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ISSUES COMMENT RYArt Criticism, Bound to Fail

A critic confronts the inescapable limitations of writing about art and reflects ontspitfalls and privilegesBY N NCY PRINCENTH L

T e object of only fitful atten tio n, sometimeswarm but mostly exasperated, art criticismis an orphan practice, and has grown up withoutconsistent discipline of any kind. This lack of order,rules of conduct and fixed stand ards for measur-ing success have lately, again (there is periodicityto this), provoked some despair; th e term "crisis"has been used. But it is no coincidence that artcriticism's laxity is exactly congruen t with the free-doms celebrated in it s sub ject. And if art is valuedfor exercising such spir ited ind ependence, why notthe writing that addresses it?Then and Nowformulated in a 2001 October roundtable' andsubsequently wo years later in a short book by JamesElkins called What Happened to Art Criticimn:the causes for alarm echo concerns that go back atleast four decades. They can be dated to the b i ih (in1962) and striking rise to prominence of Ar@um,which came in response to a widespread appe tite formore rigorous and objective w r i t i i than that offeredby other magazines at th e time, especially Artnew s,then dominated by a literary, poetic sensibility. So the

analysis, Marxist econom ic theory,.stru ctural anthropology-these areall fascinating fields, but they have :neither more necessary nor suffi-cient relationships to visual rt than

do theology, or mathematics, or thephysics of color (to name some heu-ristic precedents).On the other hand, and moreimportant I think, good fiction andpoetry can be every bit as lean andincisive, and as informative aboutactual experience in t he real world,as any cultural or political theory.Philosopher and classicist MarthaNussbaum contends that the false-hood of the art/theory dichotomywas understood even by the Greeks:"Indeed, epic and tragic poets werewidely assumed to be the centralethical thinkers and teachers ofGreece; of their Bruce Nurtrnnn: Bound to Fail,1966, colorphotogrlmph, 19% by 23work as less serious, less aimed at inc he s,fr orn ' Eleven Col or Photographs, 1966-67/1970. ourtesgtruth, than the speculative prose Sperone Westrouter, New Y ork. O 2005Bru ce NarimadArtists Rights

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ers conclude tha t the strongest-and certa inlyeasiest-act of judgm ent is decid ing what to writeabout. In th e 1950s, when at Irving Sandler's e sti-mate the New York art community numbered 250people,Artnews reviewed every show in a Manhat-tan gallery, in 50 words or less. Essentially, it wasjust enough space to pu t your thumb up or down.To go back to roughly the same time-that is, thelate 1950s and early '60s-there was (at least inpart for the same reason) a sense of mutual engage-ment between artists and critics that has sinceconsiderably weakened. There is no curren t workcomparable to Jasper Johns's indelible The Criticees (1961)--or to John Baldessari's text paintings

of the later '60s, all of which are wittily preemp-tive of criticism. They did not exactly precipita te acrisis in ar t writing, but they did antic ipate full-boreConceptualism as a kind of elbowing out of the roleof the critic. One considerable problem today isin a lack of mutual antagonism, or even energeticengagement. Artists are no more willing to take on

WH T S PAINTING

DO YOU SENSE HOW ALL THE PARTS OF A GOOPICTURE ARE INVOLVED WITH EACH OTHER, NOTJUST PLACED SIDE BY SIDE ART ISA CRVITIOWFOR TH EYE AND CAN ONLY BE HINTED AT WITH

ported by the critica l discussion, but no t be its prem-ise. Good criticism allows readers to make reasonedevaluations themselves.Market ShareRunning beneath the problem of judgment, and pro-viding much of its force and persis tence, is the ques-tion of power, especially as i t is tied to money. In theOctober roundtable, Benjamin Buchloh remarkedtestily at one point, you don't need criticism for aninves tment structure, you need experts '9 Agreeingwith Buchloh on the distorting influence of finan-cial concerns on ar t writing, Neo-Conceptual a rtistAndrea Fraser has made market analysis her subjec tin both her writing and her art. "I define criticism asan e thica l practice of self-reflective evaluation of theways in which we participate in the reproduction ofrelations of domination," Fraser said.1That is a spiral that leads inward toward eversmaller, more trivial loops. Certainly there aremore important political targets than art's sys-tem of distribution, even if that system is consid-ered representative of other, broader economicstructures. And just as certainly, art is better atother things th an market analysis. Though Fraser'sapproach reco mmends itself as a form of unsparingself-reflection, rigorously Marxist and altogetherwithout self-interest, in practice it is more than alittle narcissistic, something like those "scathing"Hollywood movies about industry insiders thatmust seem wonderfully brave to their subjects butto the r est of us sink or swim on their a ccessibilityas gossip. Peter Schjeldahl's quip at the height ofthe 1980s market boom, that art had become thesex life of money, surely goes far to explain t he

