A quiet crisis: is there a serious breakdown in the dialogue around contemporary painting? Should art critics get back into the business of making value judgments? - Issues & Commentary - painting and the past - Critical Essay

Art in America, March, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein

I recalled a comment I'd come across a few years before, in a collection of essays by the artist-writer Mira Schor: "A very bright, young art critic recently explained to me why painters today have a basic problem of reception for their work: the most intelligent of her generation of art critics, she said, do not understand painting, they don't know how to read it, don't understand color." (14) (This is echoed in Currin's observation, quoted above, that the "culture" around painting is "dead.") Could a widespread inability of critics to look intelligently and knowledgeably at painting be part of the problem? It seemed like a plausible explanation, except that the problem wasn't just with critics. In the last few years there has been a much wider failure, if not a near-total breakdown, in the process of assessing painting--how else to explain the phenomenal success of an artist like Cecily Brown, who is presented as a painting virtuoso when she is a flashy but moderately skilled practitioner of a thoroughly academic form of expressionism? (And please don't speak to me of her supposedly transgressive eroticism, which has all the subtlety of an orgy in a low-budget porn film.) Or the enthusiastic reception given to the wan, equivocating, strangely inconsequential canvases of Laura Owens? Or Gary Hume's jokey, ingratiating, quick-fix exercises in neo-Pop? How could the curator of the Artists Space show, Lauri Firstenberg, conclude that her lackluster choices were the best that New York had to offer? Looking back, I think the scale of the crisis first hit me when I noticed that Damien Hirst's visually and conceptually inert "Dot Paintings"--grids of circles in pleasant, randomly sequenced colors--were being taken seriously by American viewers and institutions. This was a sign that our expectations of painting had been drastically, even tragically reduced. It doesn't help the work that Hirst is absurdly deluded about the retinal qualities of his art: "I'm a fantastic phenomenal colorist. It's like, I'm a Bonnard, a Turner, a Matisse." (15) Given that Brown, Hume and Hirst are English, it's perhaps also a sign of the deleterious effect of Brit Art on the American art scene--but that's another story, as are, I must add, Chris Ofili and Glenn Brown, a pair of quite good London-based painters.

New Genealogies

One thing that is sorely missing from the current realm of painting is a sense of genealogy, or, at any rate, a refreshed sense of historical development. Most of us seem to be carrying around in our heads some dusty, tattered schema based on Alfred Barr's famous 1936 diagram of Cubism and Abstract Art, grafted onto which are other lines and modules representing a half dozen movements from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Geo. After the mid-1980s, the diagram metamorphoses into a cascade of individual manners, following each other in rapid sequence like calendar pages in an old Hollywood movie. As it gets closer to the present, the cascade speeds up and breaks apart, making it impossible even to keep track of changes on a strictly chronological basis. Confronted with a shattering of stylistic tendencies and a global proliferation of art scenes, and inheriting a skepticism about all universal judgments and a market-driven environment, it's no wonder that critics have largely gotten out of the business of making distinctions and value judgments, or limited themselves to issuing vague pronouncements such as the "return to beauty" that was widely heralded a few years back.