ART CRITICISMSM2273

CHARLOTTE FROST

COURSE INTRODUCTION

WHAT?

In this class we will:

• Investigate the concepts, genres, formats and practices of art criticism (and art writing in all its expanded forms)

• Describe, analyse, interpret and judge a variety of artworks

• Research and contextualise art and understand the role of art history in framing artistic value

• Produce quality responses to art across a range of formats and develop our own distinct critical voices

WHERE

Everywhere!

See the website for schedule, assessments, resources and reminders of what to bring and when:

http://artcriticism.digitalcritic.org

As well as the ‘blogazine’ you will be filling with quality art criticism!

WHAT IS AN ART CRITIC?

WHAT IS AN ART CRITIC?

60 Wrd/Min Art Critic (2009-) Lori Waxman

THE HISTORY OF ART CRITICISM IN THE WEST

Art historian Dario Gamboni suggests that:

"In a narrow sense, 'art criticism' applies to a specific literary genre that appeared in France in the eighteenth century, at the moment when public exhibitions were once again regularly organised, and of which the Salons of Diderot can be considered a paradigm. In a broad sense, it designates any commentary of a contemporary or past work of art, encompassing other literary genres such as poetry, fiction, biography, essays, correspondence or diaries."

(Gamboni, D. (1994) ‘The relative autonomy of art criticism’ in Orwicz, M. R. ed. (1994) Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 182)

One of the earliest recorded ‘art critics’ was British artist Jonathan Richardson the Elder.

He wrote a number of books in the 1700s which featured the term 'art criticism' and which set out a method for assessing the quality of a painting.

In fact, he created a scorecard that featured seven criteria anyone could use to judge art.

His methods coincided with a rise in art appreciation amongst the middle-classes and contributed new ways of talking about art.

However it was really in Paris, where public exhibitions of art were becoming popular that the genre of art criticism really takes form.

Known as Salons and organised by the French artistic academies, these public art exhibitions provided people with the opportunity to experience vast numbers of artworks.

There was always a catalogue provided which offered a small amount of information on each artwork but soon, independent writers opted to produce and sell pamphlets offering their own take on the works on show or even write for newspapers.

'Portrait of Denis Diderot‘ (1713-1784) Louis-Michel van Loo

Chief among these independent writers was Denis Diderot who began to critique the Salons in 1759.

For a time, the king of France had banned art criticism after a writer named La Font de Saint-Yenne stirred up controversy with an overtly political critique of work in the 1747 Salon.

As an initial reaction, the Salon itself was cancelled until 1751 and then independent writing on art was suppressed for some years.

As a result, Diderot's first writings were published in a periodical which, though outlawed in Paris, mailed its editions to a secret set of international subscribers twice a month.

The clandestine nature of publishing his writings meant he was relatively little known until the 1870s and 1880s when he was increasingly seen as an exemplary art critic.

Art historian Kerr Houston argues that you can observe in Diderot's writing the early formation of a type of art writing that fused personal reflection with careful description of the artworks. (Houston, K. (2013) An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc)

In the UK the Royal Academy of Arts formed in 1768 and a similar body of art critical writers to those in France amassed.

In Europe, art criticism steadily grew alongside the newspaper industry and journalism.

Art historians Dario Gamboni and Martha Ward remind us that from the start, art criticism was a precarious profession: few art critics had any training in the arts, and the role itself was usually part-time, or rather only part of what they wrote about as journalists.

Martha Ward notes that different papers took different approaches with Le Petit Journal in France offering a once-a-year slot to reviews of annual Salons. (Ward, M. (1994) ‘From art criticism to art news: journalistic reviewing in late-nineteenth-century Paris’ in Orwicz, M. R. ed. (1994) Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 162-181.)

Other papers introduced art news in their gossipy feuilleton supplements.

Gradually, writing about art crept into the mainstream press and began to assume a certain form.

The French Revolution (1789-99) saw dramatic change across France with a brief period of great creative freedom for artists and critics as the Salons became more open.

