In my previous post I noted that there recently appeared an unusually interesting and intelligent piece on the state of contemporary visual art criticism by Sean Tatol, a 34 year-old critic who has been publishing for a little under four years. His sole venue is an on-line publication called The Manhattan Art Review, and he is its sole writer. Tatol’s piece ‘Negative Criticism’ briefly describes and reflects upon his art criticism, diagnoses basic problems with typical contemporary art criticism, and offers an account of what art criticism rightly considered, and free from its current debilitations, can and should be. In response the art critic Ben Davis has given a set of reflections that partially enthusiastically agree, and partially disagree, with Tatol’s. The most striking aspect of Davis’s response is his rejection of Tatol’s model of what contemporary art criticism should be, and his suggestion of an alternative. Here I’ll first summarize Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts while briefly commenting, and then place them within the field of concerns articulated in the post-World War II Anglophone philosophy of art criticism. In my next post I’ll introduce criticisms of both accounts, suggest a further model that incorporates elements that survive the criticisms from both authors, and try to indicate ways in which the third model fits pieces of art criticism I especially admire.
Since shortly after he began publishing The Manhattan Art Review, Tatol’s criticism has largely, though by no means exclusively, been part of a section he calls ‘Kritics Korner’ wherein Tatol gives short reviews of as many as ten exhibitions. The reviews range in length from about two full paragraphs to a few sentences, with most towards the shorter end of the spectrum. Additionally, each exhibition is given a rating of from 1 to 5 stars, often nuanced with a ‘.5’; so a ‘3.5’ rating indicates something better than the mediocrity of a ‘3’ but insufficiently achieved to merit the sign of rating of thorough-going goodness, though not greatness, which is a ‘4’. Tatol’s rating system is loosely modeled upon that of the music critic Robert Christgau, who used the scholastic F through A system, which permits an even more nuanced rating with its pluses and minuses, and so could allow an even more secure sense of relative quality and so better determine which album by Bruce Springsteen or Bananarama to buy with one’s allowance. Davis and others assure us that these short pieces have been a ‘hit’ in that they have been widely ‘shared’ and discussed, and not just by art aficionados in New York City, and Davis unqualifiedly considers such discussion a virtue.
The rating system, so Tatol asserts, immediately introduces a ‘judgment’. What sort of judgment? Tatol says that it involves a judgment of ‘quality’ and with it, one must think, a sense of relative quality. That is, the endpoints of the numerical spectrum are the abominably bad (a ‘1’) and the superlatively good (a ‘5’), and so a ‘3.5’ is better than a ‘3’ and worse than a ‘4’. But what is the point of giving a numerical rating? As Tatol notes, it cannot be closely analogous to Christgau’s advice to a consumer to buy or not buy something, as the rarity and expense of an artwork in a Manhattan gallery or museum are incomparably greater than a copy of Frampton Comes Alive. One predictable effect of such rating would be to encourage or discourage gallery visits; if I trusted the seriousness and taste of the art critic, her rating one show a ‘4’ might get me on the ‘A’ train to Chelsea, whereas a ‘1.5’ rating would keep me at home listening to ‘Do You Feel Like I Do?’. But perhaps more importantly, a rating might provide a first-time viewer of an exhibition with something analogous to a statement of what the show is ‘about’. That is, just as the viewer might be aided by a critic’s claim that the show is ‘about’ X, and so keep X in mind as she views and reflects upon the works; so the viewer might keep in mind the show’s rating, and search for the kinds of goodness or badness the rating indicates.
In any case, for Tatol what immediately arises with the use of numerical ratings is the specter of ‘negative criticism’; anything below a ‘4’ is characterized as mediocre, boring, flawed in parts, or worse. Tatol thinks that any negative criticism offends against a contemporary ideology that he calls ‘subjective universalism’, whose motto is given in the meme ‘let people enjoy themselves’. It is perhaps too much to call subjective universalism an ideology, as from Tatol’s description it seems like little more than a small set of self-satisfied, defensive, and reductivist prejudices, a tight cluster of neurotic symptoms. Any negative criticism of anything threatens to spoil people’s enjoyment of their cultural activities; negative criticism insinuates the existence of other and better cultural worlds; and the typical enjoyments of contemporary people are familiar, easy, and/or popular, and so ‘guilty’ in that there is no aspirational dimension to the pleasure. (But if something like this is generally true, who’s feeling ‘guilty’?)
