is to expect consent from anyone else making a judgment of taste on that thing. Something is not merely beautiful for me; rather, it supposes a necessary validity for others, a “subjective universality.”40
Aesthetic judgments thus make claims about the beautiful that surpass the particular experience of the subject who makes them—as a claim that others should agree with the judgment—yet that cannot be validated by a concept beyond that particular subjective experience.41 In this universal agreement lies the intersubjective character of judging: Based on a subjective principle common to everyone, aesthetic judgment relies on the claim that others ought to agree and so possess universal validity, a claim that cannot be verified by resorting to a concept or to forms of empirical proof. This universality grounds taste not in private sensation but in a common sense, what Kant called a sensus communis.42
Greenberg’s evaluative criteria were largely indexed to this subjective dimension of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In the 1960s, Greenberg turned to Kant to reframe modernist aesthetics in light of the sustained influence of Duchamp and the readymade (a bête noire for Greenberg), and the rise of new forms of conceptual and post-minimal art, as Diarmuid Costello has argued.43 Aesthetic value was articulated as the outcome of such subjective judgment, the objectivity of which Greenberg found in the agreement on judgments of taste in the past, “probatively demonstrated in and through the presence of consensus over time.”44 The depreciation of judgment enacted by the critical methodologies of academic art writing denied this premise as foundational to productive critical discourse—the act of making judgments as what Michael Fried deemed the “lifeblood of the critical enterprise.”45 The return to beauty in the arch-populist writings of Dave Hickey, for example, can be seen as filling a void left by the resulting gap in critical activity.46 The re-evaluation of judgment and enumerated criteria, and their possible role within new artistic practices in contemporary art, is thus seen as “a remedy to the cauterized state of contemporary criticism.”47
The reassessment of Greenberg’s critical model, most notably by Thierry de Duve, has consisted of returning to Kantian notions of judgment. Arguing for a rereading of aesthetics in relation to Greenberg’s formalist position, de Duve nevertheless suggests a shift in the focus of judgment from the traditional concern with “this is beautiful” to “this is art.”48 Kantian aesthetics is reinterpreted—replacing “art” where Kant writes “the beautiful”—through the rejection of taste and judgment implicit in Duchamp’s notion of the readymade.49 Kantian judgments after Duchamp reflect the coincidence of art with aesthetic experience: Greenberg argued the readymade proposed anything could be experienced aesthetically, and as such, as art. This re-evaluation of judgment allows de Duve to preserve “quality, aesthetic pleasure, [and] the judgment of taste” within critical discourse.50
The normative claims suggested by the notion of a sensus communis gives judgment yet another, more expanded role in contemporary art. Kant had suggested that the universal validity of judgment implied assent by others. As examined in the late lectures of Hannah Arendt, this facet of Kant’s aesthetic theory is seen as containing a political philosophy, based on the “enlarged mentality” that enables judgment, or the “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.”51 For Kant, judging is itself inherently a social relation, referring to a shared world.52 When one judges, one does so through the sensus communis, in which one reflects from the perspective of others as a fulfillment of what Kant placed as the highest human end, sociability.53 Judgments, Arendt argues, are persuasive, based on the “hope of coming to an agreement with everyone else eventually.”54
The political efficacy of judgment rests on the community engendered by this possibility. For Arendt, judgment is “the most political of man’s mental abilities.”55 Bridging the antinomies of aesthetics and politics, Arendt proposes both concern judgment on a common world and what appears in it.56 It is aesthetic judgment that decides how the world “is to look and sound,” while allowing for a “form of being together [shared judgment, community of taste] where no one rules and no one obeys. Where people persuade each other.”57 Formed in relation to others, taste and judgment not only presuppose community, but instantiate it.58 The collectively elaborated meaning and “transforming effect of social interaction” central to relational and dialogic art echo this notion: The “arena of exchange” created by an artwork is judged both by “the coherence of its form” and the “symbolic value” of the social relations it suggests, the image of human relations reflected in it.59
A potent example of the political efficacy of judgment is found in the “politics of disgust” that frame much of the public debate around homosexuality.60 Disgust, with its complex cultural and evolutionary aspects, indicates a feeling towards a thing or act that is deemed repulsive or revolting.61 The object of disgust elicits aversion to something perceived as capable of contaminating or polluting, either by ingestion, proximity, or contact.62 This repugnance is commonly linked to the rejection of food, as well as to hygiene and sexuality. With its adaptive and sociological aspects, disgust has been shown to play a significant role in the enforcement and preservation of social norms.63
Disgust, contagion, and revulsion are often evoked in the descriptions of same-sex practices.64 This “projective disgust,” as Martha Nussbaum has argued, indentifies a group or individual to objects of repulsion, used to establish normative ground against the legalization of same-sex marriage, for instance, or to uphold discriminatory laws.65 Commenting on a proposal to repeal a same-sex marriage bill, New Hampshire State Representative Nancy Elliott depicted gay marriage as “taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement.”66 Fear of contamination and the spread of disease, as well the repulsion towards objects of disgust, are used to position homosexuality as a potentially corrupting and contaminating practice.
Such projective disgust is reflected in the decision by the Smithsonian Institution to remove a video by artist David Wojnarowicz from an exhibition in late 2010 because of pressure from lawmakers and conservative groups.67 Described as the “first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture,” Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture featured Wojnarowicz’s 1987 film A Fire In My Belly, addressing political apathy towards the AIDS crisis in the United States through the 1980s, as well as the artist’s own illness.68 The four-minute excerpt of the original thirteen-minute film shown in the exhibition featured a brief scene of ants crawling over a crucifix. According to the Catholic League this was “designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians,” and constituted a form of “hate speech” funded by taxpayer money.69
The rhetoric employed in calling for the removal of the work was underscored by a projection of anti-homosexual disgust. One politician described the exhibition as a “pro-gay exhibit” of “really perverted, sick stuff,” including the “ashes of an AIDS victim” and “lots of really kinky and really questionable kind [sic] of art.”70 A conservative news website listed its contents as “an ant-covered Jesus, male genitals, naked brothers kissing, [and] men in chains,” conflating sacrilege, homoeroticism, incest, and nudity. Both the Wojnarowicz film and other works in the exhibition—unambiguously same-sex themed—were described as “vile,” and as failing to uphold “common standards of decency.”71
Aesthetic judgment can be seen to be functioning here in a double sense. As a projection of disgust, the repulsion towards such images reflects the political dimension of aesthetic experience. Depictions of homosexual practices or same-sex themes are deemed disgusting and repellent, and as such, used to justify a political and moral order, in their appeal to universal assent in regard to the repulsion. In Arendtian terms, this reveals the social relations and moral claims reflected in the act of aesthetic judgment. Yet such an instance also highlights the productive potential of judgment in the terms of the “enlarged mentality” central to Arendt’s reading of Kant. The political efficacy of such images becomes precisely their ability to address the dialectic of identification and disgust through this thinking in the place of others, or what Arendt called “representative thinking.” As an alternative to the politics of disgust, depictions of homosexual practices can help offer the imaginative ability of thinking through alterity, and so to conceive of the political or ethical claims of others as similar to one’s own search for political recognition.72 One such example is Hickey’s assessment of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe—subject to similar decries of disgust in the “culture wars” of the 1980s—in which same-sex sadomasochism is arguably made “beautiful” through its allusions to art-historical tropes.73
Arendt’s restaging of Kantian aesthetics, de Duve’s reassessment of Greenberg’s critical model, and the calls for a re-evaluation of criteria within the “crisis of criticism” of recent years all evince a return to judgment in critical discourse. If the social, collaborative, and participatory dimensions of contemporary art reflect an ethical and political turn, this also has placed value and judgment, once central to the critical valuation of modernist discourse, at the center of critical debates about contemporary art. Rather than a reactionary appeal to formalist criteria as a standard to mitigate the pluralism or heterogeneity of contemporary art, a reassessment of judgment offers the more productive possibility of rethinking the supposed inimical relation between politics and aesthetics. The oppositional relationship between political engagement and form, and between imagination and ethics, can be shown to rely on willful misreading, critical neglect, or ideological “blindness,” while the political character of cultural production expanded beyond the strictures of well-worn critical models of the postwar left, or the debates of postmodern cultural politics. At stake are both the ongoing political engagement of cultural forms, and the critical relevance of art in the conditions of contemporary politics.
