The tone and character of the discourse on art is increasingly being determined by museums and institutes that have taken the discussion of their activities into their own hands. What is happening to art criticism?
Each year since 1995, when METROPOLIS M last took a look at the state of art criticism,[1] a conference has been organized somewhere in the world to examine the position of art criticism. In the Netherlands, in the late 1990s, Ingrid Commandeur, currently the final editor of this magazine, organized Art Criticism in The Netherlands. The State of Affairs, a conference under the auspices of the Netherlands’ Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Boekman Foundation. In 2003, the debate was repeated on a somewhat broader scale in the Boekman magazine’s theme issue on ‘Criticism’. Based in part on statistical data, it demonstrated how art criticism was slowly but surely being banned from the Dutch newspapers. Equally disconcerting reports were also appearing in other countries. Perhaps the most striking of these was a roundtable discussion with former and acting editors of the American professional magazine, October, in 2001, which ended in a page-long litany of fiascos and failures, as if it had all been for naught and no one wanted to listen to what had once been such a prominent magazine – which was probably indeed the case.
The art critics’ greatest complaint is their loss of power, whereby they risk being ever more marginalized. If 40 years ago, they thought they could dictate the entire discourse on art, even all the wheeling and dealing in art, today it is the curator (including gallery owners and collectors) who is calling the shots. Curators are the new leaders of opinion, single-handedly making or breaking the careers of artists. As the great quartermasters of art, they travel the world in search of new talent and new locations in which to show ‘their’ art. Meanwhile, the critics sit sulking at home, seriously underpaid and consequently without a travel budget, waiting for a biennial or an art fair somewhere close to home in order to stay up-to-date. Most of them stopped writing have long since turned to putting together exhibitions of their own.
For art criticism, the latter half of the 1990s were particularly dramatic. The age of the experience economy and cultural entrepreneurship set aside the idea that a critical discourse lends depth and even visibility to art on behalf of different, more promotional forms of exchange, more easily digested and easier to control by those with vested interests. The loss of the Kunst & Museumjournaal in the Netherlands was symptomatic. In the mid-1990s, with hardly a ripple, museums withdrew their financial support for this 40-year-old institution for thought and writing on art, at exactly the moment that editor-in-chief Philip Peters was bringing in successive critical essays on museum policies by renowned international authors. The museums had their doubts about all that weighty intellectual contemplation and wanted a more direct influence on the publicity that concerned their policies. Simply put, the Kunst & Museumjournaal did not give them enough promotionvalue. At the time, one museum after another began publishing their own museum papers, in which their own activities were being explained to a broad public by their own staff.
This is not the only example of the way in which institutes began setting the discourse on art entirely to their own hand during the 1990s. There was also the rise of lectures and debates as organised by these institutes. In the experience economy, we see a shift from reading to speaking, in which the discourse on art becomes an event. It is primarily in speaking – and obviously in the networks that follow – that the curator can lend depth to his activities, preferably with the help of a few renowned theorists who are not above lending out their philosophy to an exhibition project. The objective of all that speaking is not always clear, particularly where the relationship between the theory and what is actually being exhibited is concerned – let us say the very heart of the discourse on art. As long as it is spoken about, so says the creed, and as long as there are big names on the poster. A typical example was Chantal Mouffe’s sigh at the beginning of her lecture for the Becoming Dutch exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, that her rather abstract political theory was cropping up in many domains other than political philosophy.
In the age of the three P’s – programme, presentation and promotion – critical distance is an impediment, slowing things down, unproductive. In the place of outsiders, who could look at the programme of an institute with an independent eye and put it in critical perspective, what is wanted are intellectual supporters, people prepared to forge working connections to the organization, establish relationships and develop kongsis, because people are working together towards the greater interest of the society: the honour and glory of art, of the artist and, not to be forgotten, the curator.
In just a few short years, the public has become completely accustomed to public relations and the discourse on art spilling seamlessly over, one into the other, with nary a hitch. Artists and curators no longer have need of critics in order to produce texts meant to gauge the value of art. They prefer to be their own spokesperson and judge, publishing profusely on their activities in the professional press and in well-wrought publications of their own, which are offered in art bookshops all over the world. The fact that critical judgment has been lost in this discourse, which is set in a duly interdisciplinary, academic tone, does not seem of much concern to anyone. That judgment had already been lost to art criticism somewhere in the 1990s, thanks to its own embrace of an art theory that was showing more interest in analysis than opinion – see, for example, the fierce recent discussion on the loss of the capacity to evaluate in the reviews of the renowned magazine Frieze, at www.frieze.com.
Despite all this, we need not despair. If the signs do not deceive us, for a few years now, art criticism has been re-assembling itself. The fact that Curators & Co. have taken over and are moulding the discourse on art to their own taste has simply given the independent art critic more space to go out and experiment with other forms of discourse. While the exhibition phenomenon is visibly beginning to buckle under the suffocating interests of the market and is instantly punished for any form of experimentation (think of the drama of the cancelled Manifesta two years ago, the interchangeability of the biennials, the overwhelmingly safe policies of the major art institutions), in the shadow of all this comes the appearance of one experimental art publication after another. There is something for everyone: theory in Grey Room, artistic panache in Piktogram, interdisciplinary in Cabinet, affection in dotdotdot....
The new practice of art criticism may be less programmatic than it was in October, but it is completely independent, inventive and sharp-sighted, and it is receptive to all possible forms of text and image. The blossoming of the small publications is ensuring that the world of art is being given a different appearance and that it is opened up to art and culture about which most of us know nothing whatsoever, art that exists outside the market, outside the galleries and even outside the subsidized art circuit. The unconventional attitudes of these publications make it possible to conceive of an enormous influx of forgotten themes and histories. Their first successes are already in. Some of these publications are being printed in surprisingly high numbers. Their policies are slowly being picked up by the institutions. You might almost get the impression that the independently published discourse on art is once again on track.
Domeniek Ruyters
Notes
- In ‘Art Criticism fallen Asleep’, METROPOLIS M 16 (1995) No. 6, Sjoukje van der Meulen, a former METROPOLIS M editor, tried to breathe new life into somnolent criticism with a plea for a new form of criticism, made up of a hybrid mix of text and image.
OPENING