New political leadership by Napoleon saw stricter press regulations in the late 1700s and early 1800s yet art criticism usually escaped control and as a result, was often laced with political commentary. It became a vehicle for wider issues - much like the art to which it referred.         

In fact, criticism took a number for forms over these years. Art historian Michael Orwicz explains in his entry on ‘Art Criticism’ in the Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics that:

“Salon reviews in mid-to-late nineteenth-century France, for example, could take the form of vaudeville, verse, caricatures, schematic diagrams, feuilletons, essays, books, albums, and pamphlets.”

(Orwicz, M. (1998) ‘Art Criticism’ in Kelly, M. ed (1998) Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University

Press: 464).

He asserts that this variety was mirrored in the range of people drawn to this activity. For example civil servants made redundant by the fall of Napoleon’s empire often chose writing careers.

One example of this is Marie-Henri Beyle who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Stendhal’ and produced a number of critical works.  

Another type of writer who has regularly taken on the art critical task is the poet.

One of the first of these to gain notoriety was Charles Baudelaire who wrote his earliest Salon critique in 1846.

Influenced by Diderot, and urging artists to move towards an art that might capture the zeitgeist – rather than rehashing the pros and cons of classical versus Romantic painting – he sought to translate the artistic experience into words, rather than just describe and judge artworks. This made him the quintessential modern critic who demonstrated how contemporary art advanced ideas about contemporary life.

By the early 1990s Guillaume Apollinaire, another poet and playwright, gained attention for writing about Modernists – including being one of the first critics to write about Picasso and as Kerr Houston notes, he bequeathed important art historical vocabulary:

“In his writings he introduced Parisians to the work of the painter Marc Chagall, and his willingness to use an inventive vocabulary in referring to emerging trends ultimately left a deep imprint on the history of art. He was one of the earliest art critics to use the term Cubism (which was apparently derived from a reference, by Matisse, to the ‘petits cubes’ of certain artists, and is said to have introduced the art world to the terms Orphism and, in 1917, surrealism.”

(Houston, K. (2013) An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc: 48)

In the UK, artist John Ruskin made a name for himself as an art critic by championing the work of J.M.W. Turner.

Turner’s increasingly abstract style had drawn criticism in the early 1800s from art critics such as William Hazlitt and Sir George Beaumont.

Ruskin however argued that Turner’s evolving style showed he was getting closer to nature not farther away and, alongside others who appreciated this change, he altered popular opinion on the painter’s work.

Ruskin wrote a number of books in a series he called Modern Painters eventually becoming even more well remembered for his connections to the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood.

Roger Fry, a British art historian is perhaps most noted for coining the term and developing the concept of ‘Post-Impressionism’.

He was extremely interested in the type of art developing in France and was well aware of the art historical impact it was going to have.

In 1910 his London exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ demonstrated the work of Paul Gaugin, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Vincent Van Gogh and in itself constituted a critical statement on the future of art.

Along with friend and critic Clive Bell, Fry developed both a British taste for Modernism and an approach to art criticism that emphasised the form of an artwork over its content.

Fry was also responsible for tightening up and formalizing approaches to writing about art. Less keen on the poetic styles that had thrived in France, Fry would close read artworks without recourse to their context or history. While Herbert Read, influenced by Fry’s interest in Modernism, focused instead on homegrown Modernists such as Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson and wrote in a highly accessible style.

However the critic who most springs to mind when conjuring the image of an art critic is Clement Greenberg.

Art criticism in the US in the early 1900s promoted very conservative ideals and writers such as Kenyon Cox and Royal Cortissoz championed realism and technical proficiency.

It was against this backdrop that the Armory Show (first staged in 1913) featuring the work of Modernist artists and less traditional voices such as Willard Huntington Wright began to usher in an appreciation for abstraction.

A number of factors contributed to rapid change in the American art scene. Though US critics had begun to embrace Fry’s formalism, the Great Depression caused them to reconsider the impact of economics, politics and local cultures on art.

