Why art critics don't matter anymore: aesthetic terms are everywhere because everyone uses language aesthetically all the time; it is part of the texture of our lives. Alexander Nehamas

ArtUS, May-June, 2007 by David Carrier

Recently when reviewing Caroline Jones's elaborate Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses and Alice Marquis's straightforward biography, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (both 2006), I found myself wondering why there is still so much fascination with Greenberg. Almost thirty years ago when I started writing criticism, Artforum editor Joe Masheck told me that Greenberg's straightforward ways of thinking had long been discredited. But although art critics have moved on, not one of us has anything remotely like Greenberg's influence. Arthur Danto is a famous philosopher, whose very readable art criticism published in The Nation, a large-circulation journal, is much admired. But as he has told me, his writing has no effect upon the art market. No doubt reviews in The New York Times or Artforum have some practical significance for careers of younger artists. But what matters now is gaining support from dealers, curators, and collectors. Nowadays art writing plays very little role in this commercial system. As Jerry Saltz reports, "At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic written had less of an effect on the market than now." (2) Sometimes people who worry that art criticism is just advertising are concerned about conflicts of interest. We should be so lucky! I doubt that many people buy, display, or sell art because they read art critics.

In the late 1970s, when Artforum reviewers were very critical of most art in the galleries, that journal became dangerously slim. Now, fat with advertising, it mostly publishes friendly reviews. No respectable journal wants to make the link between advertising and the editorial content too explicit, but of course any commercial publication depends upon advertisers. It's easy, as Tom Crow has noted recently, to be nostalgic about the era when art criticism really mattered.

   The critical force of the old Artforum
   was never anything but a lived
   contradiction between thought and
   commerce. We have passed through a
   period when commerce has displayed
   the superior intelligence and outrun
   the theoreticians. (3)

James Meyer's marvelous recent Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) tells a story of ferocious disputes conducted in the leading journals. (4) But that era, in which Michael Fried's polemic against minimalism was published in Artforum, is long gone, as distant as the time when Greenberg lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West. In his day it was possible to live cheaply in Manhattan. As recently as the 1980s, the East Village was poor enough to be gentrified by art dealers. But now that it is prime real estate, young artists are lucky if they have expensive small studios far out in Brooklyn. And since life in that city has become extremely expensive, critics either have trust funds or need day jobs.

Greenberg had great influence because he championed the abstract expressionists when most commentators ignored or ridiculed them. Greenberg's challenging taste was accompanied by a highly original theory of why this painting mattered.

   Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really
   took up Analytical Cubism from the
   point at which Picasso and Braque had
   left it when, in their collages of 1912
   and 1913, they drew back from the
   utter abstractness for which Analytical
   Cubism seemed headed. (5)

No one else offered anything like his account. In the 1960s, Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and some of their rivals tried to take up Greenberg's role. (6) Greenberg's footnote-free style of argument was frankly informal. Fried and Krauss were professors, and so offered serious arguments. When Fried explained the virtues of Anthony Caro and Krauss championed Richard Serra, they used heavy-duty theorizing. This style of criticism was influential, and so by the 1980s, critics felt that they had to invoke the authority of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and other intellectual sources. I can hardly criticize them, for so did I. You needed to cite these French writers if you were to be judged au courant. But by the 1990s, this way of proceeding no longer carried conviction.

Fried and Krauss wanted to change criticism in the way that, at the start of the twentieth century, Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, and Heinrich Wolfflin transformed art history. Before this German-style scholarship took root, art historians wrote in informal ways. Such very distinguished figures as Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson used theory as casually as Greenberg. But after professors transformed the discipline, any serious art historian needed to cite sources and employ footnotes. Marvelous critics like Bill Berkson, Robert Hughes, Carter Ratcliff, and Peter Schjeldhal never bought into this way of thinking. But because they invoke no theorizing, they tend to be dismissed as mere journalists. In the 1990s Dave Hickey became justly famous, for he was that too-rare creature, a writerly art writer. But even so influential a role model did not change the situation. Thomas McEvilly and Arthur Danto, very distinguished professors, write wonderful art criticism in essentially informal ways. McEvilly's criticism benefits enormously from his academic perspective--he is a classicist who has a serious scholarly interest in Hindu philosophy. (7) As for Danto, he has always made a radical distinction between his aesthetic theory and his art criticism. Danto's activities as philosopher and critic really are compartmentalized. His fellow philosophers mostly know little about the everyday life of the art world, while art critics are not prepared to understand his philosophical arguments.