Note

to readers: this is a pdf of a two-part essay

that appeared online in 2018 (see footnote 1).

It is part of a work in progress on the condi?on of

art cri?cism. Please send all comments, cri?cism,
sugges?ons, etc., to jelkins@saic.edu. Thank you!
 Art Criticism is Too Easy

James Elkins

Part One1

It’s been sixteen years since the October roundtable on art criticism, fifteen years
since my pamphlet What Happened to Art Criticism?, and eleven since The State of Art
Criticism.2 The pamphlet made the claim that art critics had turned from judging—which
they did since the Greeks—to describing, evoking, and praising. I didn't have an explanation
for that turn, but it was wonderfully quantified by a Columbia University Arts Journalism
survey of North American art critics, which proved that the majority of the country’s top
critics—as measured by the number of readers of their publications, not their content—
thought that a critic’s job is to describe and not to judge.3
There is a lot to say about that turn. It’s partly an effect of the art market and its
understandable lack of interest in bad reviews. It can also be correlated with the rise of
conceptual art, minimalism, and the anti-aesthetic, all of which drove serious criticism into
the academy. But the main social effect of the turn is that it provokes resistance: many
critics don’t want to think of themselves as people who just describe art.
The feeling that art criticism is in retreat continues to inspire a steady stream of
conferences with titles like “Crisis of Art Criticism,” “Future of Art Criticism,” and “End of Art
Criticism.” In the years since the pamphlet appeared I have attended conferences and
lectured on the subject in Colombia, Belgium, France, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Denmark,
Estonia, Russia, Germany, South Africa, Uganda, The Netherlands, Portugal, Korea, Japan,
Australia, and China, and I have published several essays on the state of art criticism.4 A big
book is currently being edited by Steve Knudsen at SCAD; it has essays by Arthur Danto,

1
This is a two-part essay on art criticism, which originally appeared in the New Art Examiner
(Chicago).Thanks to everyone on social media who commented on Part One. The orginal
texts are: Part One (pdf) and Part Two.
2
What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press [distributed by
University of Chicago Press], 2003), now also in Chinese, Spanish, and Swedish; The State of
Art Criticism, co-edited with Michael Newman, vol. 4 of The Art Seminar, with contributions
by Stephen Melville, Dave Hickey, Irit Rogoff, Guy Brett, Katy Deepwell, Joseph Masheck,
Peter Plagens, Julian Stallabrass, Alex Alberro, Whitney Davis, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and
others (New York: Routledge, 2007).
3
Currently online at tinyurl.com/y8xkvo2u.
4
The two most recent are (1) the “Afterword,” in Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism,
edited by Jeff Khonsary and Melanie O’Brian (Vancouver: Artspeak, Fillip Editions, 2010);
this is a response to This is a response to Diedrich Diederichsen, Maria Fusco, Tom Morton,
Jeff Derksen, Sven Lütticken, and Tirdad Zolghadr, and (2) an essay, “Why Thinking about
Judgment in Art Criticism is Difficult,” forthcoming in a conference volume on the state of
judgment in art criticism, from the Universities of Bochum and Leuphana, edited by
Stephanie Marchal.
 2

Peter Schjeldahl, Louis Camnitzer, Blake Gopnik, and Barry Schwabsky, among many others.5
I’ve also made a study of what counts as judgment in art criticism (short answer: no one
knows), and whether or not art criticism is becoming—or already is—a global phenomenon,
essentially the same no matter where in the world it’s practiced.6 This is all by way of saying
I try to keep up with the field, even though of course it's impossible for any one person to
read more than an infinitesimal percentage of the criticism written in English, not to
mention the many traditions of criticism that are written in other languages.
So how do things look in 2018? Here are some quick answers:
(1) Art criticism is not returning to judgment. That change is a long-term shift, from a
modernist perspective to a postmodern (or postcolonial, or metamodern, or
“contemporary”) one.
(2) Art criticism is proliferating, but there is no reason to assume that it is read in
proportion to its volume. Who reads all the comments on YouTube videos? Who reads all of
e-flux?
(3) Most art criticism is conventional. There is a lot of truth to the claim that art
writing has become a sort of grammatically complexified, academically hypnotized,
awkwardly written, polysyllabic “International Art English.”7 (Think of October’s many
descendants.) On the other hand, much online art criticism today is studiedly informal and
conversational, featuring generous displays of plain speaking, corn, slang, confidences, and
in-jokes. (Think of Jerry Saltz, whose writing gets weird when it’s sober.) The two kinds of
writing are usually posed as opposites, but they are both conventional. The one is as
predictable as the other.

