Situation Critical Fall 2016

It is impossible to divorce your politics from cultural criticism – paraphrase of Joey Orr at the MCA

“No more today than in Manet’s time can aesthetic judgments be anything but contentious. And no more today than in Manet’s time can we hope to understand the art of the present by forgetting, as Zola wrongly imagined, everything learned in the museum in order to somehow see things as they really are.”  — Schwabsky

“The role of the critic, I repeat, is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” — Mendelsohn

Too often layman criticism of art lies within a vacuum–that is without any of its art-historical context. One is unable to know Manet without knowing Velasquez, and certainly not without a strong enough grasp of Western civilization to understand the divorce of the Church from art’s significance around the middle of the 19th Century. To view a work entirely out of context is not to do it any justice at all, if one sees Pollack, for example, as destroying the longstanding tradition of representational painting and ushering in a new era, one would be doing a disservice to both the art world and the historical record.

As many have noted, the art critic exists in a tenuous space. There is no objective need for their criticism as there is for peer review in the sciences, and more pressingly, often the critics aren’t even peers. Many have no practices of their own. So where does criticism come into the arts world? Barry Schwabsky offers us an answer whose crux lies in the problem posed above. Critics are an amalgam of both historian and aestheticist. A good critic provides the reader not only with its description and a value-judgement on its aesthetic and intention, but they provide a reason for its being. What is it reacting against? How did this idea come to be and in what context? These are at the core of what it means to be a critic. That said, many critics themselves disagree in terms of minutiae.

Daniel Mendelsohn of the New Yorker argues that the role of a critic is a mediator while Barry Schwabsky of The Nation argues that the critic stands in as a representative of the spectator. Let’s break these positions down. Mendelsohn’s opinion makes a great deal of sense, he argues that critics are the bridge between spectator and work, but must do so with style and forethought in order to engage the public and keep their interest. There is certainly value to this: oftentimes when staring at a piece in a minimally curated gallery, an audience member is left with so many questions they know not where to begin. This, Mendelsohn might argue, is the void that is the critic’s job to bridge.

Schwabsky, however, has a more compelling argument. The critic cannot stand between the spectator and the work because they themselves are a part of it. As spectator, (his argument stems from those of Whitman and Duchamp) one is the finishing touch on the work itself. The bridge is the spectator themselves in the sense that the spectator brings whatever socio-cultural historical knowledge with them and those lead to assumptions and interpretations that in turn give the piece meaning. The critic’s role then, is to be “1st spectator” or a representative of the others. Because a good critic should have a great breadth of that kind of knowledge, they are the obvious choice to inform other potential spectators as to their opinions, as they have the credentials of those that are at once “in the art world but not of it.”

Critics have an interesting place in the art world, and it is a precarious one. It is a symbiotic relationship that depends on one another for growth and sustainability but at times can seem parasitic. It also is an evolving role and one I’m eager to see develop in the future.