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What happened to critical criticism? Art criticism expressing a negative opinion seems to be a dying breed, but this is how we save it from extinction – for we must

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What happened to critical criticism? Art criticism expressing a negative opinion seems to be a dying breed, but this is how we save it from extinction – for we must

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Content WHAT HAPPENED TO CRITICAL CRITICISM?
ART CRITICISM EXPRESSING A NEGATIVE OPINION SEEMS TO BE A DYING BREED, BUT
THIS IS HOW WE SAVE IT FROM EXTINCTION – FOR WE MUST

by

Aino Elina Frilander

A Thesis Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM (ARTS)

May 2020

Copyright 2020 Aino Elina Frilander
Epigraph
Works of art remain afloat on a sea of words. Those refractory facts, art works,
are launched into the treacherous currents of language with its sudden
undertows, backwaters, and shifting mainstreams. Works will sink out of sight,
cause ripples or even occasional tidal waves. But this trackless, navigational
nightmare is not without direction, for below, silently at work, is that force that
waits for no man: the tidal pull toward judgment that assigns to works a
certain coefficient of power measured in terms of cold cash and those slippery
verbal chips to be redeemed for a piece of history.”

- Robert Morris, in Some Splashes in the Ebb Tide,

Artforum, February 1973.
i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph i

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

The rules 12

Epilogue 15

References 18

Interviews 18

Bibliography 18
ii
Abstract
Up until the 1960s and 1970s, art criticism was often combative, praising and
denouncing exhibitions in equal measure. Now it seems that critics are more often shying away
from expressing a critical opinion about contemporary art exhibitions, possibly due to shifts in
art itself as well as societal and political developments. As the art world has grown to include a
diverse set of voices, the critical voices have also had to change.

We live in an increasingly image-saturated world, which is why we need art criticism –
to serve as navigational aids in that flood of images – and art critics who say what they think. In
the words of composer and critic Virgil Thomson, criticism is “the only antidote we have to paid
publicity.”

In order to shed more light on the state of critical criticism today, I have interviewed five
Californian art critics about what sort of a place does negative opinion occupy in their work. All
the critics said that they prefer writing positive reviews – Sharon Mizota engages explicitly in
so-called advocacy criticism – but they all saw the need for critical writing, too. In the words of
ArtsJournal founder Douglas McLennan, “If it’s all uniformly positive and we have filtered out all
the bad stuff – how can you understand why something works or doesn’t work?”.

The conversations with the critics resulted in the creation of a five-step approach to
expressing a critical opinion in an ethical, constructive way.

iii
Introduction
Imagine that you are an art critic and you have been sent to review an art
exhibition at a respectable gallery. Your editor has asked you to review it. You
look around yourself and think to yourself – “This is awful.” The work feels
soulless, derivative. The exhibition appears to be put together callously: big
pieces to be hawked to museums, smaller pieces to collectors’ homes, a
difficult sound installation that makes the show look a little less commercial.
The gallery assistant smiles obsequiously and is happy to help if you have any
questions.
This past year living in Los Angeles as a recent transplant, I have come to know the city
by going to see every interesting art exhibition I hear about. I have crisscrossed LA, visiting
every art venue from tiny artist-run spaces and pop-ups to art fairs and big museums like
LACMA, and I have written about many of those exhibitions. I’ve seen work that makes me feel
great bubbling joy and faith in humankind – as good art is wont to do. Sometimes the
experience has been more frustrating, as described above.

I have worked as a journalist at the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in Finland for a
decade, half of which I have covered art and design. I’ve written some art reviews, I’ve edited
many more and read hundreds if not thousands of them. The way reviews are written has
bothered me for a long time. Why are there some exhibitions that never get covered? Why are
some exhibitions treated with kid gloves? Why do some critics say they don’t like an exhibition,
but never put it in writing?

Ever since I stepped away for a year from my newspaper job to come to Los Angeles
for graduate school, I’ve tried to put my finger on why I sense a great awkwardness around
negative reviews. My theory was that there has been a shift in how we think about criticism,
brought about by shifts in art itself, as well as political and societal developments. (The
internet!) To help myself think through this, I have interviewed five American critics and thinkers
writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications.

