The Boundaries of Art Criticism: Academism, Visualism, and Fun Diedrich Diederichsen Ive been asked to say a few

words about the role of todays art critic. Of course, the request for a few words is in keeping with the wish to restrict the whole field to journalistic forms of art critique. Im not referring to theoretical texts in neighboring fields such as art history, cultural studies, art sociology, or philosophical esthetics, but about reviews appearing in general and special interest magazines and newspapers, which deal with contemporary art objects in the broadest sense: exhibitions, works in an art show, or even projects and processes. At the same time, however, all of these texts have something in common that distinguishes them from almost all other kinds of cultural journalism: none of them recommend a product. They probably do contribute to deciding which is the best show of the summer, or which artists will influence the coming season even though nowadays it does seem as if the art market is less dependent upon critics when it comes to selling their stars. Even though art journalism might have a mediating influence upon the art market, its ways are far more complicated and less predictable than those of other cultural sectors, where a glance in the daily paper, the city guide, or a special interest magazine will actually, directly decide which play or movie well see, or which CD or book well buy (or order from Amazon). The pages containing art reviews in the form of purchase recommendations are rather shamefacedly tucked away in the daily papers. They are written in a completely different tone than any other text on art. Prices are printed, either in parentheses or Italics. Normally, it doesnt cost anything to look at and talk about art. In contrast, buying art is almost impossible. As a rule, art critics live in a world where they will never possess any of the objects they write about anyway, so that use through possession, as a form of art consumption, never even comes into question. Yet out of all the possible ways to spend your leisure time, going to an art show has the least to do with the daily problem of deciding whether the potential entertainment is worth your hard-earned money, or whether it would be better to save it to buy drugs, alcohol, movie tickets, or blank CDs. Its not worth the money, a verdict that is part of every other cultural journalists language, does not appear in art critique. The absence of exchange value corresponds with the strange omission of the judgment of value as a determinant for the value of art. This absence is especially mystifying because it is at the heart of every other kind of art critique. Simon Frith has pointed out that fan discourses are practically nothing more than the permanent insistence upon the (personal) value of certain pop culture products, a persistent (and ultimately futile) method of resisting their commodification. However, this instigates a complicated system of judgment, which is inscribed in biographies and other linear narratives describing the products of bands, artists, and sports clubs. This system employs terms such as quality, improvement, decline, highlight, and low point, and these evaluations become part of tradition and other histories. In
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todays art critique, however, history and tradition form an increasingly prefabricated, conveniently assailable, or handy discourse used for legitimation. Regardless of whether it was affirmed or rejected, the shape of the discourse was already always finished before anything had been written or said about any art object whatsoever. Classically speaking, judgment of quality can hardly be separated from esthetic experiences. Depending upon the point of view, the esthetically experienced subject judges in order to regulate his relationship to the paradoxes, incompleteness, or discrepancies of his experience. The overabundance of subjective experiences that can only be experienced and imagined subjectively contradicts the objectivity of the visual art object: for instance, its commercial value, or the fact that it can be mass-produced or reproduced. In striving to achieve a generalization, the subject attempts to assess qualities in order to deal with this problem: he formulates a judgment that provides an imaginable general foundation for his actually unimaginable personal experience. Now, you might question this (and every other) part of the bourgeois art experience, but you cannot ignore the fact that every kind of art experience which needs this name to distinguish it from some other kind of form of communication can also be regarded as a mediator or a conflict between the irreconcilable subjective and objective sides. Thus, you will easily be able to see that nothing is as fatal for critics public art experiences as when they are deprived of precisely this tension and must settle themselves comfortably at one or the other of the two poles. The objective pole, of course, is occupied by the kind of art journalism that is influenced by academic reflection. Even more than its role models, it must prove its immunity against those journalistic fields threatened by subjectivity. So the objective pole constructs the reviewers encounter with the object as if it were an encounter between a scientist and a theoretical object. As an author, you simply follow the rules of this discourse. As a subject, you merely register the features of the object. We are familiar with two versions of this discourse: the friendly and the unfriendly. The widespread, friendly one feels comfortable with the necessity of explaining art objects; it provides the background information not disclosed by the object itself, the practically inaccessible information that is (metaphorically) hidden in the back room. In this discourse, critics aid the projects, translate it. They recognize more allusions and know more about less obvious references. They read the art object and do not expand its text by providing what would be called their own contribution, but instead describe what the art object itself reveals. The friendly, objective pole does justice to the art object as an art object; it reveals the object as the secure side of esthetic experience. Standing on the secure side, you know how to regard the subject, tentatively blinking on the other side. In contrast, the unfriendly objectivist puts the object or its creator on trial. In the first variation, actual purposes and morally questionable interests and intentions of the creator are revealed; that is, in reality, the artist simply wants to rake in the cultural capital, accumulate recognition for himself, or perhaps serve questionable ideologies, which he does not openly acknowledge. This trial against the creator begins with the certainty that the creators objective reality cannot possibly exist in what is his