What’s to be done? There are some initiatives outside academia to revive art
criticism. (I count Nonsite, Grey Room, and others as academic: their papers correspond
closely in length, mode of argument, and potential readership to essays in October and
elsewhere.) Among recent non-academic publications, n+1 stands out, and so does some of
e-flux, Momus, and Hyperallergic, among many others.
Momus’s subtitle is “A Return to Art Criticism,” and it promises “art criticism that is
evaluative, accountable, and brave.” Some of the writing does that, but I think it could do
more. Kristian Madsen’s review of Manifesta 12, for example, raises important points about
biennales: the work in Palermo is often documentary, he says, full of “geopolitical
information,” and driven by causes and messages; it plays to the liberal artworld that

5
“The Art of Critique, edited by Stephen Knudsen, forthcoming; I wrote the Introduction,
"Art Critiques: Forgotten Children of the Academy,” which responds to each of the book’s
essays.
6
The latter is “Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global
Phenomena?,” Journal of World Philosophies 3 (2018), online; the essay is a chapter in a
book called The Impending Single History of Art, and it is posted as a Google Doc online at
tinyurl.com/yb3kg7oz.
7
Alix Rule and David Levine, “International Art English,” Triple Canopy, 2012, online at
www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english.
 3

doesn’t need convincing; and it doesn’t make use of art’s strengths, which she lists as
“ambiguity, abstraction, self-consciousness.”8 “Who’s all this for?” Madsen asks at one
point. The essay, “Courting Exhaustion: Manifesta’s Dog Days,” is certainly “evaluative,” but
in order to make a lasting contribution to the literature on Manifesta or biennales it needs
to be expanded: there's no reason not to consider biennale culture in general (here he could
make use of John Clark’s dyspeptic criticism), and he could be more historically reflective
about his criteria (ambiguity, abstraction, and self-consciousness aren’t simply art’s
strengths: they have histories and politics of their own, in modernism). Even in publications
like Momus, where art criticism can be pointed and argumentative, it also tends to be
impressionistic, informal, and not linked to the historical and philosophic discourses that
underwrite its concerns.
One solution is brief notes on very specific issues. For me the exemplar here is Hal
Foster, who has worked this way for a decade or more. He writes position papers—short
polemics couched as reviews—in places like the London Review of Books (for example a
review of Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art9), Grey Room, and Texte zur Kunst (for instance a
review of Ruben Östlund’s “The Square”10). The short format and narrow focus help him
define and clarify particular positions.
Another strategy is to consolidate your criticism into books. A good example is Jan
Verwoert, some of whose essays have been collected by Sternberg Press in association with
the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.11 In Cork, Ireland, I once had a disagreement with Jan
about the reading public for art criticism. I said it was scattered and often unknowable, and I
cited the fact that conferences on the “crisis of art criticism” tend to reinvent the wheel
because the organizers don’t always know the literature. He said I was wrong, and that from
his point of view the world of readers of art criticism was coherent, knowable, and engaged,
and that work could be done with the knowledge that previous texts would be taken into
account. His experience is not mine, but I hope he is more right than I am.