1
The critics – Christopher Knight, Douglas McLennan, Sharon Mizota, David Pagel and
Matt Stromberg – write mostly about the visual art of their time, so their opinions have an
impact on artists’ work. I talked with these five critics about how they think about their work
and what kind of a place does expressing a negative opinion occupy in it. As a result of these
conversations, I present a rough draft of how we could approach criticism in the new decade,
expressing both our positive and negative judgements in an ethical, constructive way.

Writing an art review is hard. Writing a positive art review is harder: how many ways do
you have of saying you love something? Writing an art review that expresses a degree of
disappointment in the exhibition can be harder, still.

In Los Angeles, New York City, London, Berlin and even Helsinki, critics sit staring at the
blinking cursor on their laptop screens, just like their forebears stared at their typewriters and
their stubby pencils. How to choose their words to express concerns about an artist’s
misguided intentions or flawed execution with honesty but without vitriol? Some reviewers
have no patience and are ready to throw the artist under the bus to entertain their readers.
(Let’s face it: a ruthless, imaginative takedown may be a lot of fun to write and read.) No matter
how it is done, the artist, their friends, the gallerist and/or the critic’s mother might all think the
critic is an awful person for writing that the exhibition isn’t great.

And that should not make a difference: The general perception is that a critic is
supposed to cut a lonely, heroic figure on his or her mountaintop, with a crisp view of what is
Good Art and what is Bad Art, unobstructed by concerns about hurting an artist’s feelings or a
gallerist’s bottom line because what the critic is doing is in the service of what is right and true.

You sit down at your desk and you hammer out a first draft of the review. You
say it like it is, and you’re a little proud of a clever turn of phrase here and
there. You include a bit of background on the artist, praising the old work,
lamenting this new direction. You end with a zinger. The review is only due in a
couple of days, so you decide to not hit send right away.
2
Whether art critics speak their mind or not does matter, because art criticism matters.
Ever since we all ended up with cameras in our phones and those phones always within reach,
we live in a world saturated with images. With the availability of tools for making and
distributing art, the art world has become bigger, more democratic and more chaotic. Add to
that the current high-octane art market and its attendant PRs and shills, and it becomes clear
what a Wild West the art world is right now. (The recent economic fears in China and Brexit-
related uncertainty caused a 5% dip in the art market in 2020, but the market still remained at
its second-highest level in history. So far, we don’t know what the effects of the Covid-19
1
pandemic are going to be. As I put the finishing touches to this thesis, museums and galleries
are canceling public programs, shifting into appointment-only opening hours or closing their
doors until further notice.)

Although the world is awash in images, professional critics are currently employed in
smaller and smaller numbers. The assessments vary, but I would estimate that American media
outlets now employ only 5–10 full time art critics. This feels deeply counterintuitive, because
2
with the increased quantity of images, we need people who have the perspective to sift
through the image streams and discern what is worth the attention and what is just empty
hype. The late composer-critic Virgil Thomson memorably defined criticism as “the only
antidote we have to paid publicity,” and art has never needed it more.

3
Journalistic art criticism – texts appearing in newspapers’ arts sections or in magazines
dedicated to art – is not only in the business of consumer information, telling the reading public
which exhibitions are worth seeing. It is also a historical record of art of its time and a setting-
off point for discussions. A healthy art scene can’t exist in a vacuum: to live and breathe, art
Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2020, Art Basel and UBS, accessed March 14, 2020, https://
1
www.artbasel.com/theartmarket2020.
See for example Mary Louise Schumacher, Visual Arts Journalism: Newsroom Pressure and
2
Generational Change, Nieman Foundation, accessed March 14, 2020, https://
niemanreports.org/articles/visual-arts-journalism-newsroom-pressure-and-generational-
change.
Tim Page and Vanessa Weeks Page, Vanessa (ed.), Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson. (New
3
York, Summit Books, 1988), p. 222.
3
needs public discourse – and public discourse beyond thumbs-up, thumbs-down; a nuanced
and thoughtful analysis of what an artist is trying to do and where are we with this thing we call
art.

In his book Better Living Through Criticism, film critic A. O. Scott defined the job of the
critic as resisting manufactured consensus – to ask whether the successful work is also of high
quality, to celebrate the unknown and to argue for complexity. That is difficult to do without
sometimes standing up and saying, “this is not quite as great as it’s made out to be.”