Marxist theory fuelled this shift in thinking and many critics soon began to advocate for art that reflected the times.

Likewise, in the face of global unrest, US artists and critics were interested in developing an authentic American art.

Though initial nationalist work was realist, as the World Wars forced more European creatives to seek sanctuary in New York, American began to develop different tastes.

One of the earliest indicators of this change came in 1943 when artists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman wrote a manifesto for art that employed abstraction as a way to underscore the physical parameters of a painting. Their manifesto was published in the New York Times and New York artists, gallerists and critics took note.

Kerr Houston describes how art critic Clement Greenberg responded:

“In 1947, for example, Clement Greenberg, who had worked as a translator and customs agent before beginning to write criticism in 1937, wrote in Horizon that Pollock, who had recently begun to pour paint directly onto the canvas, was ‘the most powerful painter in contemporary America.’ Arguing that the violence of Pollock’s work recalled that of Faulter, and Melville, Greenberg proposed an essentially American interpretation of the artist that clearly reflected the nationalist approach that was now more than a decade old.”

(Houston, K. (2013) An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc: 56)

Although it was Harold Rosenberg who expanded the idea of the ‘Amercian Action Painters’ as artists who documented artistic action on canvas, and although it was largely the publication ARTnews that developed a robust archive of writing about American Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg stands out as the quintessential American art critic.

This was because for the next twenty years he would build a reputation as an essential art commentator, identifying the new, connecting it to wider art history and demonstrating it’s critical value and Americanness. His writing closely impacted the art market and prices began to soar for artists he favoured.

Though Greenberg was very much a product of his time, his importance was carried over when critics such as Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss adopted and expanded upon his formalist approach in the publication Artforum.

Artforum quickly became an important source of this burgeoning American brand of contemporary art criticism. And even as writers and publications developed alternatives to Greenberg’s approach, he lived on as a popular figure to argue with or against.

Likewise, even though important critical voices have developed all over the world, it is still arguably the US that produces the most influential critics including Arthur Danto, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz (even if that influence has come into question in recent years).

Along with Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss went on to found the journal October, in 1976, in order to provide a dedicated publication for more critically and philosophically-rigorous art writing.

In terms of the history of art criticism this marks an important shift for not only does it indicate the rise of critical theory as a way of analyzing art, but to a certain extent it also signals the start of art criticism’s institutionalization and subsequent ghettoization.

At this point art criticism was viewed as a deeply academic pursuit, cut-off from everyday discussions about culture and politics. Indeed, October’s writers were often academics – including Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh – and  even though critics continued to produce less theoretical texts for national newspapers the world over, as we will shortly see, art criticism had lost its relevance somehow.

THE CRISES OF ART CRITICISM

Image rom seanbelcher.com

There have been many claims that art criticism is in a state of crisis at symposia (such as the now infamous October roundtable discussion held in 2002, ‘The Trouble With Art Criticism’ held at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art in 2011; ‘I’m for an art criticism that...’ hosted at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam in 2012; and ‘Art criticism in the future media landscape’ organised by the Association of International Art Critics and staged in Stockholm in 2013) and in books (such as What Happened to Art Criticism (2003), by art historian James Elkins, Critical Mess, edited by critic Raphael Rubinstein (2006) and The State of Art Criticism edited again by Elkins and art historian Michael Newman (2008). )

Some argue that the crisis is felt more because up until Kerr Houston’s 2013 publication An Introduction to Art Criticism, there were few accounts of the history of art criticism – (save for Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism from 1936 and volume in French called L’invention de la Critique d’Art edited by Jean Marc-Poinsot and Henry Fragne from 2002).

As a result, it has been harder to look at the longer history of art criticism and draw parallels between the writers of Salon critiques and, say, today’s online art critics – even though both tended to publish independently, use a conversational style and have a portfolio career.

