I am shocked and also sort of ashamed to see that I haven’t updated here in almost 2 months (!?). I blame contemporary art, as well as the first year of a PhD program. I’ve also been working hard on freelance stuff (writing, The Leona Drive Project, a tiny bit of curating) and have been neglectful of this poor space.

But, for anyone who’s still with me, I wanted to write quickly about two sort of concurrent dialogues about art criticism (and judgment) on two Toronto art blogs. The first came on Andrea Carson’s View on Canadian Art blog a few weeks ago when she wrote that the current show of contemporary portraiture at Red Bull 381 Projects, curated by Nicholas Brown and Julia Lum and titled “Sitting Pretty”, left her feeling cold. She continues:

But is this work that really matters? Did the artist Tibi Tibi Neuspiel make the work with any kind of emotional involvement? If so, there was none left by the time it went on display.

Not really framed as a review so much as a meditation on whether VoCA should be “more critical,” the post solicited nearly 30 comments which inevitably turned towards the role of arts criticism and the limitations and possibilities that blogs offer to critics. While the dialogue proves that the “crisis in arts criticism” issue is not yet totally stale, I found that there was some conflation of the ideas of criticism versus/as/and judgment in both the post and its responses that muddled the conversation a bit.

Carson has been explicit and consistent throughout her blog that she sees the role of criticism as evaluating and passing judgment about the quality, relevance or importance of artworks (terms which are nebulous at best and, I would argue, far from timeless or universal). In the post about the “Sitting Pretty” show, for instance, she writes “VoCA believes in the importance of criticism and tries to recommend the best (and only the best) work being made in Canada. We must all learn to support the art scene while celebrating the best, and exposing the worst. That’s a critic’s job.”

Though I’m definitely on board for a call for criticism that is more, well, critical, and that actually expresses some sort of opinion or thesis about the work being reviewed, I’m not sure that I see criticism as constituted of judgment and evaluation alone. Sure, some work is strong and keeps you thinking about it for days, whereas other work is weak and therefore forgettable and still other pieces are terrible and keep you thinking about them out of frustration. But even this distinction between artworks’ affect, they way they make one “feel,” say a lot about their effect. Generally, critics don’t write about work not worth thinking about, writing about or remembering. They write about the work they want to support because of its strength, or about work with problems that obviously still has some kind of merit or possibility (otherwise it wouldn’t be worth all this effort, and lack of monetary reimbursement, in the first place).

And, as Stephanie Vegh wrote in one of the comments on VoCA, only operating between the two poles that this act of judgment seems to offer–celebration or exposure as unworthy–also seems to do the work and its creator a disservice: “It seems to me that discussing only the best and worst might be good for the art scene, but isn’t discussing the points of interest in between those two extremes better for art?” Artists (and curators, and critics, too) make choices when they do what they do. I think the best criticism addresses the choices that were made and asks what the implications of these choices are and if, perhaps, different, more effective ones could have been made instead.

Which brings me to the second Toronto-based art blog to tackle the role of criticism this month: the brief return of Artfag who published an interview with Ryerson journalism student Michelle Kuran where the two discussed the problems and issues at stake in contemporary Canadian art criticism. The Artfag is his usual sassy self, railing against the apparent lack of distinction between criticism and exposition in art criticism (I can see his point) and arguing that Vancouver School work is “formulaic, academically indulgent, [and] anaesthetic” (I point with which I disagree, by the way). But he also has a few insightful, if armchair psychology-inflected, things to say about the role and intent of criticism. For instance:

…we give criticism because someone needs it. If one is never told that one is doing something wrong, one will never correct that wrong behaviour. This is not the act of the saboteur. That is the attitude of someone who doesn’t understand what criticism is for. Post-WWII North American social culture, especially since the 1960s, has been propelled by a therapeutic ideal of the promotion of self-esteem and mental and emotional health and well-being. This pervasive idea has wrought much good, and also much bad; in the context of our discussion, it has birthed this idea (and you can see it everywhere, from art criticism to American Idol) that criticism is an assault upon self-esteem and self-actualization. People who value discourse and the free exchange of ideas realize that criticism is always an act of caring, for it is borne of the desire to see things done successfully. Those who believe that criticism is an act of sabotage simply do not value the free exchange of ideas. We’re afraid it’s as simple as that.

Artfag likewise underscores the role of judgment in art criticism–he terms it as “discernment” between good and bad work–but complicates it with the observation that any kind of criticism carries with it an implicit investment in the work being critiqued. I like that Artfag’s call for greater (or maybe better) criticism comes attached with a call for bravery: both from critics who are worried that a negative review will endanger their future opportunities and from readers and the critiqued who might take it personally. To be brave is also a kind of choice that needs to be made. For instance, why isn’t anyone writing stridently critical reviews for Canadian Art if they are dissatisfied with its current content? I work there and can guarantee you no review texts come in “more critical” than they are in their final state. The writing that comes to the magazine seems, to me, wilfully “uncritical” when it is so, which says much more about a comfortable complicity with uncritical writing than an editorial decision.

And, to take Artfag’s line of questioning further, what is needed in order for writers and readers to be brave and take these critical stances? What kinds of contexts or social/economic conditions would facilitate better criticism?