But art criticism expressing a value judgement seems to be a dying breed. Especially
art magazines print reams of description – detailed, thoughtful description, to be sure – in
which the critic might make clear that the work is good or at least interesting, but very rarely
that it leaves something to be desired. If you imagine all of the art being produced in the world
today as a map, wide expanses of it seem to be blank, like European maps of the world before
the age of explorers. There is a lot of bad art out there, we just never read about it. To write
about it is either distasteful for the critic, a waste of resources (the critic’s time, the
publication’s budgets, the space allotted for arts pages in newspapers), or too awkward
socially. Why would we focus on the bad if we can focus on the good?

In 2020 we are increasingly used to judging any experience by giving it stars, be it a
movie or an Uber ride. In this culture of aggressive, capitalist niceness it often feels like
anything less than five stars is an affront. Negative sentiment is expressed only if something is
really, truly wrong. Our awareness of the ruthlessness of the gig economy makes us wonder if
giving the rude Uber driver a bad review might put him out of a job. With the precariousness of
artists’ careers, it seems only fitting that most art criticism shies away from making harsh
judgements. Things are tough enough as they are.

But how do you write criticism without being critical? A judgement or a degree of
negativity seems to be baked into the term itself. In an academic context, “criticism” is an
evaluation or analysis of the merits and faults of a work of art. Colloquially, it refers to the
expression of disapproval. (It may be worth noting that many art magazines, such as Artforum
4
and Frieze, publish art criticism in a section called reviews – much more neutral and
descriptive.)

I would argue that if an art critic’s job is to act as an antidote to paid publicity, that
implies having to write not just a review, but a critical critique every now and then.

At an opening, friends ask you about the show you wrote about. You find
yourself prevaricating. You don’t love it but there are some interesting aspects
to it, you say. And the sound installation in that exhibition was kind of good.
All five writers interviewed for this thesis – as well as many cornered informally at an
exhibition opening or a private conversation – said they prefer to write a positive review. They
want to share what they’ve seen, bring readers to the work and help them think about it;
contribute to the conversation. That is fair. Art critics become art critics because they enjoy
being in the presence of art. All those hours traipsing through museums and galleries on achy
feet make no sense without the trembling anticipation of knowing that just around the corner
you might encounter a work that brings you intense aesthetic pleasure and deepens your
experience of the world in a fundamental way.

“I write way more positive reviews, or reviews of things that I’m trying to make more
space for in the world, because in the United States in general, art is not taken very seriously,”
says David Pagel, a prolific freelance art critic for the Los Angeles Times and professor of art
theory and history at Claremont Graduate University.

“Art is often seen here as a scam put on by charlatans and tricksters and pretentious
elitists, and I want to find work that I love and get other people to love it, too,” he says. “For
me, writing is hard and takes a lot of time and effort and energy, and I don’t want to spend it on
something I hate.”

5
Sometimes critics do have to spend time on things they hate, he says. If institutions,
collectors or other writers celebrate work that in his opinion isn’t civilizing and humanity-
enhancing, David Pagel feels that he should say that.

For critics like Sharon Mizota, also a freelance critic for the Los Angeles Times, while
she doesn’t rule out negative reviews entirely – sometimes they are necessary – a negative
review simply does not seem worth the energy anymore. “I haven’t written a negative review in
a long time because I want to use my platform for good,” she says.

When Mizota started writing criticism in the early aughts, she wanted to point out
interesting exhibitions and participate in the contemporary art debate. The 2016 Presidential
election was a turning point. With such a visible, symbolic shift in the political climate of the
country, Mizota’s focus shifted to advocacy, she says, highlighting artists and works that are
overlooked or underappreciated. As a recent example, she mentions Sara Kathryn Arledge, a
largely forgotten artist and filmmaker whose exhibition she reviewed in March 2020.

“The election made general art criticism seem like a luxury,” she says. “When we
elected a president who is a proven racist and sexist, and continues to brag about it, it made
me realize that it is more important than ever to promote women and artists of color. If their
stories see the light of day more often, perhaps it serves as a small counter-narrative to the
horrible one being written by our government. I know it’s not much—what can art do, really?—
but it is my way of using the platform I have to talk about things that are important to me.”