Notes
1 Clement Greenberg, “Complaints of an Art Critic,” Artforum 61: 2 (October 1967), pp. 38–39.
2 David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. J. W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1965), pp. 9–10.
3 Clement Greenberg, “Art Criticism,” Partisan Review XLVII (1981).
4 LeWitt and Smithson’s articles were published in the Summer and December 1967 issues of Artforum respectively; Graham’s and Bochner’s in the Summer 1967 issue of Arts Magazine. See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
5 Nancy Princenthal, “Art Criticism, Bound to Fail,” in Raphael Rubinstein, ed., Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice (Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2006), p. 85.
6 Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. viii. See also Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. xli. Kosuth critiqued Greenberg’s formalism directly in “Art After Philosophy.” See Meyer, p. 155 and Alberro, p. 334.
7 Blake Stimson, “Conceptual Work and Conceptual Waste,” Discourse 24: 2 (Spring 2002), p. 129.
8 Benjamin Buchloh, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop,” in Hal Foster, ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988). See also Lane Relyea, “All Over and At Once, Excerpt (part 3),” X-Tra 6: 1 (Fall 2003), pp. 3–23.
9 Lucy Lippard, “Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds,” in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), p. 24.
10 Examples include Maurice Berger, The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998); James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); James Elkins and Michael Newman, eds., The State of Art Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2007); Raphael Rubinstein, op. cit.; “Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” October 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 200–228.
11 See James Elkins, op. cit., pp. 78–79.
12 Nancy Princenthal, “Art Criticism, Bound to Fail,” in Raphael Rubinstein, op. cit., p. 85.
13 See “Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” op. cit., p. 226, and Alex Farquharson, “Is the Pen Still Mightier?,” frieze (June–August 2005), pp. 118–119.
14 Emory Elliot et al., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
15 Princenthal, op. cit., p. 85.
16 Diarmuid Costello, “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65: 2 (Spring 2007), p. 217. Costello argues that aesthetics in contemporary art theory has been largely marginalized, particularly “on the basis of various infelicities” arising from Greenberg’s recourse to Kantian aesthetic theory, in favor of discourses such as poststructuralism.
17 Molly Nesbit, “Kant after Duchamp,” Bookforum (Summer 1996), p. 3.
18 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 1. See James Elkins, “Afterword,” in Jeff Khonsary and Melanie O’Brian, eds., Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism (Vancouver: Artspeak/Filllip, 2010), pp. 83–84 and Sven Lütticken, “A Tale of Two Criticisms,” in Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism, op. cit., pp. 49–50.
19 E. D. Hirsch, Jr. quoted in Clement Greenberg, “Art Criticism,” op. cit. See also Diedrich Diederichsen, “Judgment, Objecthood, Temporality,” in Khonsary and O’Brian, op. cit., pp. 83–84.
20 Costello, op. cit., p. 217. See also James Panero, “Criticism After Art,” The New Criterion 24 (December 2005), p. 16.
21 Joseph Leo Koerner and Lisbet Rausing, “Value,” in Richard Shiff and Robert S. Nelson, eds., Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 419.
22 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002), p. 11.
23 Ibid., p. 22.
24 Costello, op. cit., p. 218. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 30–44.
25 Bourriaud, op. cit., p. 112 and Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum (February, 2006), pp. 179–185. See also Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (2004), pp. 51–79.
26 Bourriaud, op. cit., p. 109.
27 Claire Bishop, op. cit., p. 65 and Grant Kester, op. cit., p. 11.
28 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 8.
29 See Christopher Bedford, “Art without Criticism,” X-Tra (Winter 2008). I am indebted here to Diarmuid Costello’s analysis of Greenberg’s reading of Kant in “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory,” op. cit.
30 Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 3, 13. See Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 29; and Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 22.
31 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:168, p. 56.
32 Ibid., 5:170, p. 57 and Graham Bird, “The Critique of the Power of Judgment: Introduction,” in Graham Bird, ed., A Companion to Kant (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 399.
33 Ibid, pp. 400–404.
34 Ibid., p. 404. See Kant, op. cit., 5:204, p. 89 and Henry E. Allison, op. cit., p. 51. Kant’s insistence, as Henry Allison argues, is that the claim about an object is about the “representational state of the subject” in apprehending that object. For a discussion on the relationship between perceptive qualities and datum to value judgments, see Elder Olson, “On Value Judgments in the Arts,” Critical Inquiry 1: 1 (September 1974), pp. 71–90.
35 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 13–14, and Kant, op. cit., 5:215, p. 100.
36 Kant, op. cit., 5:216, p. 101.
37 Kant, op. cit., 5:238, p. 122; Allison, op. cit., p. 68; and Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 28.
38 Kant, op. cit., 5:215, p. 101.
39 Allison, op. cit., p. 156.
40 Kant, op. cit., 5:212; 5:213; 5:281. See Hammermeister, op. cit., p. 29.
41 Anthony Saville, “Kant’s Aesthetic Theory,” in Bird, op. cit., p. 444, and Rainer Rochlitz, Subversion and Subsidy: Contemporary Art and Aesthetics (London: Seagull Books, 2008), pp. 42–43. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “If taste registers a negative reaction to something, it is not able to say why. But it experiences it with the greatest certainty.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 32.
42 Kant, op. cit., 5:238. See also Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 222.
43 Costello, op. cit., p. 221.
44 Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
45 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 18. As Christopher Bedford writes, “informed judgment predicated on explicitly stated, clearly enumerated criteria represents the foundation for the most advanced, productive critical discourse.” Bedford, op. cit.
46 Suzanne Hudson, “Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism,” October 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 115–130. For a discussion of Hickey’s return to beauty see also Amelia Jones, “Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics,” in Elliot et al., op. cit., pp. 216–233.
47 Khonsary and O’Brian, op. cit., p. 7. See Bedford, op. cit.
48 Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 302.
49 Ibid., pp. 304–312. For a discussion on the implications of de Duve’s rereading of Kant see Stephen Melville, “Kant after Greenberg,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56: 1 (Winter 1998), pp. 72–73.
