February 9, 2004
What James Elkins wants from art criticism
In the spirit of sharing and freedom of information that pervades James Elkins's website, here is the conclusion to his pamphlet What Happened to Art Criticism?, number thirteen in a series published by Prickly Paradigm Press in Chicago. I just purchased and read it last night, and more commentary will hopefully soon follow.
So here, to close, are three qualities that most engage me in contemporary criticism. They are open to the same objections I raised about other people's proposals: they have their histories, and they can be interpreted as evidence I want to return to some unnamed past--but so be it! That's the nature of criticism.
1. Ambitious judgment. Art criticism is best, I think, when it is openly ambitious, meaning that the critic is interested in comparing the work at hand with past work, and weighing her judgments against those made by previous writers. I like art critics who periodically try to bear the burden of history by writing in the imaginary presence of generations of artworks, art critics, and art historians. I am engaged by critics who show signs that they have read the literature, when it exists, and who have thought out the main claims about modern and postmodern art made by writers from Adorno and Benjamin to Lyotard and Jameson. Much of current newspaper and magazine criticism is written from viewpoints that could easily be explained--and fatally critiqued--by reference to the major theorists of modernism. Yet it is not an impossible demand to ask that newspaper critics respond to primary sources and to the history of their discipline. The most interesting critics show that it is possible to acknowledge complex ideas and practices even given the short formats, broad public, and tight deadlines of newspaper publishing.
2. Reflection about judgment itself.
Art criticism can content itself with description, but then it loses the run of itself, becomes something else, dissolves into the ocean of undifferentiated nonfiction writing on culture. Art criticism can be a parade of pronouncements of "discriminations," as the editorial in the New Criterion has it, but then it becomes conservative, or begins to smell of dogmatism. I find myself engaged by critics who are serious about judgment, by which I mean that they offer judgments, and--this is what matters most--they then pause to assess those judgments. Why did I write that? such a critic may ask, or: Who first thought of that? Art criticism is a forum for the concept and operation of judgment, not merely a place where judgments are asserted, and certainly not a place where they are evaded. At the same time, criticism cannot become exclusively a forum for meditation on judgment, as Krauss once said, because then it would lose itself in another way--it would dissolve into aesthetics, or into trackless meditation.3. Criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.
Because it is journalism, I don't expect to see [Peter Schjeldahl's]"Surrealism Revisited" mentioned in the next Yale or MIT Press book on surrealism. But it should be, and it should also be noted by other journalists. Build the conversation, as Annette Michelson says. I would love to see art criticism from The New York Times, the New Yorker, or Time be cited by art historians in journals like the Art Bulletin, October, or Art History. It could be, if its arguments were tight enough. I would like to see catalog essays from ordinary commercial galleries be cited in art historical monographs published by university presses. They could be, if they were written with attention to issues current in art history. Newspaper criticism is cited by historians after enough time has passed, but that is because it is valued as historical evidence, showing how works were received. What I mean is that contemporary critics who have cogent readings of artworks could enter into the conversation of art history. And of course this is a two-way street. It would also be good to see art historians' names and ideas showing up in newspaper art criticism. Why not have the conversation going in both directions?In order for that to happen, all that is required is that everyone read everything. Each writer, no matter what their place and purpose, should have an endless bibliography, and know every pertinent issue and claim. We should all read until our eyes are bleary, and we should read both ambitiously--making sure we've come to terms with Greenberg, or Adorno--and also indiscriminately--finding work that might ordinarily escape us. Some art critics avoid academia because they think it's stuffy and irrelevant, but that is just silly. (There is no other word.) And it is just as silly for art historians to spurn contemporary art criticism. The hydra may have seven heads, or seventeen thousand: but it is speaking with all of them, and each one needs to be heard if we are to take the measure of modern art.