The Brooklyn Rail

In our culture there are two often very distinct forms of art writing. There is art criticism, which is journalistic writing, as found in newspapers such as Artforum and the Rail. And there is academic writing, such as you find in the Art Bulletin and books about art. Each journal has its own conventions and quirks, but here it is possible to make some useful generalizations. If the founding fathers of Western art history are Giorgio Vasari and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the first major art critic is Denis Diderot. To say that criticism is journalism is to identify its informal quality and, usually, its brevity. Just as the sports reporter writes about soccer and basketball, so the art critic covers events in the art world, which can include shows and other newsworthy events. And because art history writing is an academic enterprise, it has footnotes, elaborately developed arguments and all of the paraphernalia of research found elsewhere in the humanities. The relationship between these two forms of art writing is thus similar to the contrast between news reporting and history writing. To learn the results of the election, you read the paper or go online; to learn the state of debate about, say, the causes of the Great War, you have to read the bookish literature. A critic presents a judgment about what’s up, while an art historian places the work historically.

Once I knew a gay couple in Texas who shared two very different cars, a large Cadillac sedan and a small sports car. It must have been difficult, I thought, for either of them to switch from one car to the other. Analogously, such is my experience, moving from art history writing to criticism is not easy. Where the art critic says, ‘this is what this exhibition means to me’, the historian of art typically adopts a more impersonal tone, telling us what the exhibition means with reference to the literature. And while a critic can be brief, even elliptical, an art historian is expected to be thorough. Writing as a critic, I may say with reference to some prior commentary that it’s a strong show. However, when writing as a historian, then I need to take account of the literature. Often when traveling I read reviews online on my smart phone over breakfast. But I’ve never seen anyone perusing the Art Bulletin on those occasions. If a critic doesn’t catch my attention, I move on quickly. That’s what I do when reading the news. But when I see accounts of Nicolas Poussin, one of my academic subjects, then I need to read with care to the end.

Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg are great critics; and Giorgio Vasari, Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich great historians. Because these concerns are so different, my listings of great critics and historians don’t overlap. Diderot and the other critics provide the historian with information about the reception of artworks. Historians writing about Eugène Delacroix need to know what Baudelaire said, but they also should study his many successors. Of course, there is no reason why someone might practice both different activities, in the way that Daniel Barenboim is both a pianist and conductor. In general, critics need to move quickly. Often editors want a review to appear while an exhibition is still up. And while a review may cite previous shows in passing, in general the focus is expected to be on what is seen. But the historian may adopt a much more expansive approach, as when discussing works found in many distant collections are discussed. Criticism involves judging, and so may often consider minor exhibitions. To write art history generally the working assumption is that the works described have passed the test of time. To be a critic, you need to be able to move relatively quickly. If that means that you get some things wrong, well posterity will correct you—or, indeed, you may correct yourself when you publish your collected art writing.

The careers of Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss provided a suggestive model for this relationship between criticism and art history. And similar remarks apply to Leo Steinberg. When young, you meet some challenging artists, and so want to write about them. And when everyone gets a bit older, you will have an historical perspective. Art history is an academic subject, which means that successful writers have support for their activity. But, for reasons worth discussing, critics as a group have not become a stable part of the academic system. Sometimes, of course, they have adjunct posts. And that means that they need to find ways to support themselves. To be an academic art writer, normally you must have a doctorate. But unlike art history, art criticism doesn’t have any such licensing system. If you can get published by a respectable editor, then you too are a critic. And this means that criticism can take place more quickly in criticism. This is why Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism was much written about by journalists before professors took it up. The academy had to be persuaded that these subjects were worthy of serious attention.

That much, in any case, is how things used to be. But as we all know, right now the art world is changing. What has recently changed the relationship between criticism and art history writing, and frequently undercut any distinction between these activities, is the turn of the academic world to focus on contemporary art. Even brand new just-come-from-the-studio artworks are written about elaborately as if they were old master masterpieces and a great number of the academic jobs involve contemporary art. This change goes with another; the crisis of journalistic art writing provoked by gentrification. A couple of generations ago, it was (almost) possible for freelance critics to support themselves by writing. Now that is impossible. Writing criticism is thus a part-time activity of people who have day jobs, and often those day jobs involve teaching art history.

We seek to better understand the present. Our critical questions: How do these sweeping changes affect our practice as art writers? How do they affect the whole contemporary art world? And do you have any advice for other art writers?