50 De Duve, quoted in Rainer Rochlitz, Subversion and Subsidy: Contemporary Art and Aesthetics (London: Seagull Books, 2008), p. 51.
51 Arendt, Between Past and Future, op. cit., p. 220–241; Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, op. cit., p. vii.
52 Beiner, op. cit., p. 120.
53 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, op. cit., p. 8.
54 Beiner, op. cit., p. 105.
55 Quote in Beiner, op. cit., p. 138.
56 Arendt, Between Past and Future, op. cit., p. 223.
57 Quoted in Beiner, op. cit., p. 141. This relationship between the aesthetic and political is central to the influential writings of Jacques Rancière, which similarly attempt to suture art and politics in light of recent artistic practice. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004).
58 Gilles Gunn, “The Pragmatics of the Aesthetic,” in Elliot et al., op. cit., p. 71.
59 Kester, op. cit., p. 29 and Bourriaud, op. cit., p. 18. See also Kester, op. cit., pp. 57–58 and 107–108.
60 The term, contrasted with the “politics of humanity,” is Martha Nussbaum’s. See Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
61 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 2.
62 Ibid.
63 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002).
64 Nussbaum, op. cit., p. 15.
65 Nussbaum, op. cit., pp. xv, 4–6.
66 Dahlia Lithwick, Why Has a Divided America Taken Gay Rights Seriously? (March 8, 2010), http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/03/why_has_a_divided_america_taken_gay_rights_seriously.html. Accessed January 5, 2011.
67 Jacqueline Trescott, Ant-covered Jesus video removed from Smithsonian after Catholic League complains (November 30, 2010), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/30/AR2010113004647.html?hpid=topnews.Accessed January 27, 2011.
68 Wojnarowicz, an artist and gay activist, died from AIDS-related illness in 1992, at the age of thirty-seven. Press Release, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhhide.html. Accessed January 27, 2011.
69 Dave Itzkof, “National Portrait Gallery Removes Video Criticized for Religious Imagery,” New York Times (December 1, 2010).
70 Interview with Rep. Jack Kingston, “Fox and Friends,” Fox News (December 1, 2010).
71 See Blake Gopnik, National Portrait Gallery bows to censors, withdraws Wojnarowicz video on gay love (November 30, 2010), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/30/AR2010113006911.html. Accessed January 25, 2011. And Trescott, op. cit.
72 Nussbaum, op. cit., p. 48.
73 Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993).
I’m certain that anyone who visits the major group exhibitions marking our time in the contemporary art world—whether biennials or art fairs—wishes to pose the same question: Why is this thing so BIG? I have rarely heard an important group show slighted for being too small. The art world does not lack density. It does not lack supply. I could only admire Roberta Smith who, before composing her Times review of the 2011 Venice Biennale, called out the daunting “Enormity of the Beast” in a blog post: “With all the additional pavilions scattered about town and the independent exhibitions that are out there, too, Venice currently has more contemporary art on offer than any one person can see, even without the usual considerations of time, money and eye-strain.”1 If supply has not outstripped demand, it still might be noted that the supply of contemporary art has outstripped anyone’s ability to account for it. Though Claire Bishop, noting the Venice Biennale’s “return to sculpture,” delivers some happy news: “the Arsenale can be completed in a relatively rapid five-hour circuit” (“[p]rovided you don’t fall hostage to Christian Marclay’s seductive twenty-four-hour epic, The Clock, 2010”).2
Even so, it’s no longer enough to tackle Venice’s beast; it’s no longer enough to stroll Chelsea and think you have a snapshot of contemporary art. Art gets made, circulated, and discussed everywhere. If I remain addicted to Artforum’s “Scene & Herd” column, it is not just for the world-trotting, soap opera saga of after parties, but for the sheer range of openings and art fairs and actions that flash their fireworks from Stockholm to Dubai, from Taipei and Guangzhou to Los Angeles and Mexico City. Where does one pick up the thread here? In San Francisco, I’m trying to imagine a setting for Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation’s latest project, whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir (2011). A film noir set in the fantasy architectures of such places as Kazakhstan, Dubai, Azerbaijan, and New York, the single-channel video has no beginning or end. Instead, an algorithm manipulates 100 hours of shot footage (roughly 3000 clips anywhere between 10 seconds and 5 minutes in length) so that no linear sequence can be repeated twice. One searches for a limit here, like the rigid rules of Marclay’s clock keeping real time. One wants to know where one is, and where one is going. But the characters keep going; the landscapes keep unfolding. whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir will always outlast you.
As we struggle to locate ourselves in the global contemporary, Fredric Jameson’s postmodern injunctions seem as relevant as ever; writing in 1981, Jameson was certain: Art as a specific and autonomous sphere has been wiped away, not through master planning and bulldozing but through successful franchising. Postmodernity marks “a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and as yet untheorized sense.”3 Art supersized to everything and everywhere, of which the global art world and its expanded group shows and expanding art centers and omnipresent events is itself just one small part.
The problem of the contemporary, outside and especially inside the art world, might then be framed as the problem of art’s infinite egress, of art being too much with us. Globally produced and promiscuous in form, contemporary art is also coupled with the democratization of aesthetics in everyday life, via the design of not just sleek new technologies but also utilitarian staples like toothbrushes and trash cans. Forms abound, and so formal judgments must be made all the time. Even as artists, art historians, critics, and theorists sought to complicate the register of aesthetic judgment by linking its formal pronouncements to context, politics, and history, the fact remains that form remains, everywhere. John Tierney’s article in the New York Times introduced me to two new terms: “decision fatigue” and “ego depletion.”4 Scientific method is proposing the following: The more you judge, it seems, the less you can judge. You cannot constantly weigh the forms of art and life; you will run out of steam. And as your judging powers expire, you’re increasingly at risk of losing yourself to what somebody else (or some corporation-as-body) prefers. You stop judging. Business as usual proceeds.
Most days, the original Regency dandy Beau Brummel is my hero. He once asked a manservant: “Which view do I prefer?” Where can I find the assistant who chooses what I prefer in landscapes and effects and maybe even toothbrushes? Then I’d have the bandwidth to choose everything else, maybe even those five hours in the Arsenale. Truth be told, the assistant can choose a Top Ten at Venice for me as well. I want the space and the time to make the right judgment, not the judgment I have to make, on every occasion and on every art-world demand. I would like to weigh the contemporary less so that I might know the contemporary more.
A mythology of my locality in the Bay Area is that the vibrancy of the technology sector depends upon young visionaries unconcerned with the physicality of their own world because of an immersion in the virtual one. From early dot.com-era profiles to David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), we see exceedingly rich start-up gurus who live in empty mansions or banal tract homes when their monetary profiles could afford so much more. This refusal of the “fashion system,” as Roland Barthes once called it, hints at a key element of judgment today: The need for space, or what Hal Foster describes in his excellent polemic, Design and Crime, as the need for “running room.”5 Steve Jobs’ sad uniform of mock black turtleneck and light-colored Mom jeans spoke a disjunction: I am the tech world of everything moving forward, only because my personal affect is static. It is the Beau Brummel response, in odd reverse: “I reject choosing fashion because I make what is fashionable. I cannot make fashion and be fashionable.” Many designers opt for such daily uniforms and so know this dictum well. Only their withdrawal from the scene of staging permits them to stage anything themselves. Oscar Wilde’s dictum from “Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young” holds: “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”6 You cannot be and have at the same time, much less make. For being and having, as we know from Freud and Lacan, are ultimately relational and not static. Which perhaps means that being and having and even making only mean something via the fractured field of the social.
