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ОглавлениеWhy Art Criticism? An Introduction
Right now, the voices calling for criticism, value-apportioning evaluation, and intervention are urgent and loud, in both social and academic contexts. “On the life of criticism”—the title of Ruth Sonderegger’s1 study, highlights the topicality, vibrance, and power of criticism while also shifting the focus away from the definition of terms and concepts and toward critical practices. But art criticism—a critical praxis that has mostly sought for and established relations to social phenomena—has had a difficult time of late. Even if no form of criticism is ever without its own crisis, recent attacks have been particularly intense, striking at the very foundations of art criticism. This introduction explores those attacks, with the hope that the panorama of art-critical positions collected within this reader can also vividly demonstrate the value of art criticism for the present time.
A peak in these condemnations occurred in a 2002 round table hosted and printed by—of all publications—the journal October;2 which, since its launch in 1976, has been one of the most important organs for critical reflection on art. October does not merely cultivate a politically engaged style; it also defends the use of strong criteria. And it is these which (according to depressing reports) have disappeared, having gone the same way as categories of classification. Some lament that art criticism has lost its independent voice; has become an art-industry mouthpiece and even a scribe to the royal court of the arts; mere applause for the artistic voices that the critic is promulgating. Given the dominance of the market in the artistic field, it has been said that neither discursive space nor knowledge of context are still required. There are no longer any utopian visions, and thus no social ones.3 Criticism would therefore always participate in inescapably problematic processes of canonization that affirm social conditions and serve the market in equal measure. The skills, responsibilities, and fields of critics, historians, and curators have intermingled; art criticism has allegedly lost its ability to make judgments, reduced at best to interpretation. Many critics are blamed with having literary pretensions that compete with art and seek to seduce through language. Criticism thus either acts in sales mode, or fosters romantic notions of fusing the critical text with the object of critique.
October has made a significant contribution to focusing attention on art’s potential to be critical in its own right. The criticality of artistic work quickly became the key marker of value in art.4 Art criticism has perhaps dug its own grave: if art is critical, who needs art criticism? What can it add to art? What can criticism produce that art cannot produce itself? Beyond this, artists themselves also write, framing their work critically and formulating critiques of other artistic positions. The fact that criticality has become a market value in art does nothing to improve things.
This fierce attack from a Western flagship of art criticism is not the only one the latter has been forced to endure. Feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial arguments have, with good reason, cast doubt on one of criticism’s core tasks—judgment—while to the same degree raising questions about the related concept of the Enlightenment notion of the subject.5 The rational, Western, overwhelmingly male subject of criticism has apparently suppressed the physical, sensual, and affective elements of the critical act, disparaging them as purely subjective. An awareness of the ever-varying situatedness of those speaking would therefore be indispensable; this awareness, however, would make it possible to define the generally valid criteria that are required to make a judgment, at least in terms of any potential generalizability. There also remains the urgent question of who is ultimately permitted to speak for whom, and in whose name,6 especially when it comes to socially engaged criticism.
So what is to be done with art criticism? Especially in view of the widespread diagnosis that the transformative power of (art) criticism is disappearing, Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke assert its necessity and value; the freedom that can be found in an act of distancing that is aware of its own participation and even its entanglement in what is being criticized.7 The relational concept of criticism they have proposed and that Graw has further pursued in collaboration with Sabeth Buchmann involves reflection on one’s own discriminations—both in the sense of discerning and distinguishing differences as part of the critical act, and in terms of the exclusions that each act of differentiation must entail.8 Given that art criticism refers to a subject matter—the artwork—that is in turn the result of a sensual, reflexive act that articulates itself in specific materials and media, we feel art criticism has a unique potential to take what has often been excluded from the Western notion of criticism—the affective, the physical and sensual, the involved—and showcase it as part of the critical act.
There have been intense discussions in recent years on how to reach transculturally informed understandings of an art that is subject to globalized conditions. Only recently, however, has the significance this expanded art field has for art criticism come into consideration.9 The journal Contemporary And is named here as an example, initially presenting and discussing art from African perspectives. It has since founded a second magazine focusing on Latin America.10 Our reader is an attempt to bring diverse voices and perspectives into conversation with each other, but to do so without claiming to be comprehensive, nor to provide a systematic index or illustrate the history of art critique through model texts by its most important purveyors. We see this reader neither as an expanded canon, nor as a new anti-canon. Our aim is rather to create a renewed awareness of the historical and contemporary plurality of art critique; to demonstrate its value and diversity as a genre and highlight what is has to offer to social discourses.