Here, to end, are three more examples of writing that I consider interesting art
criticism. These are more radical than Foster or Verwoert: they are neither colloquial “plain
style” nor intricate IAE. I name them just to suggest how many more possibilities there are
for art criticism.
(1) Fausto De Sanctis’s Money Laundering Through Art: A Criminal Justice Perspective
is an example of work that considers the global art market not as a place where identities
are constructed or oppositional voices are articulated (as academic writing generally
proposes), nor as a place where the global economy is on display (as financial reporting on
the arts usually implies), but as an opportunity for money laundering.12 The people involved

8
Momus.ca, July 6, 2018, momus.ca/courting-exhaustion-manifestas-dog-days.
9
“Smash the Screen,” London Review of Books, April 5, 2018, behind the paywall.
10
www.textezurkunst.de/109/transgression-vigilance
11
COOKIE!, edited by Vivian Sky Rehberg and Marnie Slater (Sternberg Press, 2014),
www.sternberg-press.com/?pageId=1490.
12
Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2013.
 4

need to have some expertise in visual art, cultural heritage, and the antiquities trade, but
those specialties can often be obtained by hiring specialists.13 De Sanctis does not intend to
write art criticism, but his approach is in effect a complete change from the status quo in art
criticism: he is unconcerned about aesthetics, history, or meaning – in fact he’s even more
detached than sociologists of art such as Pierre Bourdieu. For De Sanctis all that matters is
understanding the art market well enough to see how best to intervene.
(2) Craig Clunas’s Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming is an outstanding
example of what happens when social art history is consistent about its commitment to
political and social meaning.14 The artist Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) was one of the
principal scholar (or literati) inkbrush painters of the Ming Dynasty, as prominent in Chinese
painting history as, say, Poussin or Bernini in Europe. Clunas’s book is unique not only in
context of studies of Wen Zhengming or Chinese inkbrush painting, but also in the much
larger field of social art history. Clunas says next to nothing about Wen’s compositions. His
concern is nearly exclusively the value that Wen’s paintings had as objects of gift exchange
in the social network of Ming Dynasty scholars and bureaucrats. Like other scholar painters,
Wen used his paintings in trade, and Clunas did a great deal of archival work to show exactly
how that was done. The book is therefore deeply counterintuitive, because Wen’s paintings
are not treated as visual objects. The book is a tremendous accomplishment in counter-
intuitive art criticism, demonstrating that social interactions can be as rich and nuanced a
way to understand art as formal analysis and the other conventional tools of visual
interpretation.15
(3) Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is, among many other things, a work of
experimental art criticism. There are indices of hundreds of actual artworks that Proust
refers to in the book; in that respect it is one of the most thorough records of conservative
early 20th century French taste. It also has a famous theory of art, which divides aesthetic
memories into intentional and inadvertent. What makes it experimental art criticism is the
fact that in several crucial passages, Proust mixes fiction and nonfiction in the description of
visual art. There is an intensely visual description of a church in the invented town of
Combray; the literary critic Germaine Brée argued that when Proust wrote the passage he
was looking at a reproduction of Vermeer's View of Delft.16 The art historian Benjamin

13
See Beatriz Picard, “Art Market and Money Laundering: A Pretty Disguise for an Ugly
Reality,” 2018, paper available on academia.edu.
14
University of Hawai’i Press / London: Reaktion, 2004.
15
I have written about the consequences of this approach in Chinese Landscape Painting as
Western Art History, with an introduction by Jennifer Purtle (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2010), reviewed in International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
Newsletter 57 (2011), Art Bulletin 93 no. 2 (2011): 249–52, and History and Theory 51
(February 2012).
16
Proust’s description of the church is enhanced by painterly sorts of details. There is a
striking line, for example, about "flakes and gum-like driblets of sun,” des ecailles et des
egouttements gommeux de soleil.
 5

Binstock has suggested that later in the novel, when Proust describes Vermeer’s painting, he
was not looking either at the original or a reproduction, because he focuses on a small
detail—a yellow wall—that is not present in the painting. In the course of Proust’s six
volumes, these relations become substantially more complex. The church at Combray is
connected to other churches, and Vermeer’s painting is connected to other paintings. The
result is a fusion of an actual painting, a reproduction of that painting, a memory of that
reproduction, other fictional and nonfictional paintings, and an imaginary church.
Considered as art criticism, In Search of Lost Time is significantly more radical and complex
than contemporary art writing.17

