About 45 years ago I developed a strong interest in contemporary art in the San Francisco Bay Area. A major expression of this interest was of course going to lots of shows of recent art in galleries. For the most part museums did not show contemporary art, although the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art regularly had exhibitions of living artists; it was there that I saw for example the last show of Philip Guston that opened when he was alive. The Berkeley Art Museum’s so-called Matrix shows likewise presented contemporary art, and focused not on venerable figures like Guston but on up-and-comers; so it was there that I first saw works by a great many contemporary artists including Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Additionally an interest in contemporary art expressed itself in reading a great deal of art criticism, that is, reviews of temporary exhibitions of works by (for the most part) living artists. At first I read a California publication called Artweek, and then expanded to the national publications Art in America, Artforum, and Arts magazine (this last one struck me as superior to the other three, although a particular critic might publish in more than one). Throughout the 1980s I found much of this reading at the very least informative, and occasionally helpful in understanding particularly odd works (What did Bruce Nauman mean by hanging up all those plastic animals?), but it never occurred to me to imagine that this body of writing offered any authoritative guide to taste or the understanding of the arts. Nor did I look for guidance from the artists and art enthusiasts I knew, as I found their judgments manifestly biased by personal relations of friend-or-foe, as well as a kind of taboo against negative remarks about emergent art forms like video and installation art. For such guides I looked to the great art writers of the past—Baudelaire on the Salons, Walter Pater on the Renaissance, Proust on Chardin, Michel Butor on Monet and Mondrian--, certain art historians—especially Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg--, and some philosophers of art—especially Aristotle, Kant, John Dewey, R. G. Collingwood, and Richard Wollheim--, although again it never occurred to me to treat some judgment about older art as unqualifiedly right because it came from one of these great figures. By 1990 it seemed to me that I had sufficient knowledge and understanding of at least the contemporary visual arts to write my own art criticism, and so I began publishing in Artweek.
Along the way I’ve encountered various evaluative remarks about art criticism, remarks that evidently do not form a consistent set of views. So one remark is that, at least on some occasions or with regard to certain art forms or particular artists, such-and-such a critic is ‘too negative’. So the San Francisco Chronicle’s long-time critic Kenneth Baker was said to be ‘too negative’ about photography. Around the year 2000 I was on a panel on improvisation sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department. I tried to give a summary account of the characteristic virtues of improvisation, and then cited and discussed some criticisms of improvisation from John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anthony Braxton, and Theodor Adorno. The other panelists’ brows knit as I introduced criticisms, and my fellow panelist Mary Lovelace O’Neal, the chair of the department, immediately denounced me as a typical art critic and theorist who didn’t understand the artistic process and so made pointless and unfounded ‘negative’ remarks about art.
But at least this century, it seems rather more common to criticize art criticism as ‘too positive’ and/or culpably lacking negative criticism. About twenty years ago in two separate publications the art historian James Elkins and the art critic Raphael Rubenstein lamented the loss of ‘judgment’ in recent art criticism, whereby they seemed to mean ‘negative judgments’ claiming that the works discussed were artistic failures, and perhaps also ethical or political or spiritual failures. And just in the past months there have been publications from two of the finest American art critics now active, Sean Tatol and Ben Davis, raising the issue of the seeming current lack of ‘negative’ art criticism and suggesting diagnoses and remedies. Tatol’s and Davis’s pieces strike me as thoughtful, informed, and so eminently worth reading for anyone interested in the state of current American art criticism. I was a bit surprised by the prominence in both cases of what are for all the world philosophical issues about evaluation and explanation; consequently I began wondering whether the philosophy of art criticism, and particularly a small number of writings that count as its recent canonical texts, might throw some light on Tatol’s and Davis’s remarks, and further on contemporary art criticism generally. By way of introduction, I’ll very briefly summarize the course of debates and introduce the key concepts in the field since World War II, and then in my next post try to apply some of them to the most recent discussion.
A great deal of discussion in Anglophone philosophy of art criticism is oriented towards ideas, analyses, and issues in a piece derived from a lecture in 1948 by the philosopher Arnold Isenberg, published as ‘Critical Communication’. I’ll paraphrase and partially elaborate the account, while relieving it of some dated emotivist formulations: Isenberg suggested that a typical conceptual core of art criticism consisted of a three-part claim (Isenberg, pp. 155-56) The first part was a judgment or evaluation of the work(s) discussed, called ‘V’ (for Verdict or value judgment). The second part offered some description of the relevant work(s) that functioned to (at least partially) justify the verdict; this is called ‘R’ (for Reason). Thirdly, there is an invocation of some (set of) standards, criteria, or norms in light of which V + R claims some non-idiosyncratic authority; this is called ‘N’ (for Norm). The critic offers, explicitly or implicitly, some inductive reasoning for choosing the relevant N, and N is presented as if ‘backing up’ V + R (p. 158) One immediate consequence of this analysis is that a purported instance of art criticism that lacks a judgment or evaluation is not really art criticism at all. So on Isenberg’s account, if a purported piece of art criticism lacks an evaluative judgment and restricts itself to, say, explanation, interpretation, and/or description, it limits itself to at most explaining, but not justifying a critical evaluation; such a piece of language is not a critical communication (and so not an instance of art criticism proper), but rather an ordinary communication (pp. 164-5). I pass over much of this great essay, most of which argues for the claim that critical communication takes place between two parties, both of which are in the perceptual presence of what is being discussed (on this point see also Baxandall (1985)).
