I would like to start with a
brief acknowledgment of some of the pieces of art
criticism that have most influenced me as an artist. I
think there is some apprehension on the part of critics
today that they have lost their voice in the artistic
debate, replaced perhaps by market forces or by the
collector. For me, that has not been the case. Early on,
I was enthralled by Thomas Hess's MoMA catalogue on
Barnett Newman -- not so much because of Hess's
cabalistic interpretation of Newman, but by the way Hess
was able to bring Newman's exemplary practice as an
artist so alive. As a graduate student in the late '70s,
I remember reading Donald Kuspit's essay in Artforum,
"Elizabeth Murray's Dandyish Abstraction." It was a
crucial text for me. It helped me legitimize my own
latent idea that abstraction could be dandyish --
playful and provocative -- rather than spiritual and
high-minded. However, I can imagine Donald Kuspit's
discomfiture that he may have helped give birth to an
oeuvre as monstrous as my own; but let us not forget
that art criticism is no less subject to a "strong
misreading" -- in Harold Bloom's terms -- as the work of
visual art itself.
I would also like to mention both Rosalind Krauss's work
of the early '80s and Benjamin Buchloch's essay,
"Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression," from
October magazine in 1981. While I disagree with both
writers on many subjects, I nevertheless feel that
Krauss helped give me a way into understanding post-structuralism, while Buchloch's essay was a crucial
attempt to try to understand the cultural politics of
the Reagan era. Lastly, I would like to turn to the work
of another artist-critic, Robert Smithson. Strictly
speaking, his far-reaching writing still qualifies as
art criticism, since in the end he mostly does write
about art, but here is art criticism as a fantastic act
of the imagination, freely clothing itself in a variety
of literary genres, mixing contemporary art with a wide
range of other cultural production, constantly provoking
and probing, yet maintaining a detached ironic humor
throughout. In terms of today's writing, the only
practitioner-critic who approaches this intensity of
activity is unfortunately not an artist but an
architect, Rem Koolhaas.
That said, I would like to turn to the crux of my
argument. Several years ago, I was asked to participate
in a panel organized by the International Association of
Art Critics on the subject of the ethics of art
criticism. Much to my surprise, the distinguished
panelists spent a good deal of time talking about
whether critics should collect art, accept gifts from
artists, or buy art by the artists they supported. To
me, this discussion was reflective of a state of
misplaced anxiety. By claiming to be aloof from the
marketplace, the critics were able to imply that they
were also separate from the power relations of the art
world. I came away from the panel with the feeling that
the participants saw themselves as something akin to
members of the Supreme Court, able to decide on the
merits and meaning of works of art with the
dispassionate objectivity of the Judiciary Branch.
For me, this is not just a distortion of the role of the
critic, but a more basic denial of both the purpose and
pleasure of criticism. The work of the critic is to
influence the course of cultural events in his or her
own day. The critic is an active proponent in forming
the meaning of contemporary culture. And this is the
chief pleasure of criticism -- a truly Nietzschean
pleasure -- to gain the power of having one's own
subjective views, one's interpretations and evaluations,
accepted by some small portion of the cultural world as
valued and valid.
For some reason, this vision of the critic has gotten a
bad name. Critics seem horrified that the purpose of
their work is to validate and empower their
subjectivity. They seem aghast that their writings might
influence or even determine the course of culture. Yet a
denial of the pleasure of this power is, to my mind, to
deny the discoveries not just of Nietzsche, but of Freud
and Foucault as well. This denial is an almost fanciful
return to the idea of an objective science advocated by
the Enlightenment.
Let me express my views on why this embarrassment may be
present. First, there are examples of sadistic abuse,
such as the career of the late Clement Greenberg. But
Greenberg is not a model but an aberration. He had lost
his sense of the role of play always inherent in games
of power. Further, he erroneously and egregiously tied
power to objectivity, whereas power is by its nature a
subjective impulse.
More importantly, because of the convulsions of the
'80s, we have become too attached to thinking about the
relationship between art and money. If we fixate on the
relationship between art and the marketplace, there is
good reason for the critic to resist a role as p.r.
person for some money-making enterprise. However, I feel
that to see art as analogous to the real marketplace is
misleading. After all, I have yet to see an artist or
even an art dealer on the Forbes list of wealthiest
American individuals.
A better analogy is to see art as akin to politics. In
art, as in politics, the struggle for money is only a
means to an end -- and that end is the ascendance and
influence of one's own world view. If we look back, for
example, at the struggle between Minimalism and Pop art,
it is clear that it was an ideological struggle with
each camp, as in politics, arguing for a different
vision of what culture and society-at-large was and
should be. People usually don't feel embarrassed when a
political candidate they support wins (although maybe
they should). By analogy, I see no reason the critic
should disown his or her satisfaction in the success of
a cultural production they believe in and even love or
the failure of cultural practices they deeply abhor.
Turning to another subject: despite the fairly bountiful
amount of criticism that currently appears in
newspapers, magazines, books and museum catalogues, I
believe that in several important ways, art criticism is
in trouble. I am disturbed by the lack of radical or
experimental criticism that appears today -- such as
that of Robert Smithson -- or even of eccentric
criticism like that of Sidney Tillim in the late '60s.
This is further reflected in the lack of periodicals
today that are experimental in form such as Artforum in
the '60s, Avalanche in the early '70s, or ZG in the
early '80s.
In my view, creative or radical criticism is being
constricted by two different powers at once.