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necessarily subjective, restricted explanation of himself. Unlike the friendly objectivists, though, the persecutors do not expound upon an object to supplement it, but instead elucidate the falsity of the artistic subject, which lies like a rug whenever it opens its mouth and therefore ought to be persecuted. Unfriendly objectivists do indeed have an inkling of the notion that, following their own axioms, it would be naive of them to hold the creator personally responsible. After all, the artistic subject lies for structural reasons. So here, too, we have to side with the object in the trial: show how it promotes Post-Fordist business, the Empire, the cultural elite, and the capitalist art market, regardless of what the creators might have wanted. Theyre usually drunk, anyway. However, there is a kind of objectivism that tries to oust the subjective, not via the object of the review (artist or artwork), but via its subject, the author of the review. Culturally, these texts restrict their own jurisdiction and doubt experience or the desirability of experience. Instead, exact descriptions of the context of the encounter as well as the contexts of knowledge production determine the reviewers statements. These kinds of texts are remarkable for their extreme caution; they only mention what cannot be denied. They quote a great deal press releases, other reviewers, and especially theoretical authorities and do everything they can to avoid passing a judgment that might be traced back to the subjectivity of the reviewer him/herself. Of course, they cant help but pass judgment anyway, since a judgment can usually be derived from suggestive bits and hints. This kind of objectivist critique functions under the expectation that readers will cursorily, mechanically read these texts, which have been cleansed of all traces of subjectivity just as the critics themselves suggest doing. Of course, among all of the possible forms of expression alluded to here, used by art critics belonging to one side or the other, this objectivism can be understood as pure opposition (against, for example, what has historically been excessive subjectivism). However, nowadays, you can say that this gesture of self-objectification, acted out through excessive self-contextualization, has reached its limit: its become a habit. Paradoxically, its effect does not objectify, but relativizes. It slows down reading and suffocates curiosity with odd stipulations. Usually nobody takes a judgmental stance that would provide a payoff after having been contextualized and relativized. And finally, the most important contextualization of all is only seldom assumed the one amounting to the phrase the artist is a friend of mine. Before I come to subjectivism, the contrasting perishable product, so to speak, of art critique, Id like to turn to what I call visualism and what lies between these two things. In Japan, a clear improvement in the print quality of magazines and journals has been noticeable for a while, and Europe and America are quickly catching up. Digital equipment makes it faster and cheaper to print visually attractive pictures precisely where art columns once were. This has led to a tendency to print photographs of art objects in magazines, thus turning them into legitimate representatives of art objects around the globe. Not only does this mean that the number of possible art objects is severely reduced (that is, all objects, which cannot be photographed in one or several pictures, are
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excluded). Above all, the images force art critics to rely upon their evidence and suggestive power; critics must no longer go to the trouble of addressing the cerebral process that goes along with experiencing art they are simply directed back to the retina. Critique degenerates into photo captions. Additionally, this kind of magazinefriendly art has also influenced design and the choice of photographs, so that objects and productions, which do not have any artistic claims and those, which were once objects in the art world become indistinguishable from one another. Esthetic worlds, from Barneys to Tillmans, have long been part of the art directors repertoire. The boom in magazine design that has occurred during the past five years, from Dutch to i-D, Wallpaper*, Dazed & Confused, and many, many other titles, has spread an art look that claims to be understandable simply on its visual terms alone. In these magazines, which are nominally art magazines, this visualism devalues critique, or whatever might be left of it, since magazines image politics can no longer distinguish between magazine design and the images to which design refers. Ultimately, subjectivism can certainly coexist with the trends Ive just described. Art critique, reduced to photo captions, often tries to legitimize itself in other ways as fun, for example. It wants to entertain. Increasingly, textual accompaniments in magazines are laid-out in easy-reading formats, becoming text graphics, lists, and side columns, showing the return of the living footnote, now functioning as the gossip news at the bottom of the page. Yet, in this world, you find exactly what I thought was previously missing: judgments and evaluations. Art critics list their favorite whatevers, of course throwing around epithets such as intelligent, beautiful, clever, amusing, without providing any foundation for their use. The reasons are implicit, based in the authors style, which, along with his judgment of taste, is on display. Today, style wants to be regarded again as a non-explicit, philosophical backdrop. Habitual slacking and an inability to empathize have once again recently been celebrated as dandyism. Completely in accordance with the old New Journalism of the 1960s, without being vulnerable to argumentative attacks, the personally stylized world ought to provide reasons and foundations for judgments and evaluations that would otherwise be exhausted with a succinct