We have lost the open space where different folks can do something other than consume their world—and that space where objects themselves can be something other than their circulation as commodities. Our judgment cannot ignore the market here. And so our own tangled artistic economy, where groups like W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) highlight the speculative crap shoot whereby artists foot the bill for appearing in prestigious and seemingly nonprofit exhibitions in the hope that their work will be carried by ever better and for-profit gallerists. In such a world, careerists and cynics abound, winking at or despairing of the situation where any art that operates in a product system is just so many products. As Jerry Saltz noted in 2010 about a spectacular solo show in a globally-branded gallery, “Andy Warhol famously talked about a future of ‘business art.’ Here we have that, but without the art. Now we’re just getting the business.”7
A group like W.A.G.E., self-described as “[a]n activist group of artists, art workers, performers and independent curators fighting to get paid for making the world more interesting,”8 looks for that elusive running room, imagining ways of doing business that support and don’t squash the art. They point to an interesting development in the contemporary art world: that it’s no longer impolite to talk about the money. In fact, it might now be impossible to talk art without talking economics. In New York, before the real estate and other financial bubbles showed any signs of collapse, I remember my naive outrage when traveling behind a museum curator who pointed out to some collectors available objects and their prices in an important solo exhibition. What blue chip review can resist some nod to the artist’s market value now? A few months after that New York show, I saw Andrea Zittel speak at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts outside of San Francisco. Her preface: Ask me anything you want about making a living as an artist. Surprisingly then, no one dared (Lehman Brothers had yet to fail).
Today, I think that room would be talking, as we’re all talking about auction prices, sales at Art Basel, and forgiveness of our student loan debt. In my city, we’re also talking about young artists perpetually leaving because the rents are too high and the collector base is too small.9 Like W.A.G.E., we’re wondering what an alternative and sustainable arts ecology might look like. These structural discussions might happen alongside of or separate from evaluations of a work’s merits, success, or failure, but I’m increasingly interested in the ways that the structural analysis and the aesthetic review come together. Zittel inspires: Of course an artist talk should discuss the seemingly invisible means of support that make an artwork, practice, or life in the arts possible! Auction houses twin capital and connoisseurship all the time. Why not redirect the price + provenance reporting for other ends? Could there be a return-to-Brecht school of art criticism, one able to demonstrate the social situation of the work of art, the artist, and the institutions upholding both, atomizing all those economies in ready dollars and cents, while still delivering the object itself?10 Could there be such an artwork? I am interested here not in broad strokes but more in the nuts and bolts of economic reporting: How is such an object implicated in global, or even local, capital? How can it be a work of art but also be had in a system of exchange, at the same time?
Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop tested the emerging possibilities for an economically expansive field of art objects and aesthetic judgment from late November 2010 to May 1, 2011. Staged at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the piece, a pop-up store stocking over 200 invited and local artists’ “wares,” existed as a “live art” component of the collection exhibition The More Things Change. The latter exhibited works that SFMOMA has collected across object departments in the twenty-first century. The show spoke a great deal to fragility, entropy, and failure, whether through Pae White’s tapestry of a smoke exhalation, Smoke Knows, Mark Bradford’s gridded Monster, or Alec Soth’s photographs of detritus (both people and places) along the Mississippi river’s “third coast.” But the show also spoke to the intimate exchanges making themselves known over the last decade, whether Ryan Trecartin and his crew’s manic histrionics or the everyday poignancy of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More archive. Full disclosure: I was one of ten curators on this show. Fuller disclosure: I curated Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop. Even fuller disclosure: My curation had less to do with the project itself than in getting the project institutionally green-lighted. When Syjuco and her project manager, my colleague Megan Brian, got to work, I had almost nothing to do with the large contingent of Bay Area artists invited to sell their work in the shop. I did not interview every “guest worker” (as Syjuco dubbed them) who would serve as an attendant in the shop. And I certainly had little grasp of the almost overwhelming and also changing inventory Shadowshop made available for viewers of The More Things Change. In the end, when I would stroll through the shop’s gallery space, I was, at times, more like the day’s visitors than I cared to admit.
And so what did visitors see? We found a functioning retail store, a satellite museum shop closing some blockbuster exhibition. Yet the DIY aesthetic—from loading palettes as display bases and cases to the photocopied signage—suggested something else was at work. The stocked artists were invited to submit the full range of their output, from multiples to sketches to CDs and catalogues. Syjuco asked her local colleagues to examine their full range of production, to consider their studio and nonstudio practices that might circulate everywhere BUT in a gallery, and to use Shadowshop as a distribution hub for this uncertain product. The artists selected the items, the pricing (up to $250), and would receive 100% of the profits. SFMOMA covered infrastructure (from shipping to guest worker salaries), sales tax, and credit card fees. Internally, I described the piece as “bad capitalism.” We put money in, but only artists would get money out.
Shadowshop became the platform for a number of public conversations hosted by Suzanne Stein, our community producer and editor for SFMOMA’s blog, Open Space, and Patricia Maloney, editor of the Bay Area online arts magazine Art Practical. Maloney’s review of the piece in her journal set the tone for the public conversations to come.11 As she rightly pointed out, the retail structure of the installation blocked one’s art vision, so that work that could have been evaluated and appreciated as art in a gallery became so many toothbrushes in that overwhelming Target aisle. Artists who set modest materials to higher price points (the $250 ceiling that would look bargain basement in a gallery) and also devised retail stacking displays over white cube spacing, like Zachary Royer Scholtz and his hand-cut blue packing material, 6610 (blue sheeting) – force of habit, made no sense to the shopping eyes enabled by Shadowshop.12 As Maloney points out, one went for the $20 or even $10 gift card set instead. Yet it’s also true that savvy arts insiders—including SFMOMA curators, San Francisco gallerists, and Bay Area collectors—thrilled to the price tags some well-loved artists affixed to their Shadowshop wares. Josephine Taylor’s small drawings (at 4 × 6 inches, a truly miniaturized version of gallery works that can unfold on paper sizes more like 8 × 6 feet) sold out in a few hours of the shop’s initial opening (and then on a subsequent re-stock). Her nineteen delicate images riffing on complicated child-like figures, positioned on a shelf below the main countertop display, would hardly have been spotted and sold so quickly to a casual shopper, even priced at $20 each.13 No, what Taylor buyers were looking for was some bargain basement art by real artists. Shadowshop’s goal—to focus on artists’ non-art products and to distribute them, was not always met. The artists bucked the system. The shoppers sometimes played the system well too.
And this overlay and opposition and overlay again of aesthetics and economics, of insiders and outsiders, of art and wares, continued throughout the Shadowshop exhibition. As the Open Space conversations began, this doubled vision provoked a number of headaches for the sessions’ participants, who wanted nothing less than the right corrective lenses. Self-described “emerging” artists felt that they had to accept Syjuco’s invitation to join Shadowshop because of its affiliation as an SFMOMA-sponsored project. Others felt that the shop, under Syjuco’s sole authorship, exploited the participating artists by absenting their names in official museum wall texts. Everyone argued about whether they would include the project on their CVs.