Criteria
Among the authors included in this volume, Stefan Germer emphasizes the necessity of forming criteria, even if the problematic nature of generally binding critical yardsticks and normative decrees is very much at the fore. For Germer, art criticism’s role and function is to make distinctions and review them—and even go so far as to evaluate them—in relation to both artistic-aesthetic questions and sociopolitical ones. This not only addresses the content-form debate—that is to say, the question of how the subject matter of an artwork is determined by the form and medium of representation or placed in a certain light;11 it also speaks to an aporia, vital among other things to the formation of criteria, that exists within modern art or at least what is regarded as avant-garde. This aporia plays an important role in many of the contributions gathered here: namely, the question of how artistic criteria should be linked to political issues.12
Within the avant-gardes of around 1900, there were demands for art to intervene in life—even to merge with it—and to therefore counteract the impotence of an increasingly self-referential art. But to have any kind of potency as art, even the avant-garde must assert a right to autonomy; to an at least relative self-governance and liberation from any other purposes and vested interests. However, this results in a disentanglement from the social and a loss of potency. The question of the relationship between art and politics has vehemently returned to the stage, especially with the attention paid to global entanglements in the artistic field.13 This is linked to the challenge of defining the criteria that can still be used to assess artistic works, given that the possibility of making normative justifications and the fiction of independent criticism have both reached their ends.
Another important criterion is in which (socio-)political issues are picked up on, made visible, problematized, or criticized in artistic work. Whether sexism (Annemarie Sauzeau-Boetti, Adwait Singh), racism, or post-Fordist labor relations (Melanie Gilligan, Aruna D’Souza); commodity fetishism (Walid Sadek), social change, and environmental destruction (Arlene Raven); territorial struggles (Helia Darabi, Lothar Lang, Marta Traba, Igor Zabel), or war and its cultural consequences (Ješa Denegri, Sadek, Luis Vidales); art criticism’s task in each case involves highlighting the means and persuasion with which each of these sets of issues is articulated.
Art critiques that place form in the foreground of their reflections cannot dispense with commentary on what has been expressed in a particular form, even when they insist on a pitiless self-reflection on artistic materials, media, and procedures. The spectrum ranges from the communication of creative, spiritual power (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Roger Fry) or authenticity (Victor Hakim) to expressions of the body (Roland Barthes, Patrick Mudekereza, Francis Ponge) and questioning the appropriateness of a form in relation to its function (Clemens Brentano/Achim von Arnim).
A differently incisive criterion for exploring the interconnection of art and politics is the social value imparted via artistic form and artistic practice. Even where self-exploration through aesthetic experience—as it was understood from an Enlightenment perspective—is seen critically (Gilligan, Peter Gorsen), experiences of community are showcased either through artistic production itself (Coomaraswamy), via collective artistic practices (Raven, Vidales), or via shared experiences in the (self-)perception of artists (Denegri, Sauzeau-Boetti).
From his place on the left of the political spectrum, Peter Gorsen supports the provocative position that art should not be at the direct service of society. Rather than advocating for the rejection of the culture industry, he pleads for pleasure—and explicitly not in the sense of bourgeois pleasure in art. Gorsen instead demands new, (un)productive forms and experiences through art, to be generated within the framework of non-instrumental networks. He thus addresses a criterion utilized in equal measure both by art criticism and in artistic-critical practices: particularly addressing the cultural, institutional, and economic conditions in which art is produced, received, and distributed (Lawrence Alloway, Mary Josephson, Oscar Masotta, Hito Steyerl, Julia Voss).
We have covered only some of the central criteria (and these by no means represent all art-critical criteria) deployed in this volume. They hold their ground with remarkable persistence, from the beginnings of modern criticism in the mid-eighteenth century up until the present, and across cultural, political, and intellectual divides.
