Having sketched Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts of contemporary art criticism and placed their accounts in a template of conceptual points advanced by Arnold Isenberg and Monroe Beardsley, I now turn to criticism of their accounts through consideration of central features of art criticism suggested by an alternative account and by major instances of criticism. In order to provide some perspective on their accounts, I’ll introduce two further points: first, the often-urged point with regard to visual art criticism that it is rightly thought of, and rightly practiced, as taking place in the presence of the artwork; second, an example of an ideal critic of the arts, or at least by universal acclaim the closest that there is of such in the twentieth-century.
‘In the presence of the work’: One sub-genre of Classical literature and rhetoric is ekphrasis, a virtuoso description of a work of art. In some cases these were descriptions of actual works of art, in others of imagined works. The art historian Michael Baxandall has noted that it’s impossible to reconstruct the work with any determinacy based upon such descriptions. A lengthy piece of detailed ekphrastic description from the fourth-century writer Libanius of a Council House in Antioch “seems calculated to enable us to visualize the picture clearly and vividly”, but “we could not reconstruct the picture from his description. Colour sequences, spatial relations, proportions, often left and right, and other things are lacking.” (Baxandall, p. 3) Now one could further describe something of those elements that are lacking, but even so what would result in the readers’ minds would necessarily differ according to each reader’s prior experience, as each person’s resulting image would vary according to which painters and styles they mobilized in the service of the visual realization, and according to each individual’s tendencies and dispositions. On Baxandall’s account ekphrastic description is not oriented to or guided by the thought of a particular actual object; further, in ekphrasis the description is indifferent as to whether what is referred to is a depicted or an actual object or scene, as in sentences like ‘The horse is on the left next to the barn’ or ‘The river is beyond the field and fades into the distance’.
Baxandall contrasts ekphrastic description with description that takes place in the presence of the artwork. ‘In the presence’ (Baxandall’s actual phrase is ‘in tandem with’ (p. 8)) includes not just the actual artwork, or its reproduction in an engraving or photograph, but also “a rough visualization derived from knowledge of other objects of the same class.” (ibid) One might object that ekphrasis might in some cases evoke such a rough visualization, and one surely wants to know more about what kinds of classes are relevant, and what are the criteria for something being of the same class as something else. But the key point that Baxandall wants to make is that when seemingly descriptive language is used in the presence of a work, it is not so much descriptive as ostensive: it points, and what it points to is an aspect of the visual interest of the artwork. (p. 9) With such pointing, the piece of language gains greater determinacy, and what is pointed at gains some conceptualization and articulation. Baxandall insists that language necessarily generalizes (p. 3), and this much be true just as much of descriptive language as of ostensive language. But with ostensive language the point is to draw someone’s attention to something, and this is part of a larger process of seeing, reflecting upon, interpreting, explaining, and understanding something, namely the visual interest of the artwork; and in entering into this process the viewer/reader necessarily draws upon her knowledge of human life, human embodiment, the nature of agency and of making, and sense of artistic achievement. The point of using language is to grasp, and to aid others in grasping, the distinctive visual interest.
As Baxandall stresses, in using such ostensive language (such as: look at this—this object, this scene, but also this texture, this stroke, this color, this shadow, this detail, etc.) we do not point to some bare thing, but rather the thing together with some conception of the thing (Baxandall refers to the concepts of and thoughts about the thing). Crucially, the conceptualization that ostension introduces is of a conception of the pictorial role of the thing (broadly conceived), that is, of how the depicted thing ‘works’ in relation to other depicted or presented things, and so finally of the relation of all of these ‘things’ to our sense of the artistic depiction as a whole. The aim, then, of the use of ostensive language in art writing is for Baxandall the explanation of the visual interest of particular depictions; and it is when language is used to some degree ostensively and not (just) demonstratively that it reliably contributes to fulfilling this aim, an aim plausibly thought to be shared by both art historical writing about past artworks, and art criticism of contemporary works. To say that art criticism takes place ‘in the presence of’ or ‘in tandem with’ its object then is really to say (on Baxandall’s account) that it initiates or contributes to the process of the explanation of the visual interest of particular depictions. Here I just note for now that nothing in Tatol’s or Davis’s accounts, concerned as they are with the narrow issue of ‘negative’ criticism, registers Baxandall’s points about this distinctive use of language in criticism. The ostensive use of language in art criticism is neither ‘negative’ nor ‘positive’; rather it aims to explicate the artistic achievement that a particular artwork embodies. I would further note that the pervasive use of ostensive language in criticism is not well captured either by Isenberg’s schema of the core of art criticism as Verdict + Reason + Norm, or by Beardsley’s models of art criticism as a Consumers Union or a Press Agent.