But perhaps the surprising twist in these public conversations was the voiced argument that to present works in Shadowshop was to destroy both their market value and thereby their ontological status as works of art. Shadowshop’s play with the retail structure of the contemporary art world was seen to deflate all that that structure makes possible: namely, the production, circulation, contemplation, and critique of autonomous artworks, spaced well on a white wall. For artworks both to be what they are and also to be had in a system of exchange could not be shown and hence known together. Now that any gallery block cannot be read without the real estate lens of its booming or becoming neighborhood valuation, the desire to stay in this artistic game without naming it seems like my naive self aghast at money talk on the museum floor. I preferred my art front and center and my art market in the closet. Dollar bills are pretty dirty in the end, and their links to gluttony, monstrosity, and feces well noted. Our housing for art can’t be a mess—and, ideally, should follow architect Yoshio Tanuguchi’s quip about MOMA’s early aughts’ expansion: “Give me enough money, and I will give you a beautiful museum; give me more money, and I will make it go away.”
Shadowshop, unlike MOMA’s new building, asserted its infrastructure, wedding art objects to their means of support, and thereby inaugurating a series of critical confusions. Clark Bluckner, reporting on the Shadowshop conversations, highlighted one woman, self-identified as “only a consumer,” who suggested that the wares-on-sale failed as artworks-on-view not because they were so many tchotchkas with price tags in a store, but because they lacked visible authors and intentions. Our consumer’s complaint is a curious one: Certainly the whole dilemma of the commodity form is its erasure of its scene of production in favor of its magical deployment in your own life. The artwork to anyone but a collector, however, is even more inscrutable. If you can’t take it home, what are you going to do with it? Why is it here? Who made it? As any museum’s Education department can attest, the art object must ever be aligned with some answers to these questions, via wall text, iPhone stops, online video, etc. What is so compelling to me about this problem is the perception that the art object needs to carry its own scene of production for it to be considered an art object at all.
This perceived lack—a people gap, really—is crucial to Shadowshop, as I would argue its success or failure as an artwork lies solely in its ability to twin the commodity with the community of its circulation, to double a product with the scene of its making, and to enact a DIY transformation on art objects as wares. Rejecting the sleek minimalism and haughty silence of the boutique, the shop ran on the “pitch,” knowing that an overload of products paired with an overload of signage hoping to explain those products is, in the end, simply an overload. And so anyone on the production side of the piece—our artist, stocking artists, project manager, rotating guest workers (who were themselves often stocking artists), and even this mostly absent curator—would hawk our Shadowshop wares. The complaint of a consumer who thought the wares failed as art because they lacked visible intention was hardly an isolated affair—it was, instead, the very engine of the piece. We Shadowshop hawkers had a job to do: connecting people to objects and objects to people. Encountering the shop, and recalibrating themselves from art viewers to shoppers, our visitors did indeed want to know who made what, which inventory had the best value (for us, and by extension for them), and why they should be involved in the project at all. We made our sales pitches. We connected some dots. And visitors bought some wares. In the end, Shadowshop channeled over $100,000 to Bay Area artists. SFMOMA’s $30,000 project budget took work directly to the museum’s audiences and asked them to evaluate creative output that straddled commodity and art forms. That public did not fail to decide.
Shadowshop ended with a special performance by artists Packard Jennings, Steuart Pittman, and Scott Vermeire. The artists posed as QVC-like itinerant salesmen contracted by the store to sell our final stock via the web. Streaming online and selling in-person (Shadowshop sales had no online inventory), the performance spoke to the clichéd disjunction between the art world and the seeming “real” world, with the Red State attired pitchmen trying to thrill us with objects that looked, from their world’s perspective, at best inscrutable (San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum’s rookie card signed by artist Lee Walton) and at worst naughty (Rebecca Goldfarb’s wax flashlight meets phallus sculpture). This was purely an inside job, with the performers playing up to our fantasies about the seemingly real America and to our certainties about “real” America’s fantasies about us. This was community building as comedy roast. We were all in on or the butt of the jokes.
If I began this essay in global dislocation and exhaustion, imagining an art world impossibly everywhere and overproductive, I want to end with the “lure of the local,” as Lucy Lippard’s great book14 calls it, but with the “lure,” following Shadowshop’s dynamic engine, twinned with a “logic.” I hosted the eminent art historian Irving Sandler for a talk several years ago, when his memoir, A Sweeper-Up After Artists (2003), was published. The book, and his conversation with me that evening, spoke to the truly awesome scale of the contemporary art world. A Sweeper-Up might be sub-titled “Tenth Street,” for such is the original Manhattan neighborhood of the intimate art world Sandler recounts.
Thinking about Sandler’s Tenth Street now, it’s interesting to note that Sandler discovered the downtown neighborhood through midtown: In 1952, he had a “road to Damascus” moment when viewing Franz Kline’s painting Chief at MOMA: “it was the first work of art I really saw, and it changed my life, somewhat like Saul jumping into Paul, as Elaine de Kooning wrote of Kline’s own leap from figuration to abstraction.”15 But in Sandler’s case, the love of abstraction and of the painting led inevitably to the figures and locales making such things. In Sandler’s case, MOMA didn’t go away; instead it pointed out where, with whom, and how to live. It pointed downtown. By fall of 1953, Sandler finds himself in the Cedar Tavern, silently sitting across from the irrepressible Franz Kline. With enough hanging out near such artists, Sandler is now a part of their world; he writes: “Within easy walking distance of the Cedar [Tavern], Tenth Street between Third and Fourth avenues, where the Tanager Gallery was located (and where Sandler would eventually work), was the geographic hub of the international avant-garde, or so the artists who lived, exhibited, and congregated there had the self-assurance to believe.”16 If we no longer have such self-assurance about our centrality in the global contemporary, we still have hubs. Art remains local and social. And it will be from these local and social hubs that artists, artworks, hangers-on, sweepers-up, and judgments about them all will spring.
For me, the “lure” of the local is the lure of positioning oneself in an arts community. And it’s heartening to see just how many new arts communities constitute the global contemporary. If Shadowshop and Sandler prove instructive for me, it is because each example demonstrates how art is born from a social field of interests. And so the “logic” of the local, the sense that artworks both spring from and generate ways of looking at the world. Though he’s evaluated a changing art world for over forty years, Sandler remains rooted to the logic of Tenth Street at its action painting apogee. He’s explored many neighborhoods since then, but the logic of individual dynamism, gesture, and even heroism remains his starting point. It is the logic of our own critical localities, like the scene of the artwork’s production, that must be surfaced today too.
My local logic, embodied in this Shadowshop examination, proceeds from artworks and art worlds that mind the gap, using disjunction to twin a seemingly impossible this and that.17 I like Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir because it is impossible to view in total. I admire the way that the difficulty of the production process rebounds on the viewer in the impossibility of the viewing process. I find myself wishing they had shot here too. San Francisco fogs are Noir 101, so I mourn our absence from the piece. Like our Shadowshop’s consumer and her complaint, I want to know the artist too.