Tasks and Roles
Having problematized judgment as a task of art criticism, the question arises of what other or further roles it has, given that many critics remain wedded to judgment as one of criticism’s core roles. Hal Foster made a number of suggestions in the aforementioned October round table;14 art criticism could, for instance, work archeologically to bring what has been buried, suppressed, and forgotten to light. Not only a memory-related role, but also a political one would therefore be evoked. By changing the focus and shifting the subject of attention, art criticism can also govern processes of canonization—and is also able to shed light on the justifications and categories behind these processes. According to Foster, art criticism can also take an explorative approach, researching figures at the margins of the art field and, in the most high-impact case, even establishing a new paradigm for evaluating art. With such a tableau of tasks, however, the already-blurred line between art criticism and art history becomes even hazier.15 This reader, however, does not seek to mark boundaries; its aim is rather to make visible the variety of tasks and roles that art criticism could assume.
It remains a key function of each form of criticism and of art criticism in particular to intervene in artistic and social fields and to raise objections against any such restrictions. Given the increased attention being paid to the globality of the art field, many art critics feel it important to give hitherto neglected tendencies and regions their own voices (Darabi, Sadek, Zabel), to probe territories anew (Denegri, Traba, Vidales), to highlight hierarchical structures, power imbalances, and inequalities (D’Souza, Traba), and to unfold new narratives at the same time (Darabi, Allan Sekula, Zabel).16 Two Latin American critics illustrate how these evaluations of hegemonic structures in the art field can or should be countered. Traba separates the Latin American art scene into open and closed areas; into areas open to Western influence, and ones that have insisted on their own autonomy. While she preferred “closed areas” due to the identity-creating power of art (see also Coomaraswamy), Vidales advocated a generation later for an opening to US artistic practices—an opening the critic hoped would lead to a revitalization of art in Colombia and an increased attention being paid to Colombian art, as part of an art understood as universal. This optimism about globalization is one that Vidales shares with a number of others, such as Zabel or, to a more limited extent, with Darabi. Critiques of humanism can be found from decolonial, feminist, and queer perspectives (Coomaraswamy, Sauzeau-Boetti, Singh, Lynne Tillman). This is a context in which representational or identity-centered arguments are often accompanied with the assertion of stigmatized or neglected categories—the artisanal, material, and spiritual (Coomaraswamy, Sauzeau-Boetti), the affective or the physical (Mudekereza, Raven, Tillman).
Art criticism’s mappings of the artistic field often come in the wake of wars and the formation of new political systems (Denegri, Lang, Sadek); here, art criticism is ascribed not only a documentary/archival role (Vardan Azatyan, Hakim, New Culture magazine, Sekula), but also a very diagnostic, politically orienting, or even world-changing one (Alexander Rodchenko, Mark Sinker, Sergei Tretyakov). This empowerment of the collective—against the grain of the humanist, Enlightenment notion of subject-creation through art—is a task frequently assigned not just to art, but also to art criticism: the latter would thus be capable of emphasizing the assembling power of art—its ability to bring people and concepts together—and its transcultural potential, but also its potential to create cultural, national, or political identities (Coomaraswamy, Denis Diderot, Fry, New Culture, Raven, Sauzeau-Boetti, Traba, Vidales) and to create networks (Alloway).
These notions and processes are often viewed critically, however. The social and economic conditions and exhibition politics under which art operates are analyzed from institutional-critical positions, as are the ways the various protagonists understand their own roles. Events behind the scenes are brought to light—how commissions are granted, for instance (Berta Zuckerkandl). Exclusions in the form of gatekeeeping, value-generating network creation (Claire Bishop, Masotta), and infrastructural constraints (Mudekereza) are addressed, as are race, gender, and class discriminations (D’Souza, Josephson, Peter Richter, Sinker, Singh) and questions of representation itself (Darabi, Rodschenko,Traba). Institutional issues are often spoken to in art criticism written by artists; these critiques provide a theoretical background to the artistic works of their authors, while at the same time explaining it, expanding upon it, defending it, or even undermining it (Masotta, Gilligan, Steyerl).
The translation of artistic issues and the strengthening of their impacts was already present as a concern in early art criticism (Diderot, Brentano/von Arnim) and is taken up anew and in different ways in the twentieth century (Barthes, Fry, Julius Meier-Graefe). Others set a different emphasis by observing where artists and critics share common strategies and alliances—whether shared concepts, values, and ideas (Sauzeau-Boetti, Sadek), comparable economic situations (Ponge), or the blurring of lines between roles with the aim of disrupting hierarchies. Some critics focus resolutely on addressing a broader public audience (D’Souza, Hakim, Lang, Tillman, Traba), something which depends not least on the publication media and also impacts their styles of writing. This also demonstrates how valuable art criticism is in discussions of social structure and urgent societal and political questions.
