Why Art Criticism? A Reader E-Book

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 892

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

How is art criticism to be understood within an expanding artistic field? A look at its history and its manifestations within globalized conditions shows the variety of the genre, of the criteria and of the styles of writing. This reader is an attempt to bring a diverse range of art-critical voices and perspectives into conversation with each other, with texts from the 18th century to the present. The editors Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss have invited colleagues from various geographical and intellectual backgrounds to present and discuss the art critics of their choice, choosing one example from their respective bodies of work to comment upon. How have these writers approached art criticism? Which styles do they employ? What makes them extraordinary? What can we learn from their writings today, and why is it important in its contemporary context? BEATE SÖNTGEN (*1963) is professor of art history at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She studied art history, philosophy, and modern German literature in Marburg and Berlin. She is director of the DFG Research Training Group "Cultures of Critique: Forms, Media, Effects" and co-director of the program "PriMus - Doctoral Studies in Museums." JULIA VOSS (*1974) is an honorary professor at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She studied art history, modern German literature, and philosophy in Berlin and London. She is herself an art critic and journalist and was deputy head of the arts section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Leseprobe

Why Art Criticism?

Ad Reinhardt, detail from “How To Look at a Cubist Painting,” PM, January 27, 1946

Why Art Criticism?

A Reader

Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss, eds.

Colophon

Editors: Beate Söntgen, Julia Voss

Leuphana University Lüneburg

Coordinator: (rights, authors, translations, research) Catharina Berents-Kemp

Editorial assistants: Jette Berend, Marie Lynn Jessen, David Mielecke, Katharina Tchelidze

Office manager: Stephanie Braune

Hatje Cantz

Managing editor: Lena Kiessler

Project manager: Kimberly Bradley

Copyediting: Kimberly Bradley

Graphic design: Neil Holt

Photo research: Kimberly Bradley

Jennifer Bressler

Translations (commentaries):

Angela Anderson: Holger Kuhn, Beate Söntgen (Diderot, Fry); Matthew James Scown: Sabeth Buchmann, Peter Geimer, Stephanie Marchal, David Mielecke, Thorsten Schneider, Margarethe Vöhringer, Julia Voss (Zuckerkandl, Higgie), Foreword and Introduction;

Katherine Vanovitch: Valerie Hortolani, Valerija Kuzema (Tretyakov, Lang)

Source text translators listed in bibliography.

Indexing: Jochen Fassbender

Typeface: Arnhem

Production: Vinzenz Geppert

Reproductions: Repromayer, Reutlingen

Printing and binding: GRASPO CZ, A.S

Published by

Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH

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10629 Berlin

www.hatjecantz.de

A Ganske Publishing Group Company

isbn 978-3-7757-5074-5 (Print)

isbn 978-3-7757-5092-9 (eBook)

Printed in the Czech Republic

Photo credits

Frontispiece: © Anna Reinhardt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 27 © akg-images, The State Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg; p. 28 © akg-images, Scottish National Gallery; p. 32 akg-images, Musée de Louvre; p. 33 © akg-images, Erich Lessing; p. 41 Photo: Kristina Mösl, Francesca Schneider ©Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie; p. 45 Wikimedia Commons; p. 49 Courtesy the author; p. 67 © akg-images; p. 79 akg-images; p. 89 Reproduced with the kind permission of Letterform Archive; p. 122, Photo © Chris Doullgeris, Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation Collection; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 135 akg-images, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 149 from Happenings (ed. Jorge Álvarez, Buenos Aires, 1967); p. 163 Courtesy the author; p. 180 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Artists’ Rights Society; p. 197 © Alexander Liberman Photography Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2000.R.19; p. 214 © akg-images/ World History Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 228 Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo; p. 229 © akg-images; p. 231 © akg-images / Science Source; p. 240 Photo: Renato Ghiazza, Courtesy Archivio Fondazione Merz, Torino; © SIAE; pp. 254, 259, 260: Courtesy Newton Harrison; pp. 271–72 Courtesy the artists; p. 281 akg-images / Jazz Archiv Hamburg / Hardy Schiffler; p. 289 Photographer: Mali Olatunji (copyright: The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Object Number: IN1633.42 / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 322 Courtesy Tony Chakar; p. 335 Courtesy Vardan Azatyan; p. 342 Wikimedia Commons / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 349 Courtesy Wahed Khakdan; p. 362 Photo: Manuel Reinartz, image courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin,VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 374 Photo: Kathryn Carr © Marina Abramovic and Guggenheim Museum, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022; p. 390 Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel; p. 401 Photo: Enric Duch, Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin; p. 425 Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi (Collection Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi); p. 426 Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi (private collection); p. 433 Photo: Iwan Baan, courtesy Diller Scofidio and Renfro, New York; p. 434 Stephanie Berger; pp. 441–43: © Sophie-Charlotte Opitz, courtesy the artist and Akademie Schloss Solitude; p. 452 Courtesy Sable Elyse Smith, JTT, and Carlos/Ishikawa; p. 454 Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.