These three books are not normative art criticism, and I wouldn’t want them to be. I
chose them to show there are many ways to write about art. Discussions about the “crisis”
of art criticism—its disappearance from print media, its descent into academic jargon, its
dissolution in the unread reaches of the internet—all bypass the fact that it is increasingly
predictable. I would like to be seriously challenged by art criticism: I want to not recognize
what I’m reading, not understand the claims, not see the structure. I’d like art criticism to
make good on the values it celebrates in art: difficulty, novelty, independence, modernism.

Part Two

At last—more than fifteen years since the 2002 Columbia University National Arts
Journalism report mentioned in Part One—there is a new survey of art critics. Thanks
to Mary Louise Schumacher, who assembled the survey as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard
University, it’s possible, for the first time in a generation, to get an overall picture of art
criticism in North America.
Schumacher’s full survey results will be published soon by Nieman Reports at
Harvard University.18 Meanwhile she has published an essay, “Critics and Online Outlets

17
See Proust, In Search of Lost Time, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin,
and D. J. Enright, 2003, vol. 1, pp. 58-9, 252, 256; Brée, "Proust's Combray Church: Illiers or
Vermeer?," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, 1968, pp. 5-7; and
Binstock, Vermeer's Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice, 2008.
This is discussed in a book I am co-authoring with Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds (Oxford
University Press, forthcoming). Other examples of adventurous writing in this sense,
especially criticism that mixes fact and invention: Jean-Louis Schefer’s radical book on
Uccello, discussed on my site "What is Interesting Writing in Art History?,” on Lulu or at
tinyurl.com/ya3thvfa; and Gilles Deleuze’s approach to the reproductions of Bacon in the
original French edition of his book Logic of Sensation (the English translation is not
illustrated, which ruins Deleuze’s visual project), on Academia.com or
tinyurl.com/ya3pxdn9.
18
Schumacher was art and architecture critic with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and 2017
Arts & Culture Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University;
 6

Leading the Vanguard in Arts Writing.” I’ll report on some of her findings and then consider
a half-dozen tendencies that have emerged largely since the 2002 survey.
Schumacher’s survey is extensive. Respondents were asked 107 questions about
their jobs and the state and nature of art criticism. A couple of highlights: Question 71 was,
“Please name three artists who you are especially interested in championing today.” The
182 answers are fascinating because there is virtually no agreement! Four people named
Kara Walker with Anicka Yi, Hank Willis Thomas, and LaToya Ruby Frazier chosen by three
people each.
There’s a slightly longer list of artists chosen by two people, and then the responses
go on and on with artists chosen by only one person each—448 rows in Schumacher’s
spreadsheet. This is vastly different from the 2002 survey, which revealed a consensus view
of top artists—the sort that would be chosen by respondents whose median age was 47.
(Schumacher’s respondents are almost evenly distributed from age bracket “26-35” up to
age bracket “over 65.”) The 448-row spreadsheet of favorite artists is a clear sign of the
efflorescence, diffusion, elaboration, and multiplicity of the contemporary art world.
Question 44 was, “Who do you believe are the most influential art critics working
today?” Here the 222 responses reveal a very different pattern. Instead of a long list of
individuals, there’s a clear clustering of preferences—and it’s every bit as conservative as
the 2002 survey.
The top responses are: Roberta Smith (117 votes), her husband Jerry Saltz (86),
Holland Cotter (69), Peter Schjeldahl (56), Ben Davis (25), and Christopher Knight (21). From
there the number of votes per critic trails off rapidly: Barry Schwabsky, Hal Foster, Hilton
Als... the entire list is only 141 rows deep, not 448. I find this disheartening.
Some of the top names are new (it’s nice to see Ben Davis, Hrag Vartanian, and Jillian
Steinhauer), but most were on the 2002 survey. It looks like critics are still reading one
another for information (that was a surprising result of the 2002 survey), even though they
are looking at many new artists.
In 2002, Susan Sontag was near the top, even though she didn’t write art criticism.
This time she’s vanished from the list. Jerry Saltz’s ascendancy to the second spot is
surprising given that the respondents are other art critics, not general readers.

