Whereof One Cannot Critique
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Preface
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 ! }
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Criticism is a means of confronting the driving force of a cultural object and fostering confrontational experiences in others. The “driving force” of an object is its impetus for existing and creative goals, which
the critic divines from external sources—authorial motives—and the properties of the object itself.
[4]
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The degree of intensity and intention with which the critic confronts the object is directly proportional to the girth of its “driving force.”
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When the cultural object is plural, as with an exhibition review or a topical survey, “driving force” encompasses the object’s contents, i.e. sub-artworks and the narratives that they
impose. While the critic’s responsibilities to “driving force” may become broader and more demanding as the cultural object grows heftier, his stakes in it, as expressed attitudinally, stay the same.
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The critic’s task is to test an object’s constitutional properties—symbolic, material, compositional, contextual—against their contribution, in the form of novelty, “beauty,” or “truth,” to an existing corpus of
artistic production.
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The critic evaluates the object’s truthfulness either as accuracy or believability.
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Accuracy entails the object’s correlation to a known reality, or a known surreality.
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Believability is the object’s convincing instantiation of a potential reality or surreality.
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Beauty is accuracy and believability graded on a more subjective scale. Regardless of whether an individual critic understands it to be relative or absolute, beauty is appraised in correspondence to period
conventions.
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The critic has a hand in these conventions, but once he introduces a precedent, it is swept up in a mass will that overtakes his own wrangling faculties.
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Criticism should cathect the object at hand with a qualitative depth beyond its surface representation.
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Criticism is additive, which means that when the critical object is in the negative, as in cannot assert itself, strong critical intervention raises its caliber to a baseline level of palatability or
understanding. Conversely, meek, maladroit critical intervention further enfeebles the cultural object when it is already weak, and simply bounces off of that which is strong.
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The cultural object should be conceptually permeable and emotionally impervious to critical opinion.
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In lieu of passively “reading” the object as one would read a book, acceding to its basic rhythms as if they were not constructed in order to be deconstructed, the critic adapts the layman’s method of
Structure-Proposition-Evaluation as abstraction / investigation / intuition (no special order). This approach of triangulation
enables the critic to act upon the object, and elicit its feedback, rather than the object acting upon him without recourse or control.
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The critic must isolate the object’s force from its actual presence, and “tack” a microscopic sample of his own presence onto that force. He then returns the compounded force plus presence to the object and
proceeds to see what it sees, feel what it feels, probe what it plumbs. This is how “qualitative depth” is determined—from experiential projection that momentarily carries the critic into the eye of the work.
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The surface representation then becomes mostly disposable.
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In this way, criticism offers one of three axonometric views of a cultural object suspended in public view. The critical plane is situated between the anterior plane of the object’s presentation and the posterior,
originating plane of the artist, as a static proxy for the otherwise mutable register of a perambulatory audience. We can also think of criticism as the measure of the object’s volume, adjoining its height and its
weight—or the history of the object and the object itself.
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The history of an object follows from its critical response, but those deductions become secondary to contextual information.
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Meanwhile, the object silently conveys its own standpoint through basic visual, or sensorily legible aspects.
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Criticism of the object is not only a translation of the object’s standpoint into language, but an assertion of its success or failure.
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Axonometric views can symbolize relations within a cultural object, and also without, by representing how that object operates in a temporal context. Critical writing augments and dramatizes the axonometry of a
cultural “moment,” lending words to angular constellations of visuals, concepts, thoughtforms.
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At its best, a piece of criticism is (or appears to be) full of contradictions. Such contradictions are symptomatic of human thoughtfulness, or the working out of an idea over the course of a text, with care and in
real time.
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To “work out an idea,” to make an object of fussing itself, is to work almost as much as the object while seeming to work
more.
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That said, to be a critic you simply cannot be a
try-hard
. No one takes seriously the all too serious.
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There is no room for critical vulnerability except in scenarios where confession invites respect.