Although it is widely agreed by many art critics and historians (including JJ Charlesworth, Whitney Davis, Michael Duncan, James Elkins, Eleanor Heartney, Dave Hickey, Kerr Houston, Thomas McEvilley, Michael Newman, Peter Plagens, Nancy Princenthal, Carter Ratcliff, Lane Relyea, Raphael Rubinstein, Jerry Saltz, Katy Siegel) that the art critic as a figure has lost power.

Or as New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz has put it:

“At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now.”

(Saltz, J. (2006) ‘Silence of the Dealer’ in Modern Painters, September 2006: 35)

On the whole, Clement Greenberg is seen as the last critic whose opinions held tremendous critical and financial sway. Art historian James Elkins and art critic Peter Plagens both note how today we are in a paradoxical situation where more commentary is produced on contemporary art than ever before, and yet is seldom read, so has little real impact on artists careers. As Elkins puts it in his much cited book What Happened to Art Criticism?:

“[s]o in brief, this is the situation of art criticism: it is practiced more widely than ever before, and almost completely ignored."

(Elkins, J. (2003) What Happened to Art Criticism. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press: 5).

Elkins further argues that one of the main problems with today’s art criticism is that it has ceased to make judgments.

He cites the 2002 report by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Programme which found that judgment was way down the list of an art critic’s priorities (Szántó, A. (2002) ‘The Visual Art Critic: A survey of art critics at general-interest news publications in America’. A report conducted at the National Arts Journalism Program Columbia University).

This is reflected Houston’s 2013 guide to art criticism which places the chapter on judgment after description and contextualisation (Houston, K. (2013) An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.)

While Arthur C. Danto is held up as the exemplar of non-critical criticism by critics such as Raphael Rubenstein (Rubinstein, R. (date) ‘title’ in Rubinstein, R. ed. (2006) Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. Lenox, Massachusetts: Hard Press Editions: 33).

Plagens explains how viewing art – despite a dramatic rise in museum visitor numbers in recent years – is still a niche activity that doesn’t engage the average person on the street:

“The majority of contemporary art still consists of one-of-a-kind art objects. That fact alone puts contemporary art at a disadvantage regarding coverage. Simply stated, tens of thousands of times more readers see the movie or hear the CD or watch the television program than view the art object(s) under consideration.”

(Plagens, P. (2007) ‘Contemporary Art, Uncovered’, Art in America, v.95 (no.2) Fall, 2007: 49).

Added to this, he points out that many people still regard viewing art as an activity they need special skills to participate in, and they also feel these are skills bestowed only upon certain, wealthier, social groups.

The poet and art critic Thomas McEvilley notes that this, in effect, ‘ghettoization’ of the arts, means that art critical commentary is really only of use to other arts professionals. (McEvilley, T. (1995) ‘The Tomb of the Zombie’ in Rubinstein, R. ed. (2006) Critical Mess: Art

Critics on the State of their Practice. Lenox, Massachusetts: Hard Press Editions: 15).

The fact few people actually read art criticism might also be due to the opacity of much art writing; Plagens asks outright why art critics aren’t better writers? (Plagens, P. (2007) ‘Contemporary Art, Uncovered’, Art in America, v.95 (no.2) Fall, 2007: 49).

Critics Michael Duncan, Helen Princenthal and Lane Relyea all observe something of a power struggle between different modes of art writing (Rubinstein, R. ed. (2006) Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. Lenox, Massachusetts: Hard Press Editions).

Often this is posed as the ‘impressionistic, belles-lettristic, essayist, rhetorical’ and even at times judgmental work often of poet critics, versus the critical theory-infused academic mode of writing about art. (Siedell, D. A. (2008) ‘Academic Art Criticism’ in Elkins, J. and Newman, M. ed. (2008) The State of Art Criticism. New York: Routledge: 244)

The relentless professionalization of the arts is also to blame for cutting art criticism off, according to Relyea. As soon as art departments began to regulate the skills required for art world acceptance and art criticism was absorbed into this system, its precarious value system was exposed. (Rubinstein, R. ed. (2006) Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. Lenox, Massachusetts: Hard Press Editions).