Jerry Saltz, Parenthetically
Saltz has been one of the most energetic critics out there since his days crisscrossing
the country teaching part-time on both coasts and in Chicago (I first met him in Chicago
around 1988.) I am no longer surprised by the ongoing lack of serious response to his work,
but I wonder if it ever concerns him.
Even with a Pulitzer, there’s a near-vacuum of thoughtful criticism of his criticism.
My own response is in What Happened to Art Criticism?, and I still think it’s mainly right. (I
said he avoids thinking about critical principles and theories by proposing he responds
spontaneously, without preconceived ideas—even though historically and philosophically

when I wrote Part One, she was still employed by the newspaper, by by the time I wrote
Part Two (fall 2018) she had been let go—an emblem of the state of newspaper art criticism.
 7

speaking, that just isn’t possible.) Recent longer notices of his work, like Dushko
Petrovich’s “Jerry Saltz Butts In,” tend to be journalistic or impressionistic.
What’s crucial about Saltz’s work as criticism is his intention to evade reflection on
judgment or its absence and to proceed without nameable or consistent arguments or
positions—the very things that characterize any critic, no matter how iconoclastic, and
which no critic, no matter how agnostic or allergic to “ideas,” can avoid. Criticism of critics, I
think, is just as important as criticism itself. It doesn’t help that critics snipe about other
critics or simply praise them: there’s a need for reflective assessments.

Back to the Survey
Question 85 was, “Rank how important the following are to your work”: (a)
“Describing works of art,” (b) “Helping my audience understand art,” (c) “Making judgments
about art,” and (d) “Adding my own insights about art.” The equivalent question in the 2002
survey was the one that underlay my pamphlet, What Happened to Art Criticism?, because it
showed clearly that most respondents thought art criticism should describe and not judge.
In the new survey the results aren’t as clear, because (d) overlaps (a), (b), and (c). It’s clear,
however, that judgment remains a minority interest. In the rankings, the top choice was (b),
“Helping my audience understand art.”
Option (c), “Making judgments about art,” was the least popular choice, with just
22% of respondents picking it for their #1 ranking. This corresponds well with what I have
observed since What Happened to Art Criticism? With few exceptions, visual art criticism
remains laudatory, descriptive, evocative, impressionistic, and neutral.
In the essay, “Critics and Online Outlets Leading the Vanguard in Arts
Writing,” Schumacher reports on five examples or streams of “vanguard” writing that
emerged from her survey. The first is Triple Canopy(launched in 2007); the second
is Dis (founded in 2010); the third is Black Contemporary Art (founded 2011); the fourth is
Teju Cole, who writes the “On Photography” column for The New York Times Magazine; and
last is Maggie Nelson.
It’s an interesting list. Like n+1, Triple Canopy doesn’t publish traditional art reviews,
and a given contribution might be “a piece of experimental writing, a performance, a digital
game, an art object,” or “a public discussion.” Dis is also interesting for the media and forms
it employs, so it might be said that all three represent a tendency to combine media in order
to produce criticism, rather than writing it directly. Black Contemporary Art is an example of
a platform for specialized subject matter, and the last two—Cole and Nelson—are
individuals.
The heterogeneity of Schumacher’s list is a good reflection of the disparate responses she
collected, and another sign of the disarray of current art criticism.