lousy or boring as if the punk attitude had just been rediscovered once again. The return of New Journalism as farce known in Germany as pop literature has also permeated international art critique. It permits the endless, unfounded display of egos and other personal objects and organs in short journalistic formats. It should be able to thrive without the space-stealing slowness of discourse, while begging directly from the gut for the good, clean fun of new bohemian glamor sad junk piled up at stands at art fairs, such as the last one in Berlin. So, as a consequence of a regressive institutional process, the old type of feisty review, which, with the help of argumentation, tried to translate subjective experience into general objectives, has therefore disintegrated into two parts. On one side is a shy academism, which flees to the secure side of objects, claiming to have inherited the critical position. On the other side is the unrestrained, isolated, stupefied subjectivism of an aggressive easy reading culture dominated by a purely retinal visualism and judgments that are as empty as they are interchangeable. This is not an unusual development for a
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classic bourgeois public format: art critique would not be the first thing to have disintegrated into bits so that the individual metastases could fight over the succession. Yet, something is missing from this diagnosis. Namely, there is a tradition of art critique that does not talk especially loudly about quality and personal preferences, a tradition that is older than this latest development. It has its origins in the ideological function of the visual arts in a much more general sense. We have seen that in other arts, the art object is also consumed as a result of being used; its possession in one way or another is a condition required in order to esthetically experience it. These objects, which make it possible to enjoy art, are, however, hardly or not at all auratic objects. Instead, they are databanks for sound and text: media. On the other hand, a visual art work (and, as expressed in more modern branches lacking the notion of the work, the product of the art process) is a special object. It cannot be consumed and used. Hence, it has no use value, something which, in the long run is measured in time, in letting you know how long you can use the object and still make a profit from it, before it becomes boring or breaks, or you dont think about it any more or even want to think about it any more. It is thus not possible to write a review that compares the use value with the price. The art object finds itself in the paradoxical center of an art system that can only function because it regards this object as the priceless symptom of an extra-economic sphere of value, a system that erects a market around this extra-economical object. However, this market can only provide speculative evaluations, since any objective, imaginable judgment is precisely excluded by the idea of pricelessness. Every judgment of a concrete art object touches upon this precarious construction. Early types of art critique could get around this problem by constructing criticism and judgments on the basis of normative theories of the world. An other, beyond the subject and object, formed the reference point for both. An unforeseeable pleasure could also endanger such theories, however. When considering critical art theories of the second half of the twentieth century, I think that their only possible course was to exclude or devalue personal preferences. In these theories, there was no meta-theory describing the relationship of spontaneous judgment, free of intellectual influences, to the type of judgment based on normative categories. In the meantime, normativizing has become weaker and been reduced to suspicious academicism; spontaneity is connected with the reactionary reconstruction of naturalness. What remains is an absence of a theory of their relation to each other. Of course, art critique should reintegrate this part of what was formerly a whole, but it is not enough to simply want to do this. Ultimately, there were hard (and probably also good) historical reasons for its disintegration. Sometimes its possible to feel that critique, which is both politically and esthetically well-founded, which also provides reasons for why it is fascinating or repelling whether it is an adversary or not is something like a great horror. Possibly, it is because we are afraid it might come out that we only write about friends and enemies in this small world. And that is the reason why the role of fascination is either actively ignored or excessively emphasized by celebrating

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subjectivity: because it is about the fascination for other people and artists. About personal feelings for other people. Why would that be so bad? Because the lid would fly off the art scam? But that would mean that some sort of pillar would stand and fall with the incorruptibility of art critique. Plus, its much nicer to do a favor for a friend than to be bought out by large cultural industry companies, like critics in other fields. A bigger danger is the humdrum boredom of the fact that friends like their friends. Regardless of whether critics freely admit it or seek to hide it, both strategies need so much psychological room that they usually take up the space that could be used for the rest of what might actually be an interesting text. Unless the friendship itself were the object of the text, but then that would not be critique. A basic condition of our capitalist environment is that we can only know objects when they are separated and estranged from their creators. Art is the compensatory exception to this rule. Art objects are the only things whose creators we know. All other objects are mass-produced by anonymous workers. This knowledge of the creator includes the danger that their special objects will become part of them and lose their objecthood. They are melted down into emanations of the artist and this sensation easily becomes a horror because it rejects the capitalist status quo of objects in an almost pathological way. That is the real limitation of art critique under todays conditions: to forget the difference between subject and object, to fall in love with the artist. Or even worse, to hate him, to shoot him. Was Valerie Solanas an art critic?

The Boundaries of Art Criticism