The Brooklyn Rail

“When I was ten years old, I was rich.” Wallace Shawn, the Marxist playwright, essayist, and actor—lightly fictionalized in My Dinner with Andre—is reminiscing about life without obligations. “I was an aristocrat riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m thirty-six, and all I think about is money.”

Unless lucky enough to land a half dozen or so salaried posts, every art critic eventually reaches a point where they think about money as often as they think about art. David Levi Strauss told me that he and the other writers of his generation got into art criticism because it paid better than poetry. He also said the rates basically haven’t changed since the last century. It’s never been easy, but it’s probably never been this hard.

One way to sidestep this question of sustainability is to get a job and write on the side—which is what I do—but this is different from the ideal model of writing about art to improve your fiction or poetry or chosen art form. “If your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive or what you experience,” Wally says at dinner. “You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead.” That’s a death sentence for a critic.

We should think about the economic viability of criticism in the context of a larger assault on the knowledge economy, which is being subsumed by private equity even as AI tries to swallow the creative-professional industry whole. Never mind the death of criticism, all of media is suffering. Who is fighting on our behalf? I worry about critics and curators, editors and educators, but I worry about artists and novelists and filmmakers most. I worry about what culture looks like in a society where mindless consumption is the default, where each free second, every possible moment of boredom or inspiration, is distracted by some technological bauble, and where art—essentially a leisure activity—is made superfluous by an increasingly urgent demand to monetize the mundane enterprise of our lives.

When I served on the US board of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA), I felt it was our role to “establish a materialist model for dedicated art criticism,” drawing a distinction “between advocating for professionalized, comfortable criticism and advocating for the economic viability of art writing as a practice.” I’ll just say that I remain optimistic that the humanities’ stock will rise, and eventually the art market will see value in making an investment in thoughtful, textured writing. Perhaps even in supporting critics to the same extent that it seeks to support artists themselves. But art magazines can’t pay what they themselves don’t have. It remains the case that writing about other things pays more than writing about art, literature, cinema, and so on. I’m fortunate to have held stable jobs in the arts, yet I often find myself wondering if it’s better to separate my vocation from my paycheck. Maybe the drudgery of a tedious job is a boon for a writer (my former mentor Edward P. Jones paid his rent compiling—I think it was—instruction manuals for TV remotes), while a prestige job offering proximity to art acts as an opiate, stimulating enough to fulfill one’s livelihood if not a writer’s mind. This is the calculus that every art critic must make. I fear that there are more of us leaving than joining the ranks every day.

Let’s call this what it is: a brain drain. I find myself thinking sympathetically of André Gregory, the pretentious theater director whose skepticism about the possibility of having a meaningful existence—whose midlife crisis—drove him to India and Scotland and Poland, where, according to Wally, he “talked with trees or something like that.” André likens life now to “the new model for the new kind of concentration camp”—one constructed with pride by the prisoners themselves, who simultaneously serve as their own guards. “As a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made,” he says, “or to even see it as a prison.”

André believes it’s possible that “history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.” Art, he says, or the kind of artful life he’s experienced, seeks “reserves, islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function in order to maintain the species through a dark age.” In other words, he’s calling for an underground—one whose purpose is “to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture; how to keep things living.” Nothing less is at stake.