Mizota’s approach could be categorized under advocacy criticism. According to art
critic and curator Lucy Lippard, an advocate critic avoids art’s star cults, supports art that is
critical of political powers and most importantly, tries to include “the unheard voices, the
unseen images, of the unconsidered people” in the notion of what we call quality. It is worth
4
noting that Sharon Mizota, a woman of color herself, is the only one among the five critics to
Lucy Lippard: “Headlines, Heartlines, Hardlines: Advocacy Criticism as Activism,” Cultures in
4
Contention, ed. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier (Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1985), p.
243.
6
embrace this approach to writing art criticism. The other four are white men – as American art
critics continue to often be.

Douglas McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal and a frequent speaker on arts
criticism, sees why advocacy criticism is on the rise, and he isn’t entirely comfortable with it.

McLennan says that there is a sense that arts are under siege or fragile in some way; that arts
need supporting. That is why many critics temper their criticism and shy away from publishing
what they truly think, fearing that they will somehow damage the arts. Which is insidious,
McLennan says, and does art no favors. “A lot of it ends up being a kind of fan writing,” he
says. “If it’s all uniformly positive and we have filtered out all the bad stuff – how can you
understand why something works or doesn’t work?”

Ideally, we would have both: critics would work to highlight overlooked artists – but also
write critically when appropriate.

“If your priority in life is to be invited to dinner parties, don’t become an art critic,” says
Christopher Knight, who has written for the Los Angeles Times since 1989 and is a three-time
Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Knight, too, prefers to focus on exhibitions that interest him. In his position as a senior
critic, he is able to pick and choose. If a particular exhibition doesn’t interest him, that’s okay:
Los Angeles has plenty of other exhibitions to cover. It’s more productive and more fun to write
about art that excites you, he says, than about art that disappoints you.

That said, Knight belongs firmly to the school of thought that sometimes
disappointment is very important to state. “Negative reviews should be inevitable,” he says,
“because we need honest reviews.”

If a major artist has a bad exhibition at a big museum, there is value in writing about
that, Knight says. It is not about being mean. It’s about accountability, for one thing. Many
museums are publicly funded, and the taxpayer money should be used for thoughtful, well-
curated exhibitions, not the latest big, fun Instagram bait. A negative review may also be about
7
asking questions about what collectors are paying for. Some artists become fashionable due to
their hip aesthetic – think of an artist like KAWS – but is there thought and integrity and worth
to it? Like A. O. Scott said, a critic should be able to ask questions about the popular and call
out the empty hype.

“I don’t want to be just a Pollyanna, saying that everything is just lovely because it’s not!
Things are a mess,” Knight says about the state of the art world.

Knight is in the rare position of being able to call a mess a mess. His forum is a daily
newspaper, and unlike specialized art magazines, newspapers do not depend on advertising
revenue from the commercial art world. A significant part of a major art magazine’s like
Artforum’s heft comes from pages and pages of advertisements by blue-chip galleries, which
may contribute to the magazine’s perpetually sunny outlook on the galleries’ new exhibitions.
“Magazines will have a nervous breakdown if you pan a major advertiser,” Knight says,
sounding amused.

Freelance critic, journalist Matt Stromberg also calls for honesty and integrity. In his
reviews for publications like Hyperallergic and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, he does
his best to include both description but also contextualization and judgement. Mere description
is not enough.

“There is definitely a pipeline from gallery to PR person to lazy reviewer to lazy
publication to reader,” Stromberg says, “that just funnels bland, milquetoast barely-critiques
that are not doing the reader a service.“

At home, you look at your text again. It feels mean-spirited. You double-click
and hit backspace on some of your cleverest jabs. The text is nicer but also
definitely more boring. Should you call your editor? The artist says something
dumb on Twitter. You undo your deletes. Let him have it.
Art criticism is a strange discipline with little academic research into it compared to the
related fields of art history and critical studies. In theory, anyone can become an art critic: there
8
are no required qualifications or barriers to entry. All you need is a laptop, an internet
connection and the assumption that your thoughts are interesting enough to be made public.