For the second point, I begin by asking: ‘Who is it that practices art criticism, and under what conditions? Who is it that might plausibly be thought to be an ideal art critic, and what do they actually do?’ Now, the starting point for countless discussions in the philosophy of art of the proper roles and vital characteristics of an art critic is David Hume’s essay ‘Of The Standard of Taste’. Hume famously urges two central points: that criticism in the arts rightly understood invokes a ‘standard of taste’ that consists of the ‘joint verdicts’ of ‘true critics’; and that such rare ‘true critics’ possess “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice”. These claims and the essay have unsurprisingly induced a large body of critical commentary, with the widespread rejection of the assumption that, even if these claims capture what we mean by an ideal critic, and that we can identify some such critics, the views of such critics would form a consensus view sufficiently stable and coherent to function as a standard for currently practicing critics. In terms of the schema introduced by Isenberg of a piece of art criticism (again, consisting of V (verdict) + R (reason) + N (norm)), Hume’s conception would specify N as the overlapping consensus of ideal critics. This is similar, though only partially, to Tatol’s view of his self-education as a critic, as he urges that part of how a critic’s taste is formed is through consulting and testing ‘best of’ lists which are themselves the products of the considered judgments of ideal critics like Robert Christgau. Davis’s view is harder to recover; he seems to think that the relevant norms are collectively instituted by the particular group out of which an artwork arises, and that the art critic can with effort learn to read the norms off from the work.
Perhaps some progress could be made by considering who might be plausibly thought of as an ideal critic. In my reading of the major critics of the arts in the twentieth-century and their reputations, one stands as universally acclaimed as the greatest in English with regard to a particular art form: the American dance critic Edwin Denby. His criticism spans the mid-1930s through the late 1960s, with the bulk of it consisting of short reviews published in magazines in the 1940s into the early 1950s. Denby’s father was a diplomat, and accordingly Denby grew up and was educated in China, and parts of Europe and the United States. After a couple of short stints at Harvard, and a period in New York City where he saw Isadora Duncan perform, he moved to Europe, where he studied various kinds of bodily expressiveness, including dance, near Vienna. He read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, saw productions by Meyerhold and the Bolshoi in the Soviet Union, the Ballets Russes in Vienna, and danced in Germany. He returned to New York City in the mid-30s and shortly thereafter began writing dance criticism. He wrote about the range of dance that was available to him, from the Kabuki to flamenco to Fred Astaire, but his focus was upon ballet, and by acclaim he was in particular the great writer about the work of the choreographer George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet. What are the supposed great virtues of Denby’s criticism?
Denby’s collected criticism runs to nearly 600 pages, every one of which in my experience rewards careful reading and re-reading. One striking condition of this criticism is that Denby cannot assume that his reader is familiar with the work discussed; some of his readers will, and many won’t, have seen the live performance during its short run in New York City. Consider a short passage chosen nearly at random describing a performance of the ballet ‘Billy the Kid’ in 1943:
“The eye gets snagged on [the pantomime movements], one at a time, as by sign language. In the “March,” for instance, the energetic horizontal arm thrusts with open palms look as if our ballet dancers were mimicking “pushing back the frontier.’ The “Come on out West” gestures back to the electricians offstage, the praying, digging, running, housekeeping, ever westward, ever westward are meant as a frieze of history; but it is history like that shown us in the slick-paper ads. The technical fault is that the gesture does not lead out into space and relate to the full dimensions of the stage; it only leads back into the dancer’s figure. It makes the stage close in on the dancer, instead of showing him boldly taking possession . . . On the other hand, the “Street Scene” that follows is most interesting. The wandering individual floor patterns by not emphasizing a fixed place on the stage and the gestures by not emphasizing a climax in rhythm give the sense of unfenced spaces and of all the time in the world. Nothing could be more characteristically American or more original as a dance conception.” (Denby, p. 165)
There is much to be admired in this excerpt. Consider just the first two sentences: Denby begins with the assertion of a particular effect upon the viewer in ‘the eye gets snagged’; then with a mundane piece of description (‘one at a time’); followed crucially with a simile that provides a frame for the ensuing descriptive, evaluative, and veridical remarks (‘as by a sign language’). The framing simile as it were metaphorizes and charges what follows, and provides a means for the reader to engage in a richer and more determinate imaginative act of visualizing what’s to be described. He then wards off crude evaluations by mixing ‘negative’ with ‘positive’ criticism: the section’s sense of history is trivializing (‘like that shown us in the slick-paper ads’), while another’s “is most interesting”. Compositional complexity is indicated together with its effect: ‘floor patterns . . . and the gestures . . . give the sense of unfenced spaces’). Cultural significance is stated (‘nothing could be more characteristically American) together with something of the piece’s place in the unfolding history of an art form (‘nothing could be . . . more original as a dance conception’). One upshot of this typical bit of virtuoso criticism from Denby is that he finesses the issue of whether the reader has seen or not seen the piece: the framing provides a novel conception for even the most careful viewer, while providing some basis for imaginative engagement for those who have not seen the piece.