Six Directions
Criticism has changed tremendously in the fifteen years since the Columbia
University survey. Here are six directions that have emerged in art criticism in the last two
 8

decades. Criticism seems to be increasingly diverse, and by some measures, it is—but by

others, it remains conservative.19

(a) Artist/writers. Some contemporary artists have writing practices that can be thought of
as art criticism as well as part of their art practice. For example, in Andrea Fraser or Gregg
Bordowitz’s work, the line between criticism and art practice can be either intentionally
effaced or meaningless. These days, there are a number of such experiments, like Roger
White’s theatrical “Gallery Libretto,” from Dushko Petrovich’s Paper Monument. This
conflation of categories is something new: for poststructuralists from Robert Smithson and
Art & Language to Tacita Dean, critical writing has been distinct from visual artwork.
There is not much reflection on this topic, probably because it is still usually assumed
that practice informs critical writing or vice versa—that is, they are distinct. Aria Dean has
said that her art and writing are “curiously out of step,” suggesting the two are related but
are not quite a single project.

(b) New forms of cultural criticism. Even in late modernism, art criticism denoted writing
exclusively on specific art practices or pieces. Now there are many writers who mix their
writing on fine art with writing on any number of other subjects. Rachel Ellis Neyra is a
theorist and critic whose first book, under preparation, will involve “listening closely for
unruly sounds made by what we otherwise quarter off as the visual, textual, and narrative”
in Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Chicana/o/x, and black aesthetics. Emily Colucci is an observer of
the art and cultural scene, with essays on subjects as different as Patti Smith’s inexplicable
interest in carrots and “conservative camp” at Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate hearing.
In this kind of criticism, the art is woven into wider cultural narratives. Other
examples include Doreen St. Félix, a cultural commentator at The New Yorker who also
writes on art; Sarah Nicole Prickett, who writes on a range of art subjects; and The White
Pube, a high-energy blog run out of Liverpool and London by two writers who describe
themselves as “art critic baby gods” who “wanna write GOOD ~ have politix.”20


(c) Curation as critique. This category of critics has always included curators, even well
before the emergence of curation as a major part of the art world. Exhibitions by a wide
range of curators count as criticism because they intervene in existing art historical or
market narratives. This is as true of Okwui Enwezor as it is of Marina Reyes Franco or the
Swedish-Cherokee curator and editor America Meredith. Joseph Grigely, who has the office
next to mine at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is an artist who runs the Hans
Ulrich Obrist Archive: a collection of all of Obrist’s catalogs and other materials since the

19
I thank Seth Kim-Cohen, Daniel Quiles, Dushko Petrovich, Lori Waxman, David Getsy,
Delinda Collier, and Sampada Aranke for ideas. These descriptions and choices are mine.
20
It’s not always clear whether the new narrative forms and subject matters of these writers
put them at a conceptual distance from existing visual studies, art history, art theory, or
political critique. In the field of visual studies, for example, it’s an ongoing question whether
unexpected subject matter and theory produce new discourse.
 9

early 1990s. Grigely teaches seminars in the archive. The project is not only curating the
curator—although that would be a critical act in its own right—but articulating differences
and points of overlap between curation, archive, and criticism.21

(d) Writing + performance + video. The websites Dis, n+1, and Triple Canopy are examples of
platforms for art criticism that largely avoid first-person writing directed at particular artists
or venues, and instead produce art criticism as an effect of projects that may combine
performance, video, and other strategies.
Artists’ groups have explored similar territory. Among many examples, Our Literal
Speed, IRWIN, South Africa’s Center for Historical Reenactments and Keleketla Media Arts
Project, and the Raqs Media Collective have paid special attention to the relation between
art criticism and art history. The IRWIN East Art Map remains one of the most extended
attempts to intervene critically in existing art historical narratives. (Medium matters here:
the website is very different from the book.)
Another unique combination of criticism and performance is Lori Waxman’s 60
wrd/min art critic, in which artists are invited to bring in work for an on-the-spot critical
review of 100-200 words. In Waxman’s words, the project is “an exploration of short-form
art writing, a work of performance art in and of itself, an experiment in role reversal
between artist and critic,” and “a circumvention of the art review process.” Also in my
institution, Seth Kim-Cohen, known principally for his writing on sound art, works on new
critical forms including “performances-as-criticism... with and against musical
accompaniment, with video.”22