Engagement between artistsand critics has weakened.There is no current workcomparable to Jasper Johns sindelible The CriticSeesor to John Baldessari s textpaintings, which are wittilypreemptive of criticism.PrecisIf not examining the circulation of power andmoney, and making judgments tha t affect its flow,what does criticism concern itself with? Whatexactly is its purpose? In the October roundtable,George Baker described himself as an explorer, andRosalind Krauss said that her role as she sees itincludes "scanning th e horizon for some new blip."Hal Foster identified four functions for critics: thearcheological, exploratory, paradigm-making andmnemonic. Speaking in Amy Newman's Artforumhistory, Peter Plagens noted three types of critics:evangelists, cartographers and goalies. The firstare proselytizers who write only to eagerly promotetheir favorite work, the second are dedicated todescribing the lay of the land, and the third arecritics who say of themselves, "It's going to haveto be pretty good to get by me."12Most of these jobdescriptions involve identifying merit (surely aform of judgment) and finding category headingsfor its new instances. There is a vaguely colonial

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reporting or political an alysis from the field of writ-ing. Few curious and engaged reader s (and increas-ingly few writers) restrict themselves to a singlegenre, particularly since each enriches the under-standing of other s. The same is true of th e myriadmodes of contemporary visual a rt. Art as a practiceis becoming ever more diversified. Understandingany of it demands comparable flexibility and range,and although this seems too obvious to need say-ing, many critics righteously insist on allegiance tonarrow bands of the spectrum, denouncing othe rscategorically (painting, for instance, is a frequenttarget).

ifficultyEmbracing this diversity is a good way of avoidingpredetermined theoretical frameworks. It alsohelps prevent recourse to jargon; the unnecessaryuse of specialist terminology, affectations thatderive from French-to-English translations, andurljustified neologisms are among the most dis-heartening aspects of much theoretica lly orien tedcritical writing. Ironically, they dispel the joys ofthe unfamiliar that are among the highest plea-sures of compelling new art .Here fine distinctions need to be made. In criticalwriting, clarity is, I think, close to an ethical impera-tive: it enhnchises readers. The possibility of engag-ing public attention and the responsibilities thusentailed are forfeited by writing that is deliberatelyobscure. On the other hand, opacity-form that callsattention to itself-has an important, even an essen-tial place in both visual and verbal invention. And if

: one thing essential to criticism, it is recogniz-

ing art's resistance to verbal summary. What mattersmost about visual art, in the end, is that it's visual,tha t it always involves an essential quality thatexceeds written accounts. An analogy can be m adebetween this quality and th e unconscious as an expe-rience that is supplemental, or antecedent, to whatwe can say we know. 'The unconscious s the onlydefense against a language frozen into pure, fixed orinstitutionalized meaning," Jacqueline Rose writes.1sEven if Rose continues, the visual image, in tradition-al Western painting, has "restricted the human bodyto the eye," it is a restric tion that "could only operatelike a law which always produces the terms of its ownviolation. It is often forgotten that psychoanalysisdescribes the psychic law to which we are subject, butonly in terms of its ailing. '14It is not that I think psychoanalysis has any par-ticular priority as an interpretive system for art.Rather, what compels my interest in criticism, ulti-mately, is that it too (to quote Bruce Nauman) isbound to fail-that it is impossible to acco unt com-prehensively for art that's any good. As Guy Daven-port said, with disarming simplicity, "All art is sym-bolic to one degree or another, and the interest in awork of art is inexhaustible."161. "Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,"October 100, spring 2002. Participants were George Baker,Beqjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Andrea Fraser, DavidJoselit, Rosalind Krauss, James Meyer, John Miller, HelenMolesworth and Robert Storr.2. James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism?,Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.3. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Arvorum 1962-1974,New York, Soho Press, 2000.

Critics must recognizeart's resistance to verbalsummary. What mattersmost about visual art inthe end is that it's visual,that it always involvesan essential quality whichexceeds written accounts.

4. Irving Sandler,A Sweeper-Up A m rtists London andNew York, Thames and Hudson, 2003.5. Martha Nussbaum, The Frag ility of Goodness: Luckand Ethics in Greek Pagedy and Philosqphy,Cambridgeand New York, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 12.6. Guy Davenport,Every Force Evolves a Form, San Fran-cisco, North Point Press, 1987,p. 107.7. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost Reading Simo-nides of Keos with Paul Ce lan), Princeton and Oxford,Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 55.8. Elkins, p. 42.9. October 100,p. 202.10. Ibid., p. 214.11. Ibid., p. 206.12. Newman, p. 137.13. Jacqueline Rose, Se ma lit y in the Field of Vision,London and New York, Verso, 1986,p. 3.14. Ibid., p. 232.15. Davenport, p. 106.This essay will appear in a fortheming anthology, Criti-cal Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice, editedy Raphael Rubinstein and published by Hard PressEditions.