This helps make sense of Baxandall’s thought that a piece of art criticism can take place ‘in the presence of’ or ‘in tandem with’ an undepicted work unknown to the reader: the critic must invoke some shared cultural conceptions (e.g. what counts as most ‘characteristically American’) and some sense of the art form (dance) together with its history and central characteristics, that is, must do so if something of the effects of the use of ostensive use of language is to occur. In other words, a reader might be ‘in the presence of’ an unseen and unknown work if she possesses the relevant cognitive stock and the critic invokes such stock relevantly and vividly.
Moving to criticism in the visual arts, let’s consider one of the few pieces of occasional art criticism by the art historian Leo Steinberg. While a graduate student in art history Steinberg wrote art criticism for Arts magazine for a little less than a year. He stopped writing criticism, he said, because he succumbed to exhaustion of taking on the ‘preposterous challenge’ of writing about “a life’s in a week’s writing” (Steinberg, p. vii) His first piece was a review of one of Monet’s Water Lilies at the Museum of Modern Art. After quoting Monet as saying that he was trying to do the impossible, Steinberg writes:
“And it is wonderful to look at for an hour or so at a time, for you can do things to it with your eyes—tip it into a horizontal plane, then let it snap back to an upright sheet; gaze along placid surfaces, then look through them, five fathoms deep. Search opaque waters for diaphanous shrubs, and find a light source at its destination. You can invert the picture or yourself at will, lie cheek to cheek with the horizon, rise on a falling cloud, or drift with lily leaves over a sunken sky. And yet this is no daydream; every inch is true, so that one looks and stares with a sense of discovery.” (Steinberg, p. 235)
Steinberg’s passage reads as if a proleptic demonstration of Elaine Scarry’s claim that a major way that writers impart vividness to a description is to induce the reader to engage in a series of imaginative exercises on the described object, what Scarry calls ‘teaching paper birds to fly’. As Freud pointed out, the daydream is freed from the reality principle, but just for that reason untested against perception and liable to be saturated by wish fulfillment. The guided exercise by contrast is constrained by the descriptions introduced and then by a pressure to be consistent with itself as it unfolds and elaborates. Steinberg’s piece does contain a reproduction of the painting, but nothing in the quoted passage depends upon the illustration; the imaginative operations can be carried out by any reader with even a vague sense of the overall look of Monet’s late work. This is rare writing, but the point with regard to the possibilities of inducing a Baxandall-like imaginative employment of ostensive language in art criticism is general.
Now, to return once again to Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts, I note that nothing of what one sees in Baxandall’s theory or Denby’s and Steinberg’s practice of art criticism is acknowledged in the contemporary concerns with reviving ‘negative’ art criticism or with exhibiting therein some sort of ‘intellectual maturity’. Rather, the point in those great pieces is as it were perennial: the aim is to induce a perceptual and/or imaginative process in the mind of a reader that aims towards explaining, understanding, enjoying, and/or appreciating the visual interest of a particular work of art. Concerned as they are with ephemeral contemporary conditions and the current pervasiveness of blandly affirmative criticism, Tatol and Davis have lost the thread. As with so much of contemporary art criticism, Tatol and Davis imagine that art criticism ought to proceed in the absence of knowledge and understanding of the history of art, of the history of the art forms discussed, as well as in the absence of anything and everything from psychology, sociology, and philosophy that concerns the arts. But it’s not obvious how criticism can proceed without presupposing something of this knowledge and understanding, at least if it is to aim at the explication of the visual interest of visual artworks. Tatol’s and Davis’s neglect of the fundamental point given by Baxandall and exemplified variously by Denby and Steinberg is of course not an individual failing on the part of these two contemporary critics, but is another symptom of what Davis gestures towards with the idea of ‘the degeneration of the media environment’.
Might one learn something further from the historical practice of art criticism that addresses the bare and seemingly barren slur on the present as a kind of degeneration? Rather than leaving the topic with the stark and fruitless juxtaposition of an allegedly rich past and an impoverished present, one might instead take a hint from the claim of so many alleged absences and ask: How might such conceptual resources be re-introduced into contemporary criticism? In my final post on the topic I’ll suggest a renewed set of roles for analogy in criticism, and try to illustrate this with some examples from my own writings.
References:
Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (1985)
Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (1982)
Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)
Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (1986)
David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757)
Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (1999)
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th Century Art (1972)
Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)