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In producing and disseminating his work, the critic faces a series of negotiations that, in public, hide behind the screen of analytical certitude. These challenges, which primarily relate to differences of
opinion concerning who criticism is for (see below), can be mitigated by conceptualizing criticism as a devotional idiom, just like the artistic gesture.
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The devoted critic knows where to be merciful; where, merciless. And the limits of her devotion: that speech is not
deployed to save
, but to savor.
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When criticism is no longer devotional, it emanates tackiness. Criticality does well where projecting an air of piety but with a touch of monkish parsimony about it that implies
selectivity and discernment in its “service.”
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Who is criticism for:
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Criticism “belongs” exclusively to a work of art or cultural life. It is warranted in its creation.
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That said, criticism is not obliged to the object’s creator. Criticism that predicates its existence solely on the support of an individual or community falls prey to
the innately mercurial disposition of the artist and the broader “market” for their appreciation. Criticism may dictate the vicissitudes and taste of this market, but its antennae must be attuned to other
frequencies that lie just above or below it.
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A critic can be a friend to the artist, not of him.
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The respectable critic can separate himself from ephemeral “market” (i.e. social) patterns through temporal distanciations with a minimum of two days and
a maximum of two months delay in pronouncing his conclusions about an incipient phenomenon. In that interval, he still keeps track of said patterns.
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The critical window lasts from the moment when the cultural phenomenon becomes malleable to molding to the moment that it is intractably hardened. Then, history sets in.
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Though servicing a public, criticism is not owed to it, if it were, it would be as distractible, esurient, and vacuous as the attentions of any given readership.
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Criticism with designs on persuading an audience of personal prejudices is prevalent but foolish. While background resentments lend color to a critical thesis, they ultimately fade into children’s trivia. By
contrast, the pitch of a cultural idea will always be vibrant and palpable if the critical focus rests on its unchanging constitutional elements.
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Nor is criticism “for” its author. Criticism is facilitated through a private assignation between writer and object, but once that assignation is exorcized through language, and that language is launched like
kaitenzushi out to an appetitive audience, the writer’s individuality is already absorbed into his critical work.
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The critic sheds the skin of his ambitions to sustain a purer contact, and charge, between object, interpretation, and recipient. Beneath skin grows skin, such shedding implies the critic’s continuous renewal
of self, of relevance.
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The critic can be appointed to tertiary positions of advocate, diplomat, or adjudicator by any body that receives his work. This is helpful in anchoring critical conclusions in the general
airspace over which they hover. Nonetheless, the critic can only discover for himself which role is really his by doing, and by studying the outcomes of that doing—be it padding an artist’s resume, soiling another’s,
or most likely, nothing at all.
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Critical writing will inevitably come across as arrogant favoritism to some and pleasingly illustrative to others. Pedantry tempts the critic’s instructive proclivities, as do “pay-for-play” promotional arrangements
(6b-c). These tendencies should be discouraged as deliberate strategies, unless of course, the critic has deliberately adopted the strategy of the “hack” (as legitimate as any other).
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The critic settles on a keen directive by homing in on what she likes in a work, what she disdains, and what there should be more of, without acting on these conclusions herself.
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If a work of criticism is to mirror the forms or styles of the object it examines (e.g. memoir, poetic meditation), which means that it shares the
feelings of that object, it must, from the start, enunciate feeling as a throughline and a boundary between it and its focus.
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The (digital) art aggregator is not critical in part because such throughlines and boundaries are ambiguous, or simply not there altogether. The promotion of an object’s visibility by augmenting its display
using interpretive didactics is not criticism. The same is true of memes, which evoke criticality but are ultimately only motile shadows of an originating object (which can be a meme, as well).
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Artists have long written about art, about their art, and about their notion of art. An oscillation between criticism and production is to be expected, as contiguous
ways of grasping at any visual or sociocultural concept.
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We might go as far as to say one does not exist wholly without the other, and empirically, in an era of total production and critical abjection, the potential for pleasure has been undeniably curtailed, in
both. And everyone suffers for it.