In the grand scheme of things, art criticism is also a young little thing. The figure of an
art critic as we know it has only been around for about 150 years, counting from when
Baudelaire picked up the pen to write about the Salon of 1845 – a time when both art and
publishing expanded rapidly. The avant-garde art of the 20th century increased the importance
of art criticism. The public had a greater need for guidance and interpretation when bombarded
by a bewildering array of approaches to art-making from pop to minimalism to conceptualism.

5
There was a time when art critics definitely took sides. In the mid-20th century the high
priest of modernist art criticism, Clement Greenberg, and his colleagues surveyed the New
York art scene from their high perches and bestowed judgement in a way only white male art
critics of the time were able to – unwavering in their opinions (which they presented as not
mere opinions but art historical facts) and mostly very unimpressed by the work of women or
artists of color.

Take Greenberg’s review of Georgia O’Keeffe’s exhibition at the MoMA from 1946:

“The importance of Georgia O’Keeffe’s pseudo-modern art is almost entirely historical and
symptomatic. The errors it exhibits are significant because of the time and place and context in
which they were made. Otherwise her art has very little inherent value. The deftness and
precision of her brush and the neatness with which she places a picture inside its frame exert a
certain inevitable charm which may explain her popularity; and some of the greatest part of her
work adds up to little more than tinted photography.”

6
It’s a shocking read for someone used to the art criticism of the new millennium. In the
years since Greenberg, art criticism has become more even-tempered. Someone might say
more analytical, someone else might say a little boring. One reason may be the reduced
number of publications publishing art criticism. Back in Greenberg’s day, a critic could
condemn an exhibition and be sure that someone else would write about it too, maybe praising
Kerr Houston: An Introduction to Art Criticism. (London: Pearson, 2012), p. 40.
5
Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago
6
Press, 1986), p. 86.
9
it and thus balancing things out. Today, a single critic’s take might be the only public
pronouncement on an exhibition. But the evening-out of art criticism is also due to lessened
interested in pronouncing this or that artist a genius or a fool, based on how his or her work
fares against Greenberg’s strict formalist criteria of “good art”. It is unlikely that a critic working
today would write about the “errors” in an artist’s work, or write in such an arch tone. We
recognize that there are different viewpoints and approaches. The focus has shifted to the
viewer’s experience of the artwork, and recently, with the rise of identity politics, on how the
work operates in a broader social context.

Mostly we seem to have given up on judging art. Already in 2002, the National Arts
Journalism survey compiled by Columbia University revealed that judging art was the least
important aspect of art criticism among art critics in the United States: only 27% of the
respondents said they placed “a great deal of emphasis” on it. At 62%, many more placed
more weight on “providing an accurate, descriptive account”.

7
In his 2003 book What Happened to Art Criticism, art historian and critic James Elkins
lamented the lack of opinionated writing. He dated the change as having begun in the 1960s or
1970s when the proliferation in styles of art made rigid formalist judging of art difficult or
meaningless. Elkins also pointed to a generational change, in which critics in the wake of
Greenberg did not identify with the need to judge. One example of this sentiment could be
Rosalind Krauss’s introduction to her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, in which she argues that art criticism should be more concerned with
examination rather than exhibiting judgement.

“Back in the 1950s and 1960s there was a definition of greatness, and over the course
of 50 years we have broken down that narrowly declared definition of what greatness is,” says
Douglas McLennan.

András Szántó (ed.), The Visual Art Critic. A survey of art critics at general-interest news
7
publications in America. (New York: National Arts Journalism Program, Columbia University,
2002), p. 27.
10
The art world has come to realize that “greatness” for an artist coming from the
Southern American tradition is different from that of someone coming from an East-Asian
tradition, geographical artistic tradition being just one parameter. As the art world has grown to
include a diverse set of voices, the critical voices have also had to change. The singular,
judging voice of a god-like art critic is a thing of the past.

“We no longer want the imperial voice,” McLennan says. “I don’t think we trust it.”

In recent decades the snarky Gen-X’ers of the 1990s have given way to sincere,
outspoken but slightly timid millennials. They are used to negotiating a complex political
landscape of who gets to judge whom and on what basis. Young writers – most often working
as freelancers – balance on the tightrope of having to attract readers with strong opinions one
hand, but on the other of being aware of what a backlash those opinions may provoke on
social media.

