The Brooklyn Rail

It’s hilarious that something as mute as visual art should have such a fraught relationship with words. With art criticism, to be precise. Today, print is beleaguered, Instagram posts count for more than a New York Times review, and it’s fair to wonder whether ideas even matter in contemporary art. Could criticism be in crisis again? Of course, it is. 

Ah, the crisis of criticism, what would we do without it? In the art writing game, this topic is an evergreen. I myself have indulged, sort of, in a 1998 “Book Report” review in Artnet Magazine of a Maurice Berger package job called, yes, “The Crisis in Criticism.” I began with a diagnosis that criticism suffers from “stupidity, cowardice, irrelevance” and ended with a prescription for… well, let’s just say I was mean. 

Perhaps here is the place to dilate on the question of meanness—shall we say sadism?—in art criticism. Artists want to be called “great” by critics, possibly more than they want anything, while readers show a pronounced hunger for negative commentary. Many of our best critics have risen to the occasion, sternly, like Old Testament scribes. But really, all these high standards, you might suspect, represent some kind of compensation for hidden vices. In fact, we all know the reason for any animus critics may feel toward their opposite number: critics are failed artists. 

I can testify that in my early twenties, after I had launched my own art magazine, I found it easier to identify as a critic than as an artist. Was that modesty or a kind of braggadocio? Though critics serve artists, they also rule them. More than one critic has claimed a general vocational superiority over artists. While an artist is expert in one thing—themselves and their own art—critics can be encyclopedic, veritable Vespuccis, claiming and colonizing all they survey.

By the way, as any working critic will tell you, the notion of “crisis in criticism” is a waste of time to think about. You just do your work, day by day. 

Shall I mention my beginnings? My life as a critic has a primal origin. I distinctly remember being a toddler standing in the dark hallway outside my parents’ bedroom, the door open a crack, wondering what was going on in there. Such Oedipal curiosity, repeated now as aesthetic event. My fate was sealed. 

Later, as an aimless undergraduate in the art historian Barbara Novak’s twentieth-century art survey class at Barnard College, I heard Barbara mention “Minimalism,” and in search of elucidation the following semester, enrolled in a seminar on “art criticism” led by Brian O’Doherty, who happened to be Novak’s husband. He was then caretaker editor for Art in America magazine, and he enlisted me as a reviewer. Thus, did my long apprenticeship as an art writer begin.

In that seminar, I met my fellow student Edit DeAk, and the next year we launched our own magazine, which we named Art-Rite. I had a job as production assistant at a weekly newspaper, and Edit had an immigrant’s moxie. Artists did the covers, we interviewed famous art critics, got grants to print the thing, and distributed it for free on SoHo gallery windowsills. Despite not really knowing anything, we had something to say. 

But my true understanding of the vocation of art critic came a bit later, when the powers at AiA offered me the job of penning a new monthly art newsletter for insiders, called “The Art Letter.” I had no experience at reporting actual news, and didn’t know a single insider. I was a perfect candidate. When it comes to art criticism, anyone who wants the job can have it. 

Decades later, I was offered another job, as editor of a new online art magazine for Artnet.com. Truly, the digital revolution changed my life. Instead of the stately monthly schedule of a glossy print publication, I had a lively, vital new daily soapbox for preaching and screeching. With all due respect to my mentors at AiA, it’s tons more fun to run your own shop. And earn more than minimum wage.

That particular ride came to an end after sixteen years. I like to say that Artnet’s founder and CEO, Hans Neuendorf, changed my life twice, both times for the better: when he hired me and when he fired me. “Walter,” he said in the phone call announcing the end of Artnet Magazine, “I hope you’re enjoying working in your studio, because you’re going to have more time for it.” 

That was a dozen years ago, and since then I’ve managed to paint a lot of pictures and sell a few of them. As for art criticism, well, I now carry on with snappy captions on my Instagram posts, where I can illustrate short amusing elliptical texts with as many as twenty pictures. And get paid nothing for the trouble. I have about as many “followers” as AiA had subscriptions. It’s an art critic’s dream.