So in the end these are a producer’s notes about supporting and evaluating contemporary art in a specific time and a place. If I can skip the jet-setting of the global contemporary, it is because my people and purposes are here and not there. Warhol used to say, “Pop Art is liking things.” I’ll say, “Judgment is loving things enough to make them happen for other people.” I pose this love-into-action as a means of engaging the sprawl of contemporary art. And while I sought to leave him out, isn’t this just Immanual Kant in the end? Judgment as a universal subjective: We are so arrested by the thing that we determine and declare that everyone else must be arrested too. We fall hard for some thing, and we want to be a part of that thing we love. We want to find a way to make that thing happen, here, for us and for ours. And we want everyone else to love it too. So buy the postcard, start the conversation, or put on the show. The artwork will have it no other way.
Notes
1 Roberta Smith, “Artsbeat blog,” New York Times (June 2, 2011).
2 Claire Bishop, “Safety in Numbers,” Artforum (September 2011), online edition.
3 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review I: 146 (July–August 1984), p. 87.
4 John Tierney, “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” New York Times Magazine (August 17, 2011), online edition.
5 Hal Foster, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), p. 15.
6 Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellman (London: Vintage, 1968), p. 434.
7 Jerry Saltz, “2007 Art in 2010,” New York Magazine (September 19, 2010), digital edition.
8 W.A.G.E. website: www.wageforwork.com/.
9 A great conversation on SFMOMA’s blog, Open Space, has tracked this debate. See artist Brian Nuda Rosch’s response to curator Renny Pritikin’s post, “Artists Who Have Left Town,” here: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/07/the-grass-is-always-greener/.
10 Reading Brecht lately, I’m struck again by his insistence that theater must always witness its social significance. In “The Epic Theater and its Difficulties,” he argues: “The essential point of the epic theater is that it appeals less to our feelings than to the spectator’s reason. Instead of sharing an experience, the spectator must come to grip with things.” Yet he also notes, in “A Short Organum for the Theater”: “From the first it has been the theater’s business to entertain people, as it has also of all the other arts. It is this business which always gives it its particular dignity; it needs no other passport than fun, but this it has got to have.” The sensuous and the social must always be paired. Brecht on Theater, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), pp. 23 and 180.
11 Patricia Maloney, “Shadowshop Review,” Art Practical 2: 6 (2011), www.artpractical.com/review/shadowshop/.
12 See the item on Stephanie Syjuco’s The Shadowshopper blog, http://shadowshopper.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/zachary-royer-scholz-6610-blue-sheeting-%e2%80%93-force-of-habit/.
13 There is no blog post for Josephine Taylor’s work in Shadowshop, since the pieces sold out so quickly.
14 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997).
15 Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), p. 10.
16 Ibid., p. 12.
17 Think of a Brechtian actor not embodying but demonstrating a role, or of Wilde’s aphorisms, or of Foster’s running room.
Reports of criticism’s demise have been snowballing for nearly two decades now. Contrast this to the strutting that characterized the 1960s and early 1970s, when art criticism was hailed for its “august clairvoyance” and “expansive confidence.”1 By “the middle to late 1970s,” Hal Foster remembers, “theoretical production became as important as artistic production ... Critical theory served as a secret continuation of modernism by other means … it occupied the position of high art, at least to the extent that it retained such values as difficulty and distinction.”2 Indeed, some art magazines from back then get treated today with a level of reverence usually reserved for actual works of art. For example, if you go to abebooks.com or any other search engine for used-book sellers, you’d be lucky to find a back issue of Artforum from before the mid-1970s for under $25. Some go for over $200—like volume five, number ten, June 1967, which includes Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture,” Robert Smithson’s “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” and Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Whole graduate seminars have been built around that one issue. Now imagine that level of consideration being paid to any more recent issue. Hence the typical refrain: The old Artforum was a magazine you read, while today’s Artforum is a magazine you only glance through.
Some say it has always been thus, that criticism has never operated outside of hostile conditions. Since the beginning of modernism, with the crisis that arose in the nineteenth-century academies and official salons, the fear has been voiced—from all sides, including by artists and critics—that art criticism risks losing itself in the marketplace, or in some formless plurality of individual tastes, or in the always shifting sands of political fortune, or in the paranoid guardianship of cliquish connoisseurs. Supposedly fixed evaluative criteria crumble one after another, canons are revised by critique or simply succumb to scatterings of individual consumption. “We are asked to contemplate a great plethora of possibilities in the list that must now be used to draw a line around the art of the present,” complained Rosalind Krauss in only the second issue of October about the pluralism she saw overtaking the art world of the late 1970s. But in her very next sentence, Krauss unveils a totalizing “postmodern” conceptual frame able to prove that “all these separate ‘individuals’ are in fact moving in lockstep.”3 Chaos, increasing dispersal, or lockstep, greater order: now there’s a defining dialectic of modernism.
This dialectic continues into our present era of globalization, in which the art world, like other major business sectors, becomes increasingly de-centered while at the same time achieving ever-greater organizational and professional coherence. And yet conditions today do differ in some historically unique ways, which have impacted significantly the practice and status of art criticism. For one thing, over the last twenty-five years, as the art world has changed from a pyramid with one city at its apex to a sprawling horizontal matrix, and mobility has come to matter foremost, a new organizational norm has taken hold, one that emphasizes responsiveness and rapid adaptability as ways to accommodate accelerating change and turnover. Itinerant and post-studio approaches are more common among artists now, while museums increasingly rely on commissions and residencies, meaning that today the art world, like many other areas of social life, is largely characterized by flexible and short-term arrangements—by on-demand or just-in-time production, by outsourcing and temporary work teams—all interacting with one another in a loose, fluctuating network structure.
Indeed, already by the end of the 1970s Jean-François Lyotard was writing in La Condition postmoderne about how “the temporary contract [which] is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs … is favored by the system due to its greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil of its accompanying motivations—all of these factors contribute to increased operativity.”4 As well, the topography of culture has become more expansive, with focus shifting from the national and even international toward the transnational, global, and diasporic; at the same time, its analysis is more finely grained, as theorists abandon abstract totalizing and essentializing models of culture to attend more closely to particular, concrete actions. As a result, culture is thought of as more temporal and fleeting, less as an array of formalistic and static objects, or the mere effects of grand determining ideological frameworks, and instead as specific, embedded performative acts.
Moreover, the tendency is to treat these acts in nonhierarchical ways, to welcome the demise of consensus. The waning credibility of “master narratives” encourages the profusion of what Lyotard calls local “language games” with their more “heteromorphous nature.” But the decay of metadiscourses, including both modernism and its postmodernist critique, the collapsing of structures that formerly organized collective practice and experience, the demise of canons and critical criteria, the inability to convincingly “draw a line around” what is most significant about contemporary art within deep historical logics or determinations is only one side of a simultaneously integrative process. Over the last twenty years we have witnessed the replacement of summarizing models of culture with new networked models based on ever-extending databases and platforms enhanced by better connectivity. Unlike stable enclosures, a database is characterized by two qualities emphasized by today’s general communicational mandates, which are extensiveness and easy retrievability. Databases are radically open-ended; they don’t tell stories; they don’t have a beginning or end, or determined development. They are simply collections of individual items, each with equivalent potentiality. Platforms, too, are open-ended; as the underlying structures built to bring into temporary relation the items of databases, they must be flexible enough to welcome a high variety of interfaces. Just as no single television show or pop song is as hot today as the TiVo boxes and iPods that manage their organization, so too with art it is the ease and agility of access and navigation through and across data fields that takes precedence over any singular, lone objet.