Styles and Modes of Writing
The question here is which manners, forms, genres, styles, and modes of writing art criticism can use to bring its interventions and its value to bear. All criticism is bound to the forms and media in which its descriptions appear,17 but criticism does not merely reconstruct its subject matter; it is rather the modes of representation, the styles, and the media that highlight particular aspects of the subject matter and the conditions surrounding it, placing it in a new light. Criticism always spotlights, frames, and illuminates its subject in a specific way; in doing so, it also creates visibility for the process of critiquing and the situation in which it takes place. Criticism thus implicitly or explicitly also addresses the techniques and processes of critical description; these are in turn participants in the constitution of the subject matter as it appears within critique. This means that when the mode of description changes, criticism’s subject matter changes, too.
By way of its subject matter alone, art criticism knows the power of representation, as one of its tasks is evidently to describe and examine that very power. One of this reader’s aims is to highlight the diversity of art-critical modes of description and/or representation and their effects; we thus asked the authors of the commentaries to speak to the peculiarities of the various styles and modes of writing they selected. According to Roland Barthes, these differ in the following ways:18 style is a “self-sufficient language”19 which, based on linguistic conventions and grammatical norms, unfurls from within the writer. Regarding the mode of writing—Barthes’s translators called this literary form—we speak rather of the relation between the written and the social; Barthes speaks of “literary language transformed by its social finality,”20 the “morality of form.”21 Art criticism refers to an artwork, to a materialized approach to the world that has taken form; and it addresses an audience. This means that art criticism is writing that refers to an outside in two ways, yet can be shaped by an author’s will to write in a particular style.
The relationship between self-sufficient modes of expression and reference to the subject matter, world, or society always varies in how it plays out. In the early days of art criticism around 1800, it was often understood as a space in which the artwork resonated (Diderot, Brentano/von Arnim); a notion that one hundred years later is taken up again in the specific literary form of Kunstschriftstellerei (Meier-Graefe), whose German appellation can only loosely be translated as “literary art writing”; but it is also deployed in critiques that understand form as a medium of communication (Coomaraswarmy, Fry). Here, the authors are concerned with amplifying the message hidden within the work of art, doing so via expression that is both linguistically adequate and conscious of form. This is proof at the same time of the author’s will to pursue style; of the author’s descriptive skill. Last but not least, a form of criticism that linguistically reinforces the qualities of an artistic work in this way also serves as a testament to the validity of the author’s own understanding of art; discussed in emphatic terms, the work demonstrates the impact art can have, with the impact corresponding to the critic’s own criteria (Diderot, Meier-Graefe). Another form of resonance is the recording of bodily, affective reactions to an artistic work; reactions that are then showcased as a factor within the critique (Barthes, Mudekereza, Raven, Richter, Tillman). Ponge, for his part, anthropomorphizes painting to highlight parallels in the material, social, and economic contingencies of criticism and its subject matter.
During the twentieth century, there emerged a demand to find (or invent) new modes of writing that would be adequate to developments in contemporary art, thus enabling art criticism to play a greater role in debates beyond art (Bataille, Raven, Sekula). This can come in the form of modes of writing not previously regarded as criticism, such as autofiction or fictional criticism (Sinker, Tillman); text/image constellations (Bataille, New Culture, Sekula); or unusual print type, via which the changes in criteria, argument, and modes of writing are also shown visually. Another tried and tested method is for the critic to write in voices other than their own. With his alter ego Mary Josephson, Brian O’Doherty exposes the patriarchal power structures of the art field. With Berta Zuckerkandl’s leak, it is not the critic herself who provides information; rather, it is letters sent by figures whose cultural policies are being denounced by their own writing.
Differing modes of writing are also conditioned by varied political contexts. In times of revolution and upheaval, art criticism can become a form of agitation, bringing art itself along with it in pursuit of shared political goals (Tretyakov). In political systems that make offensive interventions into the artistic field, smart language games can evade the censor, without abandoning the mission of criticism. Ultimately, and as previously outlined, the mode of writing in each form of art criticism is ultimately produced by its media and genres.
