April 1992 - 102030 - Brief Article

Ten years ago this month, in her contribution to Artforum's "Critical Reflections" series, Meaghan Morris raised hard questions about the ethics and practice of cultural criticism. Senior editor ERIC C. BANKS revisits the essay and finds its challenges still resonate.

I WOULDN'T ENDORSE Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, though it does offer a certain camp pleasure. Enjoy the good judge's nitpicking attacks--does it seem from his book that everybody is writing outside their field of expertise?--and revel in seeing Mr. Mean take down everyone in his path like an egghead daisy-cutter, from the late neo-con Allan Bloom to the ultraleft Noam Chomsky.

Posner's jeremiad has by now been reviewed to death, and pointing out the book's inanities would be pushing at an open door. Perhaps better would be to ask how it is that Public Intellectuals elicited Op-Eds nationwide. Gauging from the collective hand-wringing, the title brought to light a largely unspoken anxiety over the role public intellectuals play today: What exactly is it they do? What should they be doing?

If one grants the (slight) fudge of equating "public intellectual" and "cultural critic," the art world is apparently undergoing its own confidence check. "Crisis in Criticism" is a seat-filler at contemporary-art symposia. Of course, metacritical commentary is hardly an invention of the recent past--just look at the first issue of Artforum (June 1962) to see Sidney Geist's call for reform ("That critics know what they are talking about, and talk only about what they know"). Indeed, Artforum boasts a fifteen-year-old series of "Critical Reflections," in which "a range of critics or theorists" are invited "to articulate what they see as the role and responsibilities of art criticism today."

As it happens, in her contribution to that series ten years ago this month, Australian writer Meaghan Morris, a noted figure in cultural studies, raised many of the issues that turn up in Posner's book, if from a different point on the political spectrum. Her lead sentence registers anxiety about the direction that criticism had taken at the beginning of the '90s: "I dislike the messianic view allowing critics to speak with confidence (or these days, sell endorsements) on every issue in social life....I am also uneasy with the puritan variant that requires us to rehearse, in exemplary fashion and no matter what the occasion, our difficulties and crises of confidence in having access to public speech." Indeed, the emergence of cultural studies over the prior decade laid the question flat on the platter: What exactly is the critic's purview, and what is the object of examination proper to the "discipline"? What is the horizon of judgment, if judgment is still the right term?

Morris went about addressing these questions by turning first to a set of ethical appeals. "My critical discipline does not generate my critical questions," she wrote. "It is, on the contrary, a way of answering questions that arise for me insistently in the course of my everyday life." But those personal, ethical concerns give way as the essay develops into a broader, political framework. "The fact is that in order to write criticism....I need to begin with a pressing, wordless feeling that I must work to render sociable--by writing out of it a cultural history that may serve a political struggle." Alongside this response, she parried with the major topics haunting the cultural studies landscape of the early '90s--relativism, the critique of aestheticism--while refusing to see them in black-and-white terms. Much depends on her deft deployment of the simple phrase "it depends."

As nimble as Morris's feints were toward the issues of the day, what is perhaps most compelling about the piece a decade later is her honesty regarding the question of critical range. Here's where Posner, in one of the geekier law-and-economics moments of his book, finds common ground with recent discussions of criticism within the art world (and neighboring precincts). Emphasizing the combined effects of academic specialization and the insatiable demand for commentary--the market for writers and talkers has expanded exponentially in the recent past with the explosive growth in print, cable, and Internet media--Posner argues that the public intellectual has become more prominently represented in public life, not less. These changes in the market for public intellectuals parallel the burgeoning of the art world in the post-'60s, post-Pop milieu and its genius at absorbing the culture around it at dizzying speed. A glance at the articles in this issue of Artforum--whether it's General Idea's FILE magazine proje ct in the early '70s or Elmgreen & Dragset's fun with the white cube today--offers in miniature the battering that the art/life virgule has taken over the last several decades. How does cultural criticism respond to its slippery, almost spectral subject? For better or worse, any consideration of criticism must come to grips with this question. Does that represent a study in decline? It depends.