How then does a museum, for example, approximate the condition of a database or platform? No longer seemingly permanent and timeless, art exhibitions are—self-consciously—temporarily assembled. The better a museum or kunsthalle can do this ad hoc arranging, the better it will fall in line with the recent general business trend toward service provision: of offering different modular experiences from which customers can choose depending on whim or preference. Or as Marc Pachter, director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, described his museum’s recent renovations, “You can choose your portal, you can mix and match as you want.”5 Even museum architecture has adapted accordingly—by, for instance, literally incorporating more interior portals, glimpses of faraway objects (which interject with one another), and other manners of disorientation. In Rosalind Krauss’s terms, this produces “a gesture which is simultaneously one of interest and of distraction: the serendipitous discovery of the museum as flea-market.”6 This bombarding of the viewer with choices better aligns the museum with today’s communicational protocols, and may help explain why museums have succeeded in attracting ever larger crowds while, for example, most venues for “serious” music like symphonies and operas, which are limited in their presentational options to sequencing linear, set programs, struggle. It’s precisely by falling into ruin that structures like the museum or the canon become not obsolete but updated, how the space of art and culture become most recently modernized.
Under these conditions, art criticism, at least in the United States, undergoes a substantial recasting. On the one hand, the actual practice of criticism expands from a proclivity of elites to a broad form of social labor: Rating and recommending objects and experiences has become a mainstay of today’s ubiquitous social media, as well as an important cost-free source of value-adding for retailers. On the other hand, individual response to individual objects, the baseline formula for the work of critics, dwindles in significance. That’s because today’s world of network connectivity shows little regard for isolating boundaries, either those of the sovereign individual or the discrete artwork, the two poles between which free aesthetic judgment is to be punctually exercised. A communicational paradigm places too much stress on ever-changing relations and constant interaction and feedback to support criticism’s still dominant myth—that of a lone individual, armed with little more than her or his well-tuned sensibility, facing off against a similarly delimited object, a framed artwork, or precisely themed exhibition. And little is left for critique to unmask, since communication doesn’t raise the question, as does representation, of a referentiality or truth beyond the connection. What matters instead are links and circulations.
Thus the demonstration of aesthetic refinement today is more likely to unfold via the extent of one’s horizontal and multidirectional reach across myriad cultural niches. Indeed, a more networked subject has come to the fore over the last twenty years. No longer a distilled essence of a centered culture, whether high culture’s elitist snob or mass culture’s brainwashed couch-potato, the individual becomes a de-centered actor, what sociologists like to call the “omnivore,” or what Gilles Deleuze calls a “dividual” (someone who is not a “discontinuous producer”—making or consuming discrete, similar objects one at a time—but is “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network”).7 Criticism, at least when it’s imagined to be issued from some fixed position at a distance from the field of practice, will appear limited and diminished by its immobility and withdrawal from the field’s circulatory movement. Artist Liam Gillick is one of many in the art world who have noticed how, with the “general melding of roles between artist, curator and critic,” one result today is “a concurrent diminution of the role of the semi-autonomous critical voice.”8
For a concrete example of the impact of such changes on criticism, look again at Artforum. In 1993 the magazine initiated a contributors page immediately following the table of contents. What the contributors page implied was, for one thing, expansion; in the newly globalized art world, it was no longer reasonable to assume that the magazine’s readership would recognize its authors by name alone. But the other was that recognition between readership and authorship was needed. It should be remembered that the author’s byline is itself a relatively recent invention, a modernizing innovation of the magazine and newspaper format for the purpose of rooting the previously sufficient text in an author, in a scene and an act or performance of writing as origination, in much the same way that sound recordings would later replace sheet music with a singular, originary act of embodied musical performance. The difference with Artforum in the 1990s is that it, like a lot of other magazines, introduced a contributors page not so much to tie each of its articles to a singular, unique and isolated source or origin but more so to open the articles out, to use the authors as a sort of hyperlink to myriad other professionals, sites, and projects. On the contributors page authors are introduced by a standardized biographical blurb listing professional accomplishments and affiliations, and thus each is plotted across a map of other publishers, exhibition venues, schools, art institutions and so on (and this at a moment when other areas of the magazine were becoming similarly hyperlinked, such as in the ads, which increasingly throughout the later 1990s listed email addresses and eventually websites). On the contributors page each author’s 100-word blurb—the bureaucratic CV in prose—accompanies a thumbnail head-shot (ranging in style from off-the-cuff and personal to slick and modish). Here, as a response to the twin problems of growing dispersion and anonymity on the one hand and increased interconnectedness on the other, the answer is a standardized form of introduction which, through the personalization of its address, invites intimate investment.
Another change at Artforum, one that the contributors page helps track, is the allotment of column space in the magazine to fewer independent critics and to more and more professional art historians who are more institutionally networked. The critic, by comparison, looks isolated and unconnected: she or he is too inward turned, still supposedly privileging a subjective interior, the place where the experience of art is received and submitted to aesthetic judgment. The art historian instead privileges an exterior, a field of not only other objects but also disciplinary discourses, all bridged and related. Art historians are strongly identified and integrated as professionals; they conduct their practices within institutionally defined fields that are striated and organized by title, rank, and collegiality; they belong to professional associations; they advance their respective fields by situating their efforts first and foremost in relation to contributions by fellow practitioners. In short, they are abundantly hyperlinked; with their widely disseminated and standardized institutional base of codified training, historians of contemporary art exist and operate within networks. Critics don’t have any equivalent of academia or the museum world; they lack institutional grounding and organization; they have no well-organized system of training that erects high educational barriers of qualification. They don’t have that same kind of transcontinental archipelago of professionally linked colleagues, with their cross-advertised conferences and symposia, etc., through which to travel, mingle, connect. Compared to professional historians, critics are unincorporated, even amateurish.9
Also since the mid-1990s Artforum has run more interviews, roundtable discussions and multi-authored features, which represent, over and above whatever specific topics the discussants happen to be addressing, the connectedness and “liveness” of communicational interface. Here writing, with its associations to interiority and “thinking to oneself,” is replaced by something closer to talk, which is more exteriorized and socialized, thinking that’s always addressed, that’s about transmission, that’s heard rather than overheard (to borrow John Stuart Mill’s famous distinction between rhetoric and poetics). This is another crucial ingredient in the recent construction of a new ideal for art discourse. Not only are connections to be made, but these connections need to be socially tight and thus informationally rich. Measured in communicational terms, the only thing more valuable than extensive reach is complex, intimate feedback. As organization theorist and current Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria explains, “The structure of face-to-face interaction [as compared to long-distance communication or typical customer suggestion-box mechanisms] offers an unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning … These are the relationships that provide the foundation on which the rest of the network depends.”10 And this becomes all the more important now that, instead of being based predominantly on anonymous commodity exchange or impersonal institutionalization and canonization, art-world transactions are increasingly grounded in short-term contracts that involve social interactions stressing interpersonal qualities like trustworthiness, loquaciousness, and likeability. A new art-world map is being drawn—by art magazines but also by museums, biennials, art schools, and so on—which, while omitting a centered and centering idea of culture, and leaving instead just overlapping concrete practices, appears both much bigger and much smaller, its boundless extension providing the backdrop to small pockets of high-intensity social involvement, of quasi-contract-based collaborative projects, of face-to-face interaction. This has been described as a “social turn” in art, but it’s also how business gets done today: within a vast universe of international radar blips, one zooms in here and there to join in on private, proximate performances, entering organic and immediate spaces stirred with breathy, spontaneous conversation. (Indicative here is the “Scene & Herd” column that headlines Artforum’s website, where art events spanning the globe are covered in an intimate tone and scale, an intimacy reinforced by the accompanying photos, in which effervescent encounters with fellow attendees and personalities are captured with what appears to be a handy pocket instamatic or digital point-and-shoot—or even cell phone camera—which, rather than looking in from an anonymous position outside, is instead itself entirely immersed in the action, one more spontaneous element in the participants’ overall performative play.)