Genre and Media
Art critiques can diverge massively in style. They can be written dispassionately or vehemently, descriptively or as judgments, exuberantly or minimally, academically or lyrically. There are whole worlds between—for example—the passionate literary style of Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century, the consciously adopted first-person perspective of Lothar Lang in twentieth-century East Germany, and the matter-of-fact analyses of Patrick Mudekereza in the twenty-first century. Some authors are keen to distance themselves from the artists they write about, whereas others, like Viktor Hakim in Beirut, speak about them in more informal terms and call them by their first names.
New approaches to writing have continually been introduced and tested throughout the history of art criticism, with the differences of form being at times so pronounced that it pays to divide the texts into genres. Examples of this are numerous in this reader: the Yugoslavian critic Ješa Denegri chose the interview as a way to do formal justice to the diversity of art currents in Yugoslavia in 1989, both in one-on-one dialogue and in conversation with larger groups. In 1808, German poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim invented a fictitious dialogue in order to approximate a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Around a hundred years later, Zuckerkandl in Vienna got involved in a dispute about paintings Gustav Klimt had been commissioned to create by the city’s university; for this she chose the form of the leak, publishing excerpts from letters addressed from the ministry to Klimt and not intended for public consumption. Yet another hundred years later, Australian art critic Jennifer Higgie deployed the serial format to give visibility to women artists: on Instagram, she posts an image of a female artist every day, to an audience of 60,000 followers. Even the recommendations website Yelp has been used as a platform for art criticism.22
By looking at genre, it becomes possible to avoid the trench warfare in which different approaches to art criticism have been pitted against each other. One example of this being how value-apportioning art criticism was elevated to the status of art criticism’s definitive genre, with less normative approaches being interpreted as signs of decline.23 There is no doubt that the review is an important genre; it is represented here by a Julia Voss article on an exhibition by the painter Markus Lüpertz. Other genres still have value, however; in a catalogue text for the artist Bernard Réquichot, for example, Roland Barthes gave up on any form of distancing and instead sought forms of intense empathy in the work, body, and life of the artist. In this instance, we feel it makes sense to also designate catalogue texts as a possible form of art criticism. Often, these are bound too closely to requirements set by those commissioning them—galleries or museums—for them to count as art criticism; Barthes’s catalogue texts, however, went well beyond friendly, scholarly contemplation; in doing so, he created the genre of immersive, literary, bodily resonance. This is quite different to the genre of the chronicle as represented by the critic Hakim and his gesture of plain description, largely absent of empathy and value judgment.
The various genres and formats—interview, fictional dialogue, leaks, serial chronicles, catalogue texts, reviews—are closely interlinked with the platforms they appear on. The form is made possible by developments in the media landscape, from the emergence of magazines and daily newspapers to the mass media and social media. Each new medium opens possibilities that were not present before, thus also begetting new genres. To name another example from this reader: in the Netherlands, “Anonymous” (an unnamed female blogger) nestled herself exclusively in the comments section of articles published online, where she trolled against the poor representation of women. These interventions took place within the literary field, but could easily be transferred into the art field and have thus been included here. The expanded prospects of a “hypermediatized” cultural journalism are set out by Kenyan author Enos Nyamor.
A look further into the past shows that the media history of art criticism began unfolding long ago. The changing alliances that emerged in the wake of the varying forms of publication are also reflected in this reader. We begin with one of the founding figures of art criticism, Denis Diderot, who wrote his critiques on behalf of Friedrich Melchior Grimm and for a select, mostly courtly audience across Europe. He was guided in this by the notion that exhibitions, like theater, served to educate the people and nurture good citizens.24 It was no longer members of art academies and rather laypersons, like Diderot himself, who selected the criteria of discernment and judgment. The example of art would thus be used as a means of training critical thinking and public debate. This is an idea that also appears in the bourgeois salon culture that emerged around 1800, modeled on the courtly culture.25 Their mouthpieces were journals and newspapers such as the Berliner Abendblätter that Bretano and von Arnim wrote for, and later the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, in which texts by Zuckerkandl appeared. Fin-de-siècle art critics had other organs of publication at their disposal, from art trade catalogues to specialist art journals.26
The so-called Kunstschriftsteller*innen—art writers of a more literary bent—are a consequence of this publishing boom, which also included art books issued in large editions. The excerpt from The Indian Craftsman by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy means that academic publishing as a possible medium of art criticism is also represented in the reader.
Further stages come into play over the course of the twentieth century. The fact that artworks can now be easily and affordably reproduced in high quality has spawned an international glut of new, specialist art magazines with various aims, from entertainment to scholarly debate. The latter has long been typified by Artforum, founded in 1962 and the journal in which Claire Bishop’s essay originally appeared.