Especially online, the critical landscape is polarized, says Matt Stromberg. “There is
criticism that is very promotional. Critics are afraid to really criticize an artwork. On the other
hand, there is caustic criticism, which gets more headlines but loses the nuance.”

Most critics appear to choose the route of least resistance and focus on description. It
is uncontroversial and intellectually acceptable. A young critic can always side with long-time
Artforum writer James Yood, who was famous for his descriptive, very neutral reviews. Yood
didn’t believe in prejudging the work on behalf of the reader, James Elkins says. That is why
Yood focused solely on carefully considered description, leaving out all explicit
pronouncements about the work’s value and his personal opinions about it. (“He was very
diplomatic – could have been an ambassador,” Elkins said to me.) Because there was no
explicit judgement, every word became a judgement. Yood’s seasoned readers knew that the
exhibition was interesting if he chose to write about it at all.

While not afraid to take a stand himself, Christopher Knight can see how the Yoodian
approach works, too. “Description is often cavalierly dismissed, but the way you describe
something can confer value and meaning,” he says. All description is interpretive. “It’s
11
important to be aware of how one is describing something in a way that is illuminating. It’s not
easy.”

While Knight is right, this is clearly an approach that demands a lot of the reader – a familiarity
with both art and the critic writing about it. I’m reluctant to underestimate the abilities of a
reader, but in all honesty I’m unsure whether I, myself could parse a review like that, reading
between the lines and trying to interpret every adjective. A description-as-judgement approach
may work for a specialist magazine like the Artforum, but in a newspaper setting and for a
general readership, I think it might fail to serve the reader.

You send the review to your editor. At night you lie awake in your bed
wondering how the artist is going to react. And the gallerist. You delete the
Twitter app from your phone to not find out.
The rules
The time for mean, arguably misogynist Greenbergian criticism has passed, and I don’t
think anyone really misses it. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction,
however, leading to polite and slightly bland reviews that shift the responsibility of interpretation
and judgement on the reader. But if we want art criticism to be honest, say truth to power and
serve as the Thomsonian antidote to market forces, critics must be able to say it when
something is not great, or honest, or right.

How do we go about this?

In my conversations with the critics, many said that they would not pan an artist’s first
exhibition, which is a guideline I’ve followed for years in Helsinki, too. Out of curiosity, I began
asking the critics about other unspoken rules of criticism. Based on those conversations, I
propose establishing the ground rules of an ethical pan to in order to keep honest and slightly
12
curmudgeonly criticism alive. At its core, it’s about being smart and kind and always, there to
lift up the art, not yourself.

Rule # 1: Don’t hide
Describe carefully, interpret benignly and try to do the work justice, but if the work is
misguided and misjudged, say it. It’s tempting to dance around it, but don’t. Write as
thoughtfully as you can and remember that the artist is a person with real human feelings.
Remember that the artist is a professional, too, and can take constructive criticism.

“You have to remember that somebody really believed in that work and poured their
heart and time and energy into it,” Matt Stromberg says. “So even if I think it’s hackneyed or
shallow, it still deserves that I take the time to criticize it in a thoughtful, meaningful way.”

Rule # 2: React well and thoughtfully
“It takes a really astute, wonderful critic to have an interesting reaction,” says Douglas
McLennan.

Many art critics think that their job is to show up and see if the piece is “good enough,”
he says. But an art critic’s job is to have an interesting, educated reaction. Not anyone can do
that, and that skill is why an art critic deserves the reader’s time and attention. Instead of
saying that an exhibition is awful, it’s more interesting to pull the exhibition apart and see why it
didn’t succeed.

It’s important to try to figure out what the artist is trying to say, says McLennan. “Then
you can be like, boy, that’s not very interesting – for the following reasons.”

“Those reviews can be the ones that you learn the most from,” he says. “Sometimes I
read a very negative review and I’m like ’wow, that makes me want to go see it’, because the
writer has really engaged me with the idea.”

13
Rule # 3: Don’t pan a first show
“If it’s a young artist with not much track record, there is no reason to write a slam,”
says Christopher Knight. David Pagel feels the same. “If an artist is just out of school, even if
his work is misguided and despicable, I probably won’t trash it, because no-one is behind yet,”
he says.