The alternative to this subjective universalism, Tatol thinks, arise from reflection upon the aim of criticism, which is ‘education’. But surprisingly he explicates this not in terms of the audience’s, but rather in terms of his own, education. He says that he’s learned more about visual art in the few years of writing criticism than he knew when he began writing. He describes his own passage from youthful tastes to a more mature taste through wide reading, particularly from consulting ‘best of’ lists and following up their suggestions. But, again surprisingly, he acknowledges that such lists cannot plausibly be thought to present the results of the application of ‘objective’ standards; rather, as with Christgau’s lists, they ‘crystallize the critic’s sensibility.” And surprisingly for a third time, what is particularly valuable about the critic and her sensibility is its ‘consistency’, and not, say, its rightness or accuracy or learnedness or penetration.
After flailing contemporary art critics, in particular the New York Times’s Holland Cotter, for writing approvingly and uncritically of artworks that seem to embody some fashionable ‘social justice’-type attitudes, Tatol concludes with a final surprising move: he takes what he calls a ‘quasi-theological’ turn in asserting that what makes an artwork good is that and how it enacts “a channeling of an external sense of life into an artwork”; and “good criticism seeks to recognize this good as much as it can.” Tatol fails to discuss whether ‘external senses of life’ are, as far as equal as far as art is concerned: Does it matter whether the sense of life is profound or trivial, clairvoyant and or self-deluded, compassionate or vicious? And it is not clear to me how this is consistent with his earlier statement that art critics rightly understood are guardians of quality and judgers. Then one wonders: how does the use of a numerical rating to the critic’s, and by extension the audience’s, recognition of the good?
So Tatol’s piece presents four concerns, which I shall wrench into the form of claims: 1. His practice of using numerical rankings in art criticism is defensible, in that it re-introduces and highlights ‘negative criticism’, which supports the art critic’s proper mission of defending ‘qualify’ and offering judgments. 2. ‘Negative criticism’ is typically blocked in contemporary art criticism on account of the widespread adoption of the ideology of ‘universal subjectivism’. 3. The aim of art criticism properly understood is education. 4. The ideal art critic is in her criticism instigating and embodying a kind of self-education whose terminus is intellectual (or cultural?) maturity. Ben Davis’s response is a string of loosely connected ruminations on one or another of Tatol’s points. As noted above, Davis generally expresses an enthusiasm for the effect of Tatol’s art criticism, which is that its high volume of weekly batches of short reviews and ratings has ‘got people talking’ about exhibitions that otherwise would not have been reviewed, and further that part of this talk is induced by Tatol’s re-introduction of negative criticism, which stimulates agreement and disagreement from readers. Davis nonetheless disagrees with Tatol’s emphasis on judgment, and seems to suggest that a chief task, or at least virtue, of contemporary art criticism is the critic trying to make sense of (and not necessarily judge or evaluate) novel kinds of expressiveness. Davis further seems to endorse claims 3 and 4, but strongly disagrees with Tatol’s characterization of maturity in claim 4. Davis takes Tatol’s characterization of the idea critic as exhibiting consistency in her criticism to mean that the critic’s views and tastes should be fixed and unvarying (unsurprisingly, Davis offers no textual evidence for this, and it flies in the face of what Tatol says about the critic’s self-education; taken more charitably, ‘consistency’ for Tatol must mean something like a kind of consistency in the exercise of interpretive virtues such as charity and seriousness). Davis accordingly thinks that Tatol’s conception of maturity involves a kind of faithfulness or responsibility to oneself; to this Davis counterpoises maturity as responsibility towards others, and bound to a sense that others, not so much one’s readers as the communities out of which new kinds of artistic expressiveness emerge. On Davis’s conception intellectual “maturity” [Davis’s scare quotes] involves Tatol’s sense but is “also about knowing yourself in relationship to others.” So in criticism one should have, to use Max Weber’s famous terminology, not (just) an ethic of conviction, but rather (also) an ethic of responsibility. A basic impulse in contemporary art criticism is and ought to be finding out about others, and thus the most central virtue of contemporary art criticism then is curiosity, curiosity about others’ artifacts and lives.