Art critics’ careers can also be boosted by visual media like television, as with Argentine critic Marta Traba. The explosion of media in which art is critiqued or at the very least reported on was recounted a few years ago on the basis of the Documenta exhibition series, founded in 1955 in Kassel. By the time Okwui Enwezor curated the eleventh edition of Documenta in 2002, 15,000 journalists from Germany and around the world were accredited to cover the event.27 Those keen to take the trouble to index these journalists’ pieces by media and genre would have had much material to discover.
The transitions between old and new media are fluid at times; almost all publications that began in analogue form now also have digital versions. Still, there are a number of differences that must be sketched out, at least in brief. With digitization and social media, voices previously unable to get past the editorial departments of printed publications are now able to have their say. This has led to debates previously pushed to the margins of art criticism being returned back to the center. Founded in 2009, the online art magazine Hyperallergic offers a daily-updated and explicitly politically engaged art criticism that tackles issues of race, gender, and classism as a matter of course. Generally, it can be said that digitization has brought with it a widespread politicization of art criticism. Activism and art criticism are also moving closer together.28 Given these developments, it seems to us all the more necessary to examine to what extent and for which reasons the various genres can be regarded as art criticism.
The Art Market and Networks
At an art criticism conference, Jörg Heiser spoke of the “sink-or-swim” strategy that accompanies gentrification. People who work in the “worst-paid artistic fields,” he claimed, “are compelled to keep the greatest possible number of fields of activity open and to slip into changing roles.”29 This pressure clearly also weighs on art criticism. Cities with particularly high densities of art institutions are often particularly expensive; rents in many instances have risen astronomically in recent years, while the fees paid to art critics have continued to fall. With the exception of the small number of editors on long-term contracts, very few people can make a living by writing about art. Art historians have often sprung into this gap, teaching at universities in the daytime and moonlighting as writers for art magazines. This necessarily leads to academization of art criticism, both in its style and in its content.30
There are also many freelancers who curate in galleries, museums, or at biennials, while writing art criticism at the same time. According to one widespread view, these many subordinations and precarious relations have made art criticism less polemic, less up for the fight. The texts in our reader shed a different light on the situation. Critics like Lawrence Alloway have taken networks as the subject matter of their writing, addressing at the same time their own entanglements within them. Other critics like Marta Traba, Annemarie Sauzeau-Boetti, and Arlene Raven call for nothing less than the formation of new networks or collectives, allowing them to become more assertive, more vocal, or more just. Finally, there are also tactics in which the author’s own identity is discarded; this can be read as a creative means of escaping the constraints of subjugation. Within our reader, the alter ego Mary Josephson and Anonymous could be cited as examples of this.
Just a few years ago, a foreword to an art criticism essay would have been obliged to include a statement on how collectors’ strong financial capital had long since replaced the power of critics’ opinions. A new generation of collectors had been described as mega-collectors, their emergence coming hand-in-hand with an increasing number of private museums. The intensive economization of the art field and the rise of art as an asset class have been described many times.31 Nevertheless, the situation has developed in an unexpected manner: on the one hand, because the relation between art and money has been anything but a niche topic, having been set out and analyzed in many ways by Bishop and other writers. The need for business models and art production to be examined in tandem is shown with great humor, via the example of the Japanese scholar Yuriko Furuhata.
On the other hand, we have witnessed how trustees at large museums have been compelled to resign and how institutions have refused to accept donations due to overwhelming criticism. Without the internet and activists’ digital platforms, these phenomena would be inconceivable. These activisms are accompanied by an art criticism that, taking its cure from institutional critique, examines economic relations and connections in far greater detail than in previous decades. In this reader, Gilligan elaborates on what the cultural logic of financialization means for art production, while D’Souza examines economic inequalities and the degree to which institutions practice what they preach.
As comprehensive as it has become, this reader is still pieced together from fragments of a multifaceted phenomenon. In constellation, however, we hope that they still shed some light on the value of art criticism, both within and beyond the artistic field.
1 Ruth Sonderegger, Vom Leben der Kritik: Kritische Praktiken – und die Notwendigkeit ihrer geopolitischen Situierung (Vienna, 2019).