Also, whereas up until the late 1980s Artforum seldom ran anything but art ads, limiting the few product advertisements that were accepted to the back of the magazine, over the course of the 1990s more and more product advertising appears—for clothes, liquor, mints, eyeglasses, restaurants, bars, airlines, hotels, even financial services—interspersed with the gallery announcements throughout the entire issue. And whereas formerly the ad section and the editorial content had been strictly segregated, now they co-mingle, alternating page to page. This mingling helps to disarticulate the editorial content and allows for more diversification, as short “think pieces” by intellectual-columnists are now interrupted by upcoming exhibition “previews” and various types of news reporting—on art institutions and their intertwined affairs, on the comings and goings of curators, etc. There are also more lists (“Hot List,” “Top Ten”), in which the designating of something as “the best” no longer isolates but integrates it into one long cue lined up with other long cues. Many of the new sections in Artforum (“Openings,” “Thousand Words,” etc.) also appear regularly. Which means that, not only does the magazine take on a more diverse institutional art system as its subject matter, but the magazine itself, as it becomes more diverse, also becomes more systematized, more templated, accommodating only those changes in content that don’t exceed its structure’s built-in flexibilities (again the website provides a clear example of this).11 And finally there is more emphasis on practical information, on news and the art world’s general functionality, which makes the magazine more a resource and guide and less a venue for criticism. It could be argued that this is indicative of a larger tension in art today—between an emphasis on practice and practicality on the one hand, on the everyday and design and even activism, and the supposed continuing need on the other hand for criticism with its refusals and negativity and its tearing things down. The annual “best and worst” section in Artforum, an occasion for more lists introduced in 1994, had the “worst” half permanently deleted only three years later, in 1997.
Many of these recent changes, especially the interspersing of advertising and editorial content, have been cited as evidence of Artforum’s decline. But that argument is exceedingly simplistic, and proves only that what’s really in decline is the ability to think critically about the current conditions of possibility for criticism itself. The more challenging argument is that Artforum has never been stronger. We may excuse ourselves that we don’t read it anymore, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming all the more paradigmatic of what it means to be an active participant in the art world today. Artforum still dominates—not despite but because of its being a magazine you only glance through. That’s how it has succeeded in updating and modernizing itself—by loosening its allegiances to an older print culture and the techniques of silent reading, so crucial to ideas of individual autonomy and interiority, of critical distance and thinking as an isolated, independent act, and instead aligning itself more to the protocols of information management, to the practices and effects of user interface and instantaneous electronic communications. Criticism might indeed matter less to Artforum today, but that doesn’t mean the magazine’s dominance has tapered. Indeed, if you look at the “Statement of Ownership” published in each year’s November issue, you’ll find that after a long stagnation lasting from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, Artforum has experienced one of its biggest jumps in overall print run, nearly sixty percent, in the past fifteen years. It’s never been more popular. To say that the Artforum of today has simply fallen below its previous standards of quality, to begrudge it for not being what it used to be, is not only nostalgic but a thorough denial of our present historical moment.
The task facing criticism today is not only to own up to these changes in the structures that govern and determine its production and dissemination, but furthermore to aggressively update the historically, collectively accumulated conceptual and rhetorical resources that constitute so much of the practice itself, its sanctioned models, categories, terminology, value assumptions and so on. Flexibility, nomadic mobility, dialogical feedback—too much art criticism still complacently assumes these to be challenges to the system, despite the fact that they are the very attributes the dominant system most loudly promotes. Applying to the art of today the same critique that was formulated thirty or more years ago actually deflects considerations of present conditions; it replaces a contemporary social frame of reference with a canonical art historical one, and diverts attention away from ruptures between then and now in favor of a reassuring illusion of historical continuity. It’s up to art criticism to prove that it can answer our present moment, not just parrot analyses from criticism’s heyday in the 1970s. Either that or admit that criticism itself has become history.
Notes
1 Robert Pincus-Witten, “Naked Lunches,” October 3 (Spring 1977), p. 104; Rosalind Krauss, “Pictorial Space and the Question of Documentary,” Artforum 10: 3 (November 1971), p. 68.
2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. xiv.
3 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977) p. 68.
4 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 66.
5 Quoted in Johanna Neuman, “A Museum with a Patented History,” Los Angeles Times (July 3, 2005), p. E36.
6 Rosalind Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum Without Walls,” in Reesa Greenberg et al., eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 245.
7 Richard Peterson, “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore,” Poetics 21 (1992), pp. 243–258; Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 5–6.
8 Liam Gillick, Proxemics: Selected Writings 1988 –2006 (Zurich: J. R. P. Ringier, 2006), p. 142.
9 In the 1960s and 70s, many of Artforum’s feature articles developed out of what were intended to be reviews—the few sectional divisions in the magazine were entirely porous. And while it’s true that many of Artforum’s early main contributors, like Michael Fried, trained in and subsequently taught academic art history, many did not (Max Kozloff left NYU’s graduate school to work fulltime as a writer and Artforum editor; painter Sidney Tillim had only a BA and Peter Plagens an MFA, etc.). As for later art historians like Krauss and Foster, they admired and identified themselves as critics first and foremost, and wrote magazine and catalogue essays almost exclusively, rather than research-laden tomes. And yet their more recent students have helped reverse this trend by embracing more academic careers and models of research and publishing.
11 Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles, “Face-to-Face: Making Network Organizations Work,” in Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992), pp. 293, 305.
12 I hesitate to even bring up Artforum’s website, especially its “Scene & Herd” column, since shifting focus to such overly caricatured and marginalized examples risks distracting from my main argument about the new priorities, behaviors, and functions of today’s art press more generally. As with most magazines, the importance of Artforum’s website as part of its overall information platform shouldn’t be overstated, if mainly because it leverages nothing near the hardcopy’s status and cultural capital and brings in comparatively little revenue. What I’m trying to stress here are new forms of organization, while also not reducing these down to a matter of particular technologies (e.g., websites on the internet), since such a move invites determinist fantasies that risk losing sight of other forces—changes in culture, social structure, markets, etc.—that are relatively, but significantly, independent of developments in the various technologies they draw on.