Or a Michael Duncan has it:

“For critics the slippery slope to irrelevancy has been greased by academia. Decades ago, the value judgments that were once the core of criticism were exiled from art departments, the victims of a double whammy of deconstructive theory and political correctness.”

Duncan, M. (2006) ‘Buggy-making in Tulip Time’ in Rubinstein, R. ed. (2006) Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. Lenox, Massachusetts: Hard Press Editions: 111.)

The biggest indicator that there might be a serious problem with art criticism is simply that many full-time art critics are losing their jobs.

Plagens explains that although there is more writing on art than ever before, conversely, fewer newspapers across the US are featuring any of it.

Gallerist Edward Winkleman describes the popular narrative of the art critic’s rise through the ranks:

“The narrative for most art journalists (that is, a writer whose publisher/editors discovered they had, in addition to strong journalistic instincts, a knack for the complex task of translating the visual language of fine art into words) like any journalist, used to be they would find or be assigned a particular beat and cover it consistently for a specific publication or media outlet (i.e., TV or radio network) that had a budget to cover travel expenses (e.g., to send them to the Venice Biennial or Documenta or to interview an artist or museum director half way across the country) and a decent full-time salary with benefits. If they were notably successful, they might be hired away by a bigger publication/network or an arts-specific publication, often becoming a semi-celebrity within the art world, getting lecturing gigs or panel discussion invitations, possibly becoming the editor of a major arts publication/network, and hopefully eventually publishing their collected works in a book or two or launching their own TV series.”

(Winkleman, E. (2013) ‘A Conversation with Tyler Green on the Art Journalist's "Narrative"’ edward_winkleman, 9th July 2013: http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2013/07/a-conversation-with-tyler-green-on-art.html)

But in an interview with blogging critic Tyler Green, suggests that this model is all but dead.

In 2011 art critic at Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel, Mary-Louise Schumacher, started chronicling job losses across the US in her sector, compiling footage for a documentary on the plight of the American art critic.

Schumacher noticed how art critics’ roles were regularly absorbed or merged with other journalistic duties and how they often faced having to rapidly expand their skill-set so they could manage social media accounts and stables of regular arts bloggers, for example.

As if to prove a point, two prominent voices in debates about the crisis of art criticism, James Elkins and Dave Hickey – who, interestingly, occupy different ends of the spectrum in terms of academic art historian and journalistic critic – have thrown themselves from art criticism’s sinking ship.

Elkins is moving into creative writing while Hickey, who is at retirement age, said he was abandoning an insular and money-motivated scene quite unlike the one he was drawn to in the first place.

Meanwhile others have observed the meteoric rise of the independent curator, or, as art critic Jennifer Allen puts it, the ‘curator-critic’. (Allen, J. (2008) ‘Death Becomes Them’ Frieze no. 114, April 2008: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/death_becomes_them/).

The global expansion of the contemporary art market and with it, the growth of the biennial and art fair scene has dramatically altered art world terrain.

The so-called gatekeepers are now more likely to be curators who work internationally and often independently selecting artworks and introducing equally itinerant collectors to them.  

Writer Randy Kennedy observes:

“Over the last decade, as the contemporary art world has grown to planetary size – more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling Web sites, bigger museums, new biennials almost by the month – it has sometimes seemed as if a new kind of cultural figure has been born as well: the international curator, constantly in flight to somewhere.”

(Kennedy, R. (2012) ‘The Fine Art of Being a Curator’, New York Times, 18th July 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/arts/design/as-the-art-world-grows-so-does-the-curators-field.html?_r=0)

As artist and eflux founder Anton Vidokle explains, that the contemporary curator can fuse an independent critical voice with a more directly institutional source of legitimacy and it’s a potent force.

On top of this, the concept of curation has been expanded to include all manner of things. In light of social media for example, adding things a Pinterest board is considered curating.