A second canonical bit of analysis came in a series of essays by Monroe Beardsley in his essay ‘What are Critics For?’ Beardsley suggests that there are two major models for art criticism, each of which is accompanied by distinctive conceptions of the purpose and primary content of criticism. (He mentions and dismisses without explication a third model, the ‘judicial’ model, as ‘dead’ (Beardsley, pp. 159-60)) The first model, which Beardsley thinks captures much of the activity of art criticism, both in actuality and rightly considered, is the “Consumers’ Union model of (professional) criticism”, of ‘CU’ for short (p. 150) Beardsley says that on this model “the critic’s primary obligation is to the consumer of art—the audience, the viewer, the reader, the listener . . . [the critic] tells us, as best he (sic) can, what we need to know to make intelligent choices about works of art” (ibid). So such an art critic does engage in an evaluative activity—they tell you, for example, that one bank building is better than another as a work of architecture (that is, I take it, as an instance of artistic building)--, but do not make your (ultimate) decisions for you, as those further depend upon your particular circumstances of what morality you hold, how much money you have, what you consider safe and healthy, etc. Beardsley considers a number of prima facie objections to this model, two of which seem to me particularly relevant to the practices of contemporary art criticism. One objection is that in CU the critic offers no interpretation of the artwork; but surely it is part of the critic’s role to help, if not enable, receivers of artworks to interpret them correctly (p. 152) Second, Beardsley notes that there are difficulties for criticism arising “from the nature of certain avant-garde developments” (p. 153), including the sense that anything like traditional judgments of quality miss the point of the artistic activity (Beardsley cites John Cage’s 4’33”), or even that conceptualist gestures, while allegedly creating an artwork, offer no object upon which to fix one’s gaze or to interpret.
For Beardsley the other major model of art criticism is “the press agent (or PA) model of criticism” (p. 155). On this model “the critic’s primary obligation is not to the consumer, but to the producer—that is, to the artist and, indirectly, to the art itself as a form of enterprise involving many artists, present and future.” The critic does not judge, but rather their “central tasks are analysis and exegesis” that aim to help us “see the underlying structure and texture of the artwork” and “help clear up our puzzlement about the meaning or meanings of the work” (ibid). Whereas ideal critics on the CU model are competent judges, on the PA model they are competent interpreters. Beardsley goes on to urge that the CU and PA models are substantially consistent; their sole substantive difference is that the former demands, and the latter refrains from, judgment. Beardsley claims that CU with its judgments captures the primary character of art criticism, while PA “calls attention to important but secondary roles” of the critic (p. 156). CU also helps us grasp and articulate certain characteristic failures in art criticism. The critic may error in discussing trivial or irrelevant matters that divert attention from judgment; critics may stick with the PA model of (mere) interpretation and explanation and so be derelict in their central duty; and they may dogmatically offer judgments without reasons for the judgments (pp. 161-63). Such failures are not infrequent, and the CU model helps one spot them and provides a way of reminding the critic of their proper task (p. 164).
There are of course many more considerations, insights, and arguments available in the Anglophone philosophy of art criticism. Perhaps most relevant to these sketches of some of Isenberg’s and Beardsley’s points are counter-arguments to the claim that judgment or evaluation is central or even indispensable to art criticism proper. Arthur Danto, for example, argued that under contemporary conditions that critics ought to refrain from judgment and limit themselves to explicating the ideas embodied in art works and analyzing the ways in which artists in fact managed to embody those ideas (see Danto 2005). More recently James Grant has argued that although evaluation and judgment are prominent aspects of much art criticism, what he calls the constitutive goal of art criticism is to present the features of artworks that are rightly appreciated, and that the non-constitutive goal which occupies much of actual art criticism is to provide imaginative ways of helping the reader grasp what and how to appreciate. Still, I would think that anyone familiar with recent discussions of art criticism will sense how much of Isenberg’s and Beardsley’s points resonate with typical contemporary concerns and complaints. So in my next post I turn to Tatol’s and Davis’s recent pieces, and will attempt to explicate and interpret their various claims in light of these conceptual resources from the philosophy of art criticism.
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)
Arthur Danto, ‘The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art’, in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (2005)
Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)
James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003)
James Grant, The Critical Imagination (2013)
Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)
Raphael Rubenstein, ‘Why Don’t Critics Make Judgments Anymore?’ in Art in America (2003)
Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)