The other critics interviewed for this thesis agree. It’s cruel and unnecessary: nobody’s
career needs to be nipped in the bud. A critic can always find another exhibition to review.

Rule # 4: Reserve big slams for big players
Sometimes tough love is required. Christopher Knight says that art itself has taught him
that scale is important. The bluntness of the criticism should be in proportion to what is being
criticized. If a major, established artist is showing in a major, established setting and it just isn’t
good, it needs to be said.

“The bigger and more powerful the institution, the more leeway one has because you’re
playing on a level playing field,” Knight says. “LACMA, the Getty and the Huntington have the
wherewithal to deal with a loudmouth upstart like me, whereas a small artist-run space in East
Hollywood doesn’t.”

Rule # 5: Refrain from cheap shots – unless…
Even if the criticism is warranted, there is no need to be mean. The critic must be clear
about what is being criticised and why and from which perspective. Criticism is written for
readers, however, and a critic doesn’t have to avoid humor.

“If you have a really good joke and it’s a cheap shot…” – Christopher Knight laughs a
little – “you’d better have a way of explaining that you know it’s a cheap shot.”

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Epilogue
This is a weird time for art criticism. We live in an era in which there is maybe more
being written about art than ever before, because the internet offers unlimited opportunities to
publish one’s work. However, art criticism is also very dispersed on the internet, and it would
probably be accurate to say that relative to the publishing volume, art criticism is being read
less than ever before. From a financial point of view, art criticism matters very little, because
who cares? The art economy works differently than, say, film. A bad film review in the New York
Times might mean that thousands of people choose to stay at home instead of buying a 12-
dollar movie ticket, whereas a gallerist only needs to convince one rich collector that a piece is
worth buying for $500,000.

Art criticism is by no means dead, however. The verbose and academically rigorous
essays in Artforum might not attract great audiences (did they ever?), but the field of art
criticism has shifted and expanded with the rise of social media. Anyone can publish their
opinion on an exhibition, and even a small, independent art blog like the White Pube can
attract a significant number of eyeballs, because Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente
write in a such an entertaining, irreverent and internet-savvy way. More established websites
like Hyperallergic, CARLA, X-Tra and Triple Canopy offer detailed, opinionated texts on even
the more obscure topics in contemporary art. These specialized online publications only reach
those readers who are already interested, already invested. Art criticism in newspapers and
other general-interest publications is essential for not locking art up in its ivory tower.

The internet has been the reason behind television’s renaissance in the 21st century. It
has enabled the fans of “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad” to come together and have
heated debates about their favorite shows like never before – delivering nasty critiques but also
passionate defenses. In contrast, in contemporary art, that sort of debate hardly exists. Most
people are too intimidated to state their opinion, thinking that they don’t know enough, fearing
that critics or their friends who studied a bit of art history in college will cut them down to size.

15
“People don’t feel like it’s safe to discuss. It’s isolated,” says Douglas McLennan. “And
because it’s isolated, it matters less and less. The art experience isn’t complete until you share
it with someone, and if people are afraid to share it, the art form starts to die.”

That is why critics should not be afraid of damaging the art form: they can’t. The health
of art depends on rants and raves, positives and negatives, approachable writing, a healthy
debate, the community around it. Art criticism must have opinions, it must be engaging, it must
be smart – compassionate, clear-eyed, honest and a little bit funny, a little bit seductive.

“The important thing is to treat art seriously, not fluff it up or treat it with kid gloves,”
Knight says.

“When I write criticism, I’m starting or continuing a discussion that hopefully makes
people more aware of other perspectives, tolerate differences and be more civilized. Those are
my big grand meaning-of-life goals,” says critic David Pagel. “One sentence at a time.”

No-one gets back to you on it. The artist is fine. Everyone is fine. A year later
someone tells you the exhibition made them think, and yes, they disagree with
you, but that they wouldn’t have gone to the exhibition without the review. It’s worth it.

As I’m coming to the end of my time in Los Angeles – it feels difficult to leave! – I find
myself looking back on what I have seen and learned. I have kept a loose diary of the
exhibitions I have been to by posting photos on Instagram of each one that has interested me
or appealed to me. (Again, I don’t think I’ve posted about many exhibitions that I disliked – is
that the censorious, conflict-avoidant art critic mentality at work?) Currently, I’ve posted 105
exhibition photos, so I must have seen many more. I have never had a chance to look at this
much art in a year. I have also never had this many conversations about criticism in one year.

