The Brooklyn Rail

I fell into criticism more than I pursued it. A few friends talked me into starting the Manhattan Art Review because they knew I could inject some criticality into the discourse, which is something I was interested in, but it mainly began somewhere between a place to practice writing and a tongue-in-cheek joke. At the time I was narrowly making ends meet through part-time work, so I had free time and wasn’t worried about making money. COVID hit six months after I started, so once galleries reopened I had even more free time and money was even less of a concern. My writing started to attract attention not long after that, around winter 2020–21, so I started working on it more seriously without any particular goal in mind. By the end of 2021 my part-time job(s) scheme fell apart, and since then I’ve tried to monetize with ads on my website, paid studio visits, and a Patreon, but none have generated anything close to a living wage. Anything I’ve done freelance for magazines has paid so little in proportion to the amount of work that I’ve never considered it as a form of income. I’ve lived off grant money for the last two years, but I don’t know how long that will continue, so I have no long-term stability.

I doubt my writing has any real impact on the art world. I’m not involved with promoting anyone’s career and I don’t want to be. I try to be as faithful to my own impressions of art as possible, so actively championing a particular artist would be at odds with that. I don’t stand to gain anything from anyone’s career advancement anyway. My main influence, I think, has been in reintroducing judgment to criticism, which is often spoken of as if it were controversial, but I think that’s just the job. Someone who writes on art and withholds their opinion is an art writer or a journalist, but not a critic. Refusing to evaluate art implies art can be addressed adequately by factual description or by repeating the artist’s interpretation of their own work, but I think that trivializes the specific function of art as a subjective experience. An artist is no more qualified to dictate the meaning of their art than a chef is to award their own Michelin stars; art is a specific discipline with its own history and contextual boundaries, even if the terms of experience are more abstract than that of a meal. Whether an art critic is right or wrong in every instance barely comes into it. What matters is the exercise of their sensibility towards art in general, which the reader can then consider from their own point of view. I usually don’t agree with Pauline Kael’s taste in films or Robert Christgau’s in music, but I’d much rather read one of their reviews over something less brashly opinionated by someone with a more even keel. Judgment, taste, and connoisseurship have been dirty words in art for a few decades now, but I don’t see how art can be navigated without them. More to the point, I don’t think it’s possible to do without them in the first place. People might protest that there’s no objective grounds to make a critic a more legitimate judge of art than someone else, and I agree. The only metric is if people like your writing.