On one hand, the increasing consolidation of ownership
within the print media has had a stultifying effect on
writing of all kinds. Magazines and newspapers are
increasingly the property of large companies -- often
publicly held-- for whom the bottom line is the deciding
factor in determining content. Less obviously, there has
also been tremendous consolidation in the areas of book
and periodical distribution. Thus, anything not
conforming to the mega-distributors' needs will not get
out either. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly of
all, a new tradition has developed in the world of
periodicals -- to begin a new and interesting magazine
that may have the potential to publish some non-conformist material -- and then as soon as it gains some
cache or recognition, to sell it and sell it out to the
richest media conglomerate around. While this of course
conforms to the laws of capitalism, I find it
reprehensible, and I would suggest that a diversity of
ownership of newspapers, magazines, and book publishers
is essential to revive intellectual experimentalism
today.
At the same time, I see the university as, at this
point, also a threat to experimental art criticism. The
situation is this: in our epoch, in the '80s and '90s,
for whatever reasons, it has become harder and harder
economically and socially for young intellectuals to
fashion lives for themselves except within the
university. At the same time, in every field, including
art history, the university standard has become more and
more oriented towards the mastery of a highly
specialized field of knowledge. There has also been an
accompanying standardization of intellectual methodology
for judging the validity of argument. In my view, the
result has been stultifying. There are fewer and fewer
independent, unaffiliated intellectuals, and those
within the university system are subject to increasingly
rigid methodological conformity. These are not the ideal
conditions for nurturing experimental thought.
Another disappointment with art criticism that I have
experienced in recent years is the lack of any movement
towards intertextual criticism. As an artist, or
practitioner, I have long been aware of the importance
of intertextual thinking in the development of my own
work and that of my colleagues. Artists are often just
as influenced by pop music, architecture, literature or
movies as they are by work in their own field. Further,
in my view, any profound understanding of the work of a
visual artist past or present must locate his or her
work within the matrix of cultural production of that
era. Yet art criticism generally continues to cling to
an exposition of art as it relates to other art. But
perhaps this is not surprising if we think back to what
we have said about both the state of publishing and the
university. The traditional periodical demands that
culture be subdivided into sections -- the movie
section, the art section, the music section. There is no
place given to the intertextual writer. Similarly, the
university, as we have observed, most directly rewards
scholars who confine themselves to a specific field.
Still another crisis that art criticism, and art, faces
today is that we are coming to the end of the vitality
of our era's critical paradigm -- namely post-structuralism. It has always been one role of the art
critic to mediate between the non-verbal world of visual
art and the linguistic world of philosophical or
theoretical discourse. If we grant to visual art an
intellectual importance equal to written theory, and
imagine that the two are linked at any given time as
part of each era's mentalité, than it falls to the art
critic to link the worlds of written theory and visual
art. We can see such linkages in the world of literary
and visual Surrealism, in the discourse between
Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism, and even in
the relationship between abstraction and neo-formalist
structuralist tendencies in the '60s.
Since the beginning of the '80s, we have inhabited a
world increasingly dominated by post-structuralist
thought. There are three reasons to think this paradigm
may be about to shift. Firstly, every paradigm changes.
Secondly if we view intellectual production in terms of
George Kubler's ideas of their length of viability,
post-structuralism shows every sign of being at the end
of its cycle -- insofar as it is not generating
innovative production but rather increasingly
specialized non-innovative uses. Thirdly, in the
intellectual community, post-structuralist analysis has
gained the authority of truth, it is hegemonic; and such
hegemony is a sure sign that post-structuralism has
outlived its potential for creativity. I strike this
death-knell with a certain note of sadness. If we are
all the products of our time, I am surely a child of the
post-structuralist revolution, and its tenets will
always dominate my thinking. I believe it falls on a new
generation to figure out how to now challenge the
assumptions we make about the world.
In planning my remarks today, I also made the misguided
promise to say something about art criticism and the
Internet. There remains the possibility that interactive
periodicals will appear on the Web that will democratize
the dialogue about art. However, I am skeptical that
such a transition will ever occur. Firstly, it is my
contention that as the Internet becomes more
sophisticated it will inevitably become dominated by
highly capitalized media giants. Their concept of
interactivity will probably be very different from ours.
Secondly, for real interactivity to become reality, one
must imagine a true revolution in human relations, one
in which every person's utterances are valued equally
with every others. Such a revolution is unlikely and
perhaps undesirable.
There is one experiment on the Web, however, that I have
followed with some interest. It is called The Thing, and
it is the project of the artist Wolfgang Staehle. At its
height, The Thing hosted an open chat session for
artists to discuss the current exhibitions in New York
and Europe. The result was unlike any other art
criticism that I have seen before or since. Scanning the
screen, one got a very real sense of the kind of talk
that takes place between artists in restaurants, bars,
studios, and parties -- a look into the real thinking of
the protagonists in contemporary art.
This is perhaps one possibility that the Internet holds
-- to record for the future the actual back and forth
dialogue that takes place among artists who are a part
of the production of contemporary art. And to
my mind, this is one thing that art criticism has never
done very well. From Cubism onwards, art criticism has
created its own dialogue about contemporary art that as
a rule quiets the voice of the artist and supersedes the
actual debates that take place between artists.
I would like to add just one more comment on my own role
as an artist and an art critic. I guess I have become a
proponent of trying to "seize the means of production"
in this monopolistic age. I became an art critic in
order to insert my own concerns as an artist in the
critical debate, rather than leaving that task to
others. More recently, dissatisfied with the periodicals
that discuss contemporary culture, I decided with my
colleague Bob Nickas to start a cultural magazine of my
own. In music, cinema, and the phenomenon of fanzines,
this practice of doing-it-yourself is becoming more and
more widespread in the United States. And I find it a
very effective form of criticism.
This text was delivered at the 85th annual conference of
the College Art Association in New York on the panel
"Art Criticism: Valuation and Reevaluation," organized
by the United States Section of the International
Association of Art Critics.
PETER HALLEY is a New York painter and publisher of
Index magazine.
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