I also have never before teetered up on a stepladder to tape cables to the ceiling in
exactly the way an artist wants them, scraped spilled white paint off cement floors or fixed a
16
PA system right before an artist talk. All of this fairly banal-sounding work is absolutely integral
to exhibiting contemporary art, and I have had the opportunity to get my soft critic’s hands
dirty working at an independent art space called Joan in Downtown Los Angeles. This thesis
would never have been written without slow Thursday afternoons there.

All that is a long-winded way of saying this: I may be returning to the same job I had in
Helsinki, but I am not returning as the same writer.

17
References
Interviews

James Elkins, February 12, 2020.

Douglas McLennan, January 28, 2020.

Sharon Mizota, January 29, 2020.

Christopher Knight, February 6, 2020.

David Pagel, February 10, 2020.

Matt Stromberg, December 10, 2019.

Bibliography

Earnest, Jarrett. What It Means to Write About Art : Interviews with Art Critics. New York: David
Zwirner Books, 2018.

Elkins, James. What Happened to Art Criticism? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Gee, Malcolm. Art Criticism Since 1900: Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism. Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949. Ed.
John Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Houston, Kerr. An Introduction to Art Criticism. London: Pearson, 2012.

Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1986.

Lucy Lippard. “Headlines, Heartlines, Hardlines: Advocacy Criticism as Activism,” in Cultures in
Contention, ed. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier. Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1985.

18
McAndrew, Clare. The Art Market 2020, Art Basel and UBS, accessed March 14, 2020, https://
www.artbasel.com/theartmarket2020.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “criticism,” accessed March 4, 2020, https://
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/criticism.

Murray, Chris (ed.) Key Writers on Art. London: Routledge, 2003.

Newman, Amy (ed.) Challenging Art : Artforum, 1962-1974. New York: Soho, 2000.

Page, Tim and Weeks Page, Vanessa (ed.) Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson. New York:
Summit Books, 1988.

Schumacher, Mary Louise. Visual Arts Journalism: Newsroom Pressure and Generational
Change, Nieman Foundation, accessed March 14, 2020, https://niemanreports.org/articles/
visual-arts-journalism-newsroom-pressure-and-generational-change.

Scott, A. O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and
Truth. New York: Penguin Press, 2016.

Szántó, András (ed.): The Visual Art Critic. A survey of art critics at general-interest news
publications in America. New York: National Arts Journalism Program, Columbia University,
2002.
19

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Up until the 1960s and 1970s, art criticism was often combative, praising and denouncing exhibitions in equal measure. Now it seems that critics are more often shying away from expressing a critical opinion about contemporary art exhibitions, possibly due to shifts in art itself as well as societal and political developments. As the art world has grown to include a diverse set of voices, the critical voices have also had to change. ❧ We live in an increasingly image-saturated world, which is why we need art criticism – to serve as navigational aids in that flood of images – and art critics who say what they think. In the words of composer and critic Virgil Thomson, criticism is “the only antidote we have to paid publicity.” ❧ In order to shed more light on the state of critical criticism today, I have interviewed five Californian art critics about what sort of a place does negative opinion occupy in their work. All the critics said that they prefer writing positive reviews – Sharon Mizota engages explicitly in so-called advocacy criticism – but they all saw the need for critical writing, too. In the words of ArtsJournal founder Douglas McLennan, “If it’s all uniformly positive and we have filtered out all the bad stuff – how can you understand why something works or doesn’t work?”. ❧ The conversations with the critics resulted in the creation of a five-step approach to expressing a critical opinion in an ethical, constructive way.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Frilander, Aino (author)

Core Title What happened to critical criticism? Art criticism expressing a negative opinion seems to be a dying breed, but this is how we save it from extinction – for we must

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 04/08/2020

Defense Date 05/15/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art,art criticism,OAI-PMH Harvest,visual art

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee chair), Moss, Karen (committee member), Page, Tim (committee member)

Creator Email ainonen@gmail.com,frilande@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-281449

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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