Whereof One Cannot Critique
In the wake of several articles critically surveying, or purporting to critically survey, one particular place and time—no more important than any other besides that it is
ours—and the displays of, alternately, indignation and triumphalism on the part of the factions involved, it seems useful to demarcate: (a) what is criticism, especially of
cultural objects; and (b) why it should have consequences.
Underpinning this effort is the fact of the slow demise of criticism as an absolute, exacting, and more importantly, impactful mode of engagement with art and ideas over the
last decade. Without taking too much time to examine what preceded this development and the circumstances for it, we can securely attribute the once totalizing role of a work’s written or spoken critique to the domain of
modernism and postmodernism, just as biography and typology were prime to historical understandings of art production, and as, perhaps, intertextual literacy and
diagrams
are crucial to an appreciation of its present. There are two issues at stake here—what has happened to the art critic, and what has happened to art—that we will address as interrelated.
Classically, criticism aims to furnish an artistic current with coherence and direction, having the secondary effect of buttressing its author’s stature as a person of committed vision. That secondary effect is now the
main motivation for today’s “critical writing,” which opts to turn the cultural object inside out, so that the follies of those orbiting an artwork are construed as core substance. This singular preoccupation with what
Arnold Hauser dryly modeled as “the social history of art” is neither unique to our period, nor irrelevant to its assessment, just a pitiable waste of already dwindling brain cells. Attending solely to the homologous
mechanics of
how culture and politics copulate
in public perception (as relations of same and same, irrespective of which is on top or on bottom) gives barely a picture of what an artwork actually is—what distinguishes its
character.
Then again, the contemporary critic does not capture a “moment” in order to intervene in or enrich its making but to reify his own anemic image against the Wynwood Walls of the “creative.” Any semblance of will to
excellence in the
competitive middling
that is today’s critical writing is a pantomime by and for the already enervated. In the bowels of worlds artistic and literary—codependent in their narcolepsy—
churn
the low, seething, boilerplate texts of small-fry
functionaries
. Professionally butthurt commentators indict without identifying the purpose of indictment and
illuminate what does not lack in light already
, strategic missteps that deprive the few claims they are so bold to make of generative power. Awash in a sea of petty squabbles, they often
blame
the decrepitude of their discourse on a poverty of inspiration while withdrawing from a duty to lead a way through it.
“Complicity”
is too weak a word for such subservience to the temporal without the honor of a superior cause.
The death of capital-C criticism as it was known—and feared—for at least a century has not gone unnoticed, nor unmourned, by younger members of the apparatus that continues to pretend to
perform it. Even those
led astray
by recent pretensions to
criticality
that are little more than
advertorial
comedy will recognize what media veteran Rahel Aima means when she maintains that
“nobody reads art criticism,”
or the few evaluative (rather than summarily descriptive) texts still published in traditional journals: that, save for some unharried elders and agent-having millennials, nobody truly
writes it. This reality is pithily encapsulated by Jarrett Earnest’s What It Means to Write About Art, a standout in the virtual
cottage industry of late 2010s anthologies on the topic whose very title polishes off the gradual pivot of the “art writer” from critical responsibility to freewheeling ekphrasis that always
spirals
down, not up.
[1]
We can forgive the casual observer’s defection from critique as a natural response to the specter of backlash condemning to ignominy those who divulge opinions—of a work, or an idea—removed from the acceptable. Yet for
the belletrist to surrender to climatic anxieties by abdicating categorical authority is to disrespect the innate courage of the artistic gesture, the sole thing to which she is obligated. Moreover, such cowardice elides
the culpability of a lack of qualitative standards in clearing the path for ostracization, to begin with. Panic over reputational and economic security has ushered an intellectual retreat to aphoristic press release
speak, never mind that much of our best writing comes from those who
fend it off as beneath them.
The ensuing convergence of laziness, venality, and fear of cancellation to mock criticism from all sides would be a hilarious alliance if it were not an offensive waste of resources.
“The shade of that which once was great,” as Wordsworth remarked of the Venetian Republic’s extinction, will appear to every generation as having just passed it by in some enviable regard. We now encounter the
mythological “greatness” of what was criticism through its
masks
, to retool Dean Kissick’s “naive” term—here as less the
cloaking devices
of industry aspirants (ourselves included) than variations on écriture that
cover
for the critical void. These might encompass
the rumor as pitch deck
and corporate
trend-trawling
moodboards
, or more “altruistic” endeavors like
interviewer-centric interviews
,
bovine county fairs
, and a ritualized
airing of grievances
. With its champion eliminated, criticality is sublated into a salaried narcissism of small differences among largely online
“cabaret”
vaudevillians. Their output is occasionally affecting—it can indeed “change the culture,” and at the very least, an
Amtrak
poster—yet stops short of actual criticism amidst the inviolability, or desired inviolability, of its polemical overtures.