(e) Criticism in podcasts, films, and videos. I owe this category to Lori Waxman, who read a
draft of this essay and pointed out that an increasing number of art criticism projects don’t
rely on writing at all. There’s the long-running Bad at Sports, which I contributed to several
times—it was wonderfully informal and unpredictable—and the videos, podcasts, and TV
channel on Art21. Lori also mentions TV shows like The Next Great Artist (2010-11) that
featured Jerry Saltz in a panel of critics, artists, and curators; School of Saatchi (2009) which
had Tracey Emin and Michael Collins as judges; and I Love Dick (2017-2018), an adaptation
of Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel of the same name.23

21
There is relatively little on the subject of curatorial theory; Terry Smith’s bookremains the
principal source, despite some reservations. Without a consensus idea of curation, it would
be as difficult to distinguish curation from art criticism as it has been for the October school
to articulate the relation between art history and criticism.
22
Kim-Cohen, email, October 2018. Despite a large literature on multimedia and the post-
medium condition and an equally diverse literature on performativity and criticism, I don’t
know of any writing assessing the nature and possibilities of art criticism when it spans
multiple media. (Always happy to hear of examples!)
23
As in (b), it’s an open question whether these podcasts, films, TV series, and videos bring
new content to criticism along with their new forms. Some rehearse familiar sorts of
responses that can be found in written criticism. It would be useful to have a careful study
of one of these to see what positions and arguments it has that are medium-specific in the
sense that they could not be found in written sources.
 10

(f) Fiction and criticism. Many respondents to the 2017 survey showed interest in mixtures
of fiction and criticism. In Part One of this essay, I mentioned one of the original, and still
most radical, examples, Proust. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in mixing
fiction with art criticism (and art history). It’s a subject I am studying, and I think it is helpful
to distinguish among disparate possibilities.
First there is fiction (novels, usually) that include passages of art criticism. Ben
Lerner’s novels, like 10:04, are examples. Lerner writes well-informed criticism, but it is
assigned to specific characters and set within boundaries in the narrative.
I would like to distinguish this strategy from fiction that includes criticism but also
embodies it throughout the text. An example is Don DeLillo’s 2010 novel, Point Omega,
which contains a description of Douglas Gordon’s 1993 24 Hour Psycho; after those opening
pages, the novel develops a narrative that enacts a similar “anguish and anxiety.”
That’s two possibilities. There is also fiction that describes the art world or artists,
and so acts as art criticism. Some of Tom Wolfe’s novels fit that description, and so do
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang.24

Beyond these three is a largely uncharted region in which art criticism appears in and
as fiction, metafiction, and “creative nonfiction”; Maggie Nelson, Susan Howe, Anne Carson,
and Claudia Rankine have been written about in these terms.25
It would be wonderful if there were texts theorizing these and other possibilities. But
relatively little has been written beyond case studies. It’s a great opportunity for scholars in
search of dissertation topics.

Conclusion
Art criticism is consistently interesting. It resolutely resists anything more than
provisional ordering. It continues to avoid judgment in favor of description; it favors
neutrality and praise despite the encroaching market; it imagines itself to be in perpetual
crisis or decline; it attaches itself to many media and voices; and it has no central texts,
practitioners, or problematics.
Despite its disappearance from newspapers and other mass media, it is even more
uniform, more widely produced, and I think less read, than in 2002. Its historians and
observers, like me, convene conferences and edit books on its history, condition, and
prognosis, but those have little effect on the continuous disarray of the field. My main
interests in art criticism are still its insouciance about its concepts and its hope of locating a
place to speak that is somehow outside of system, practice, or precedent.

24
I thank Lori Waxman for these last two.
25
A useful parallel for the dialectic between fiction and criticism is the so-called “novel-
essay,” a form that appeared in the early 20th century and for a while threatened to engulf
the novel, stalling its plot and freezing its characters into mouthpieces. The principal
example is Robert Musil’s endless The Man Without Qualities, and the principal scholar is
Stefano Ercolino. I wonder if this might be a more useful starting point than the general
poststructuralist interpretation of fiction as political critique.