Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen. Can These Antiques Ever Prove Dangerous Again?, 2012.

In honor of Labor Day, today we want to thank the publications that made our Summer Reading series a success. We were honored to host articles from Artforum, Art Papers, Art Practical, the Brooklyn Rail, East of Borneo, Frieze d/e, Hyperallergic, MN Artists, MN Original, MOMUS, Rhizome, SFMOMA’s Open Space, Temporary Art Review, and un Magazine. And we credit the labors of the artists and writers, without whom this series would not be possible: Juana Berrío, Timothy P.A. Cooper, Steven Cottingham, Jarrett Earnest, Matthew Fluharty, Orit Gat, Claudia La Rocco, Patricia Maloney, Pippa Milne, Ceci Moss, Mohamud Mumin, Matt Stromberg, Matt Sussman, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Catherine Wagley, Caroline Woolard, Ben Valentine, and RM Vaughan. We are truly proud to share this space with you! 

Jenny Holzer. You Are a Victim of the Rules You Live By, n.d.

There’s an increasingly old adage, first invoked by Brion Gysin, stating that innovations in writing are fifty years behind innovations in visual art. But surely innovations in art criticism are a further fifty years behind.

In Parkett 84, Charles Bernstein argues that “art criticism, insofar as it succumbs to a paranoiac fear of theatricality that induces frame-lock, lags behind poetry at its peril.” I am going to argue the same: identifying professionalism—and therefore capitalism—as the key catalysts behind art criticism’s undying crisis.

In a 2008 feature for X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Damon Willick elucidates how art criticism has “seemingly been in crisis for at least the last fifty years.” I could list off a dozen other articles and a couple conferences vaguely articulating the “crisis in criticism,” (I’m sure you’ve seen them lurking out there) but I’d rather offer something else. Willick says that “today’s discontents have idealized [Clement] Greenberg and critics of his era as the antithesis of the noncommittal, jargon-laden art historians/critics they believe have guided art criticism to its current state.” But even the preeminent critic Greenberg himself opined that “contemporary art criticism is absurd not only because of its rhetoric, its language, and its solecisms of logic. It is also absurd because of its repetitiousness.” That was in 1962.

Art criticism, once practiced almost solely by poets, now has very little in common with contemporary poetry. Leaving the flamboyant realms of Guillaume Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara, and other dead white men, art criticism became stolid, academic, and serious. But I was reading about how William S. Burroughs looked to painting to “revive” his writing. Inspired by the likes of Hannah Höch and Nancy Spero, he borrowed techniques of collage, cut-up, and chance, and applied them to the written word. Poet and criminal defence attorney Vanessa Place draws from long-standing traditions in conceptual art when she moves words from courtroom transcripts, unaltered, to her books of poetry. Once, she tweeted, “Poetry is now fifteen minutes ahead of art.” I retweeted her. These conceptual techniques are increasingly interdisciplinary, en route to fully being embraced by a broader mass culture. Yet art criticism lags on, both the subjects and styles of its reviews as isolated and protected as an artwork in a white cube. All of it, ignoring so much.

Read the full article here.