“Adventures in Reading Landscape,” or when is a review a review?

I’ve been doing a lot of research for my thesis lately, which has involved reading a lot of articles, essays and reviews about Vancouver art production. But my most favourite entry recently has been artist/critic/art historian Marina Roy‘s essay “Adventures in Reading Landscape” in Vancouver Art and Economies – a compilation put together by Artspeak director Melanie O’Brian in 2007 that reflects on the professionalization and institutionalization of art production in Vancouver.

Roy’s essay looks at connections between writers, artists and writer-artists in Vancouver and how texts about art have been produced, circulated and received in the city. Discussing the trend of independent arts publications going under due to lack of consistent funding (reminds me of the fate of Lola) and writing opportunities therefore mostly coming from commissions for catalogue essays from galleries and commercial dealers, Roy points out that these conditions have a direct impact on the kind of arts writing that is generated by writers and critics:

“When language defines artistic production in mostly positive, profesionalized terms, critical judgment tends to be withheld, thus diminishing the public’s encounter with polemical and epistemological issues related to art.”

While it isn’t really explicit in Roy’s essay, it’s made me wonder what constitutes an art review or arts criticism in conditions where arts writing is so often funded by those with an explicit stake in the commercial success of the art being written about. Is a review a review if it doesn’t pass judgment or make a polemical statement about the work it’s addressing? Is it enough for a review to describe an artwork or the author’s experience of it? Or the work’s place in the canon of art history? And, according to Roy’s description, does arts criticism that does not link the work in question to how we make sense of the world still count as arts criticism?