From
heartfelt scrapbooks
to
“drive by shootings”
, a smattering of documentary amuse-bouches are
supposedly
“de-zombifying” prior cultural toolkits. Yet the inanimacy of the nomenclature and identities being retroactively
mainlined
as evidence for this (“hipster” and “indie sleaze” having the mouthfeel of dentures) only accentuates criticism’s fossilization. In para-institutional framing, whether or not you accept Barry
Schwabsky’s
diagnosis
that contemporary art is a literal expression of “ethical” intentions—rather than a constant, covert play on them—we might still expect the critic to preside over adherence to an ethic. But the critic has been rendered
squeamishly dumbstruck by the audacity with which new material (good,
poor
, or
both, simultaneously
) manifests interpretation at emergence, localized to whatever domain—platform, patron, philosophy—facilitates its circulation.
Contemporary artworks thus appear apathetic, if not downright hostile, towards external pressures to taxonomize as nothing more than a waiver of co-signing while their own bounds become increasingly, and interestingly,
elastic. Appearances, though, are misleading, for these same works also yearn to be grounded in a “real” that is remembered—the territory of the
participatory
“happening.”
Meanwhile, the default taxonomists are so confounded by conditions of sentient production, however much an organic culmination of postwar avant-garde
experimentation
, that they will readily hail even the mildest of works as revelatory or dismiss it as impenetrably graceless—either way, failing to make any incisive contribution. The cipher can be rich artistic territory (Trisha
Donnelly, Ann Quin,
www.rachelormont.com
), but why should the critic stop at the accommodating threshold of its surface intimations? And why not confess, with one last shred of nobility, to a fear of what lurks beneath them?
Instead, when everybody’s an artist (perhaps even
a Pasolinian terrorist!
), no one a critic, all are
granted
the independent progenitor’s privileges of “no thoughts just…” self-explanation. The exceptionally magnetic credo of “theoretical gossip,” for instance, which rejects
the art historical
while hijacking its theaters, is surely worthy of analysis beyond the third grade
reading level
, yet will likely never receive it, not because few are capable of doing so but as a closed circuit governed by the hermeneutic thesis that “one doesn’t defend one’s god, one’s god is in himself a defense.”
[2]
How such containment transcends mere autopoiesis towards what Eric Schmid
scopes
as “no ontology,” or a “de-ontologized metaphysics,” requires separate consideration. The key point being that a treatise such as Schmid’s Prolegomenon, dealing with the
“discretization” of the arc of historical continuity in which criticism participates, is not criticism, either, but an extension of his artistic practice.
So
the question remains: what comes after the
funeral ball
that is today’s not-quite critical writing? On
April 7, 2021
, Kissick tweeted, regarding contemporary images but with application to their criticism:
We’re trapped in the world Fredric Jameson foretold, “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the
styles in the imaginary museum.” But I know there are ways out.
To which Aima responded:
imo
the way out is through the international airport.
A year later, an exit strategy feels all the more urgent and elusive. Yet perhaps the crushing weight of critical inadequacy is a good thing, a sign for the rigorous to stay still, to not desert when the going gets
morose.
To delineate the fundamental principles of criticism, not as it is, not even as it was (for who alive can remember!), but as it should be, is to adventure into anachronism
as-a-bit.
[3]
This approach is no more violently nostalgic than the cultivated poignancy that is Kissick’s geyser of Ruskinian feeling—with its perpetual rush of empathic wonderment—or, as
Aima suggests, a promenade through the gift shop of subaltern exploitation. So why not put to the test some elementary principles of criticism and see if they stick? These may indeed prove
vintage enough—as in, appropriately inert—as to come back into fashion.
A dejected-looking Carrie Bradshaw wears Christian Dior newsprint in Sex and the City
“What Goes Around Comes Around” (S3E17, 2000)
II. Working Principles of Criticism { check back for updates ! }
[1]
The art writer’s evolution can be related to a motif of the same period: a fascination with artists who have “left society,” as Tao Lin put it, from Martin Herbert’s sleeper hit
Tell Them I Said No to new research on
Lee Lozano
,
Elaine Sturtevant
, and other recalcitrant
“outliers.”
There is also the conceptual omnipresence of the thin man himself, Marcel Duchamp, who famously slank away in later life from the culture he bequeathed to us.
[2]
Henry James, “The Aspern Papers.” We shall soon see how well—with misunderstanding as his medium—investigator M. “Crumps”
channels
H. Bloom. “Closed” circuitry as a structural trait is not incompatible with a theme like “open intelligence,” but the foundation of any attempt to make inroads in it.
[3]
This is also an Enlightenment approach, per Reza Negarastani’s articulation of Carnap’s late thinking, as cited by Schmid:
Carnap admitted that the Enlightenment paradigm has been corrupted, it has become a recipe for conformity to the order of is. But the real ambition of the Enlightenment as
he understood it is to move from the order of is to the order of what should be or what
might be.
[4]
We use the phrase “driving force” after Henri Bergson’s élan vital to help integrate the history of criticism’s early rise, which coincided with Bergson’s thinking.