The Brooklyn Rail

It feels fitting to be writing this on Election Day, when many things, including the status of our questionable democracy, are at stake. For the past eight years or so, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what the point of my work is amid a series of personal, social, and political crises that are constantly unfolding. “People are dying,” says a voice in my brain. “What is the point of an art review? People are always dying,” says another brain-voice. Doesn’t the world still need art reviews?

I think the answer is yes, but to be honest, I can’t be entirely certain. My therapist tells me there are no “shoulds,” but I don’t completely agree. I believe we should all be trying to make the world a better place. The question is really how do you go about it. I’m not comfortable being prescriptive about that. The voices in my head say that being an activist or a public defender or a doctor is probably a better way to go than being an art critic—but then my lawyer friends tell me that what I do is important. I try to believe them.

Considering the purpose of criticism, John Berger once wrote, “First you must answer the question: What can art serve here and now? Then you criticize according to whether the works in question serve that purpose or not.… The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?” I think about that passage a lot, in particular the burdens it places on art. It feels almost unfair to judge all works by that standard. Still, I admire Berger’s tenacity, his insistence on setting the bar high, and if we’re doing so already, maybe we could look at criticism in the same light. When we practice it, are we helping anyone to know the world or themselves better?

For me, the answer is yes—by which I mean, criticism at least helps me know myself and the world better. It’s a way of sorting through problems and picturing possibilities. It’s a form of engaging in a very old and ever-evolving conversation about meaning. It’s an offering to the reader; maybe they might like to know about this thing, too. Or maybe they’re already wondering about it. Or maybe the thing itself is boring, but it’s valuable or interesting to see a kind of critical thinking that’s dismissed in our society modeled right there on the page.

Naturally, I’m not thinking about any of this when I write. When I write, I’m struggling to translate an experience or feeling into ideas that seem viable and sound smart. I’m usually struggling to meet my deadline, too, and to not go over my given word count (impossible). Inevitably, the lofty goals of criticism butt up against the realities of it—which is useful, to a point. The friction is generative. But the truth is that the realities of criticism are worse today than they’ve been in a long time. The pay is largely shit, the outlets are few, full-time gigs are nearly nonexistent. And half the time I suspect that no one understands what we do, not even our fellow journalists or art worlders. Criticism is not promotion, even when it’s advocacy. Criticism is “a way of showing up,” as my friend, the art critic and writer Jessica Lynne once wrote. 

(I wanted to write that criticism is care, but the word “care” has been so picked over by the art world in the last few years that I no longer trust it. This is also the job of the critic: to call people on their bullshit.)

I may never be able to fully articulate why, but I believe it’s important that we critics keep showing up. In order to do that, society needs to do a better job of showing up for us. What does that mean? Funding journalism and jobs, better freelance pay and protections, and reading our work, for a start. Without those things, criticism will become even more the province of only the people who can afford to do it, and when that happens, it will become less valuable. Its breadth of vision will be diminished. A criticism that only sees certain things and people, and only in certain ways, is just another instrument of power.

People are dying; the world is burning. As I write this, the people sitting next to me on my flight are watching election returns come in on CNN (and I can feel my chest tightening accordingly). What can genuine, rigorous criticism serve here and now? In my better moments, I imagine it could be one small piece of the puzzle that helps us pass through the darkness in order to reach some other, brighter place.