Davis’s insistence that curiosity is something like the cardinal virtue of contemporary art criticism seems to be of a piece with three other criticisms of Tatol. First, Davis dismisses Tatol’s insistence on the importance of judgment or evaluation. Judgment, according to Davis, “is not actually the hard part”, which seems to suggest that for him what is the hard (and more valuable) part is achieving and conveying some understanding of unprecedented artworks. Second, when Davis criticizes what he views as an unsuccessful review by Tatol, he says that it “doesn’t reflect what the works look like or what they are trying to do.” So the harder part of criticism seems to be descriptive and interpretive, that is, conveying a sense of the works’ appearance, the artist’s aim, and how the former partially fulfills the latter. Finally, Davis suggests that Tatol misses the central reason for the current poor quality of art criticism, which he says is the ‘degeneration of the media environment’ into something that demands a ‘quick take’ on things, which presumably includes Tatol’s weekly batch of short, numerical reviews. The exercise of curiosity is demanding and time-consuming: “It definitely takes time to do the work of thinking about each show as an individual thing, to find out enough to check your preconceptions and do justice to the work, either positively or negatively. It takes time to do the actual writing.”
I’ll conclude this post with a sketch of how to place Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts within the schema and concerns provided by canonical bits of the philosophy of art criticism. Recall that Isenberg had offered a model of the core act of art criticism as involving three conceptually distinct and mutually reinforcing moments: V (verdict) + R (reason) + N (norm). And Beardsley claimed that there are two distinct models of the critic’s activity, CU (the consumer union which carries the constitutive aim of art criticism as a kind of evaluative guide for recipients) and PA (the press agent who carries the important though non-constitutive aim of supporting and endorsing artists’ works). For Tatol the act of criticism is consummated in V, while R is minimal, or even occasionally non-existent. He seems to think that N is fixed is for any given critic at any particular time, but that the critic must also understand that N develops over time as the critic’s sensibility matures. Davis in marked contrast considers V easy and typically routine, while the action is in the struggle to produce R and establish a kind of local determinacy and validity for N. Once R and N are established, V either follows trivially or is otiose. With regard to Beardsley’s models, Tatol ignores PA and offers an idiosyncratic version of CU, in that the recipient remains unconceptualized and amorphous, and the focus instead is on whether and how a piece of art criticism might contribute to the critic’s maturation. Davis likewise ignores the audience, and counters Tatol with a strong version of PA, with the proviso that the artist for whom the critic advocates is not something or someone given in advance of criticism, but rather something one arrives at through a long process of looking, investigation, and reflection. For Davis N is already there prior to criticism, which must be fundamentally conceptualized as the revelation and clarification of N. Davis’s appeal to ‘pluralism’ turns into the claim that there are multiple N’s, each of which has as it were a regional validity where it governs the interpretation and evaluation of works from its district, but whose scope is strictly limited.
It seems to me that this brief placing of Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts is illuminating, at the very least of helping clarify why one might think they are talking past each other. Is there then nothing more to say than to note that they agree on some points and sharply disagree on others? In my next post I’ll try to advance philosophical reflection on these accounts with an appeal to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, and a re-formulation of the point of art criticism as not primarily to produce evaluations or interpretations, but rather to bring the reader to see why the art is worth viewing. I’ll then try to show how this model fits the practice of some of the great critics across the arts.
References:
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)
Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)
Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)
Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919)