2 “Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” October 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 200–28. The discussion featured George Baker, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Andrea Fraser, David Joselit, Rosalind Krauss, James Meyer, John Miller, Helen Molesworth, and Robert Storr.
3 In The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York, 2005), Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello go even further in speaking of the recuperation of all critical enterprises within the artistic field. A differing perspective can be found in Helmut Draxler, Gefährliche Substanzen: Zum Verhältnis von Kritik und Kunst (Berlin, 2007).
4 See Irit Rogoff, “From Criticism to Critique to Criticality,” transversal (January 2003), https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en (accessed August 18, 2021).
5 See Sonderegger 2019 (see note 1); Katy Deepwell, New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester and New York 1995); and Deepwell, ed., Art Criticism and Africa (London, 1998).
6 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Lawrence Grossberg et al., eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 1988), pp. 271–313.
7 See Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke, The Value of Critique: Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour (Frankfurt am Main, 2019).
8 Sabeth Buchmann and Isabelle Graw, “Kritik der Kunstkritik,” Texte zur Kunst 113 (March 2019), pp. 33–52.
9 See, for example, Anneka Lenssen et al., eds., Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York, 2018).
10 The two publication platforms Contemporary And and Contemporary And América Latina launched in 2013 and 2018 respectively; they are accessible at https://contemporaryand.com/ and https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/.
11 See Armen Avanessian et al., eds., Form: Zwischen Ästhetik und künstlerischer Praxis (Zurich and Berlin, 2009).
12 Likewise relevant is Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Göttingen, 1974).
13 As examples of the recent glut of studies, see Christian Kravagna, Transmoderne: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts (Berlin, 2017); Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham and London, 2015). On historic conceptions and the problematic nature thereof, see Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen: “Weltkunst” und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne, (Berlin, 2015).
14 See “Round Table,” October 100.
15 See Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 78.1 (2015) on “Der Ort der Kunstkritik in der Kunstgeschichte” (art criticism’s location in art history).
16 See, for example, Melina Kervandjian and Héctor Olea, eds., Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino? (London and New Haven, 2012), which appeared as part of Yale University Press’s Critical Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art series.
17 See Sami Khatib et al., eds., Critique: The Stakes of Form (Berlin and Zurich, 2020).
18 See Roland Barthes, “What Is Writing?,” in Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston, 1985), pp. 9–18.
19 Ibid., p. 10.
20 Ibid., p. 14.
21 Ibid., p. 15.
22 In 2014, Brian Droitcour briefly used Yelp, a platform typically used for rating restaurants and shops, as a home for pithy critiques of museum exhibitions in New York. Droitcour is now an editor at Art in America.
23 See James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism (Chicago, 2003).
24 Eva Kernbauer, Der Platz des Publikums: Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen, 2011)
25 Richard Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism: from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford, 1993); overviews of the history of art criticism can be found in Kerr Houston, An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices (Boston, 2013); Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism, (New York, 1936); and Gérard-Georges Lémaire, Histoire de la critique d’art (Paris, 2018).
26 On the significance of art criticism in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Cynthia A. White and Harrison C. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York, 1965).
27 See Jasmin Schülke and Jürgen Wilke, “Multiple Medialisierung: Eine Fallstudie zur Kasseler documenta (1955–2007),” M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 59 (2011), https://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634x-2011-2-235 (accessed August 23, 2021).
28 Julia Voss and Norman L. Kleeblatt, “Art, Criticism, and Institution,” in Danièle Perrier, ed., Art Criticism in Times of Populism and Nationalism: Proceedings of the 52nd International AICA Congress, Cologne/Berlin 1–7 October 2019, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2021, pp. 187–202.
29 Jörg Heiser, “Strategischer Multi-Optionalismus: Untiefen eines postkritischen Konzepts,” in Ines Kleesattel and Pablo Müller, eds., The Future Is Unwritten: Position und Politik kunstkritischer Praxis (Zurich, 2018).
30 On the relationship between art criticism and university art history departments, see the spirited early plea made by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, “Wie werde ich ein Kunstkritiker,” in Ruperto Carola: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der Freunde der Studentenschaft der Universität Heidelberg 13 (1961), no. 29, pp. 107–111.
31 There is an enormous range of literature on this. See, for example, Heike Munder and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Das Kunstfeld: Eine Studie über Akteure und Institutionen der zeitgenössischen Kunst, (Zurich, 2011); Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2011); and Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century (London, 2017).