All efforts were made to trace copyright holders to all images and texts. In the case of omissions or queries, please contact [email protected].

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projectnumber 2114.

Foreword

Why Art Criticism? An Introduction

Commentary

Source Text

Passion, Performance and Soberness

beate söntgen

denis diderot

Essays on Painting

In Conversation

johannes grave

clemens brentano, achim von arnim

In Front of a Friedrich Seascape with Capuchin Monk

heinrich von kleist

Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape

Emotional Collectivities

stephanie marchal

julius meier-graefe

Fellows in Reality

The Leak

julia voss

berta zuckerkandl

The Klimt Affair

Klimt’s letter to the Education Ministry

Crafts and the Spiritual

monica juneja

ananda k. coomaraswamy

The Indian Craftsman

Practical Formalist

beate söntgen

roger fry

The Futurists

The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, O. M.

Independent Gallery: Vanessa Bell and Othon Friesz

Agitation

valerija kuzema

sergei tretyakov

The Work of Viktor Palmov

Photo-Notes

Snapshot

margarete vöhringer

alexander rodchenko

Against the Synthetic Portrait, For the Snapshot

Decomposition

malte rauch

georges bataille

Critiques

Decolonizing Art History

parul dave mukherji

ananda k. coomaraswamy

Why Exhibit Works of Art?

Advocating the Collective

camilo sarmiento jaramillo

luis vidales

The Aesthetic of Our Time Colombian Painting

Materialism and Proximity

isabelle graw

francis ponge

Note on the Hostages, Paintings by Fautrier

Censorship and the Authorial “I”

valerie hortolani and valerija kuzema

lothar lang

Annotations on Painting in Leipzig, with an Update on Tübke

Hermann Glöckner

The Hans Grundig Exhibition

Harald Metzkes at the National Gallery

Fragments on Art Criticism

Trespasser of Gatekeeping

juli carson

oscar masotta

I Committed a Happening

Embedded Chronicler

monique bellan

victor hakim

The Artistic and Literary Life: Reviews from La Revue du Liban et de l’Orient Arabe

Undisciplined

thorsten schneider

peter gorsen

Prolegomena to a Hedonistic Enlightenment

In Drag

astrid mania

mary josephson

Warhol: The Medium as Cultural Artifact

Self-Reflective Connectivity

beatrice von bismarck

lawrence alloway

Network: The Art World Described as a System

Vulnerability and Resistance

florencia malbrán

marta traba

Two Decades of Vulnerability in Latin American Visual Arts 1950/1970

Fellow-Feeling

sarah wilson

roland barthes

Réquichot and His Body

Documentation as Dialogue

michael f. zimmermann

allan sekula

On the Invention of Photographic Meaning

Introduction

Deculturization

sabeth buchmann

annemarie sauzeau-boetti

Negative Capability as Practice in Women’s Art

Coming Together: Demas Nwoko and New Culture

azu nwagbogu

bob bennett

Architecture and Environmental Designs

Gathering Voices, Feeling Relations

oona lochner

arlene raven

Two Lines of Sight and an Unexpected Connection: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison

Drawing Another Line

maja and reuben fowkes

ješa denegri

A New Turnaround

Chronopolitical Intervention

ana teixeira pinto

mark sinker

Loving the Alien in Advance of the Landing

A Drifting Mind

isabel mehl

lynne tillman

Madame Realism’s Diary: The Matisse Pages

Criteria Against All Odds

peter geimer

stefan germer

How Do I Find My Way Out of This Labyrinth? On the Necessity and Impossibility of Criteria for Judging Contemporary Art

Decentering

maja and reuben fowkes

igor zabel

The Soil in Which Art Grows

Greetings from the Provinces

Tactics of Alienation

ghalya saadawi

walid sadek

From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon

Art Historiography

angela harutyunyan

vardan azatyan

Toward a Dilemmatic Archive:

Historicizing Contemporary Art in Armenia

Hatchet Job

wolfgang kemp

julia voss

What World Does this Prince Want to Rule?

Bridging Borders

anita hosseini

helia darabi

Found in Translation: Exile as a Productive Experience in the Work of Iranian Artists

Dispatch: Tehran

Through the Digital Looking Glass

ying sze pek

hito steyerl

Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy

If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!: Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms

The Cultural Logic of Financialization

holger kuhn

melanie gilligan

The Beggar’s Pantomine: Performance and its Appropriations

Camp and Credit Cards

yuriko furuhata

takashi kashima

This Excess Called Lassen: What Is it That Art History Cannot Write?

Nearly Unbiased

julia grosse

patrick mudekereza

Homage: Djilatendo Remixing Africa, Again

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Échangeur

Retroactivity

andreas beyer

peter richter

Male Morals

Troll: Anonymous

miriam rasch

reader laureate

Through My Reading Glasses

Queering

rebecca john

adwait singh

Staying With the Sirens

On the Resilience of the Past

Cracks in the Wall

Into the Light

Culture and Capital

anna kipke

claire bishop

Palace in Plunderland: Claire Bishop on the Shed

Merging

yvette mutumba

enos nyamor

In a Hypermediatized World. Visions of Cultural Journalism

Follow the Money

david mielecke

aruna d’souza

Reviews from 4Columns

The Series

julia voss

jennifer higgie

Instagram, March 12, 2021

Biographies

Bibliography

Index of Names

Colophon and credits

Foreword

Studies on art criticism’s history and definition—on its protagonists, its significance, its death or at the least its frequently diagnosed crisis—are many and manifold. But few books have gathered the actual raw materials: the critiques themselves, which, after all, are what make the concept of art criticism tangible, lending it concrete form and vitality. This reader thus gives such form to the phenomenon of art criticism via critical exercises and practices. Forty-six voices of art criticism are collected here from across four centuries. The gathered texts have appeared in both analogue and digital form: in newspapers, magazines, journals, and blogs; in popular media, catalogues, and academic publications. From the outset, we wish to avoid any misunderstanding: this reader may begin with the eighteenth century and be arranged in chronological order, but our aim is not to narrate a history or genealogy of art criticism on the basis of particular examples. We are rather seeking to provide a taxonomic account of the variety of art criticism’s forms and roles.

From our perspective, the need for a reader of this sort is clear for two reasons. First, art criticism is often discussed in the singular, but it is historically and presently as varied as art itself. Only by setting out the many and manifold roles and forms, styles, modes of writing, genres, and the diversity of its criteria and domains to which it lays claim is it possible to arrive at a more precise notion and definition of art criticism. Second, and from an entirely pragmatic perspective, the reader offers material for examination and analysis in art-historical pedagogy, and as a suggestion or even possible model of contemporary and future forms of art-critical writing.

Soon after we decided to compile a reader several years ago, it became clear that it could only become reality as a collaborative project, undertaken with other experts. The present reader is thus based on an international workshop—Cultures of Critique: Forms, Media, Effects, held at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2