Or as an article for the New York Times on popular uses of the term puts it:

“The Tipping Point, a store in Houston that calls itself a sneaker lifestyle shop, does not just sell a collection of differently coloured rubber soles, along with books, music and apparel. No, its Web site declares the store ‘curate’s its merchandise. Promoters at Piano’s, a nightclub on the Lower East Side, announced on their Web site that they will ‘curate a night of Curious burlesque’. Eric Demby, a founder of the Brooklyn Flea swap meet, does not hire vendors to serve grilled cheese sandwiches, pickles and tamales to hungry shoppers. He ‘personally curates the food stands,’ according to New York magazine.”

(Williams, A. (2009) ‘On the Tip of Creative Tongues’, New York Times, 2nd October 2009:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html?pagewanted=all)

ART CRITICISM IN ASIA

So, why all this focus on the West? We’re in Hong Kong!

Well, its because art criticism is a largely Western phenomenon.

China was oblivious to the various genres and movements that characterise Modern and Contemporary art in the West until very recently. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Chinese artists first encountered the Western Modernist canon and often worked hard to assimilate its various features in their own practice.

The figure of the Western art critic was inextricably bound in the Western history of art.

Clement Greenberg, the most popular example of the concept of the art critic was as much a part of the Modernist scene as Abstract Expressionism itself.

So at the same time as Chinese artists were first exposed to art forms that were not a part of their own art experience, they were likewise introduced to a writerly practice called ‘art criticism’.

The crisis of art criticism here then is something quite different, as art critic and curator Pauline J. Yao explains:

“The most frequently heard refrain around the proverbial water cooler of the Chinese contemporary art world (next to the lament that there are no real curators) is that there are no real art critics. This position has been widely echoed in international art circles where every year we hear the exhortation that criticism is dead and then a panel is quickly thrown together (usually at an art fair) to discuss the ‘crisis in art criticism’. But while in the West people seem to lament the relevance or efficacy of art criticism, we inside Asia seem hard-pressed to locate it in the first place.”

(Yao, P.J. (2008) ‘Critical Horizons – On art criticism in China’ in Diaaalogue, Asia Art Archive, December 2008: http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/592)

So we need to consider:

1. Whether Asia really wants this approach to understanding art? If artists here have produced beautiful works of art for thousands of years without designated writers to describe, analyse, interpret and evaluate their work in this way, why would they need them now?

2. Is art criticism still an essential force on the art market? The Asian art market is growing at a rapid pace and many urge that the bubble will burst without respected figures to pronounce on which art is significant and which isn’t.

In an article for Time Out Hong Kong, art writer Edmund Lee asserts that:

“While there’s an enviable degree of artistic freedom in Hong Kong when compared to the Mainland, what we lack sorely is a culture of professional art criticism that could effectively give the artists an honest assessment on their practice – an essential part of the art ecology to situate the art created into a larger discourse. Good critics usually make good curators, but when critics are largely absent and artists begin to regard staying in the profession as a triumph in itself, it becomes increasingly difficult for Hong Kong art to rise above its sideshow status to the city’s prospering market.

(Lee, E (22nd May 2013) ‘Is Hong Kong Ready for Contemporary Art?’, in Time Out, Hong Kong:

http://www.timeout.com.hk/art/features/58536/is-hong-kong-ready-for-contemporary-art.html)

3. What might Asian art criticism look like? If the philosophical theories and art histories that support the Western practice of art criticism are imports, is there a way we might develop a more Asia-appropriate approach to evaluating art? And if so, what might we do differently?  Or does a Western-style art market need a Western-style criticism?  

We therefore have a very special task in this class.

We’re pioneers!

Not only do we get to consider what it takes to experience and interpret art…not only do we get to intensively develop our own personal critical voices that will be unique to each and every one of us…but we also get to consider what the practice of art criticism could and should be in Hong Kong today.  

WHAT IS AN ART CRITIC?

NEXT WEEK

Come to next class with your laptop and an example of a book, movie or album you either really like or really hate and be prepared to tell the world why.

Any questions come talk to me or email clfrost@cityu.edu.hk