Art Criticism is Croaking

Art Criticism is Croaking

It may be all over but the whining. Arts criticism seems to be going the way of the modest beach house: out of style.

The National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University – advocate for fine arts coverage in the press - is shutting down for lack of funds. Goodbye appraisal. Hello hype.

Enter the critics’ bemoanings. Some say we should have seen it coming in 1994 with the debut of the animated sitcom “The Critic.” The series was about a nebish film critic, voiced by comedian Jon Lovitz, who no one took seriously.

But the Lovitz character wasn’t the first put-down of arts criticism. Remember the snotty, sneery newspaper architecture critic Ellsworth Monkton Toohey in the 1943 novel “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand? Toohey was so put out that an architect ignored his assessment that he conspired to destroy him.

Which is worse, villainy or vapidity?

As interesting as this question may or not be, the larger question is not the sign of the times, but why the times are changing. My take? Art criticism is partly to blame.

When painter Mike Bidlo copied 84 Picasso paintings out of a book and rationalized, "Everything is mine, except the form," I thought it was a joke. I stopped laughing when noted art critic Kim Levin of New York's “The Village Voice'' hailed Bidlo’s effort: “Biddle rematerializes trite reproductions back into works of art.''

I had to adjust my smile again when Art in America magazine hailed Bidlo’s imitations as "honest, middle-class respect for a modern classic."

That said, I didn’t really expect to be mourning the death of criticism until 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum, an arbiter of taste as surely as a newspaper critic, chose to show two actual pigs, dead and halved, floating in formaldehyde and titled "This Little Pig Went To Market, This Little Pig Stayed Home" by Damien Hirst.

Hirst’s stuff showed earlier in New York's reigning SoHo gallery. What you saw were actual cows sliced up, each slice floating in a formaldehyde-filled Plexiglass tank; and a carcass of a pig, cut lengthwise, its halves suspended like the cow parts with one of the halves inching back and forth on a mechanized track so the pig looked like it was being constantly sliced. But I figured that was just a gallery display in SoHo. A museum display is something else again. It says that such a thing is worthy of your attention and your entry fee.

Of course, art critics can get it wrong even in the face of good work. England’s 19th-century art critic wrote of James Whistler’s work, said to be the precursor of Impressionism, that it looks like he was just "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.”

French art critic Louis Leroy wrote as nastily about the Impressionist movement in 1874. Only it wasn’t called that back then. Leroy used Monet’s painting “Impression Rising Sun” to mock painters in a writeup titled “Exhibition of the Impressionists.”

Yet, Impressionism turned out to be the most popular of art styles. An exhibit of Monet paintings created such a mob scene in London's Royal Academy of Arts on closing day in 1999 that the museum had to keep its doors open all night to accommodate an 8,000-visitor spillover.

If art criticism is dying, it won’t be from natural causes. Art criticism has mistakenly touted garbage and discredited virtuosity. We can’t help calling the good stuff wrong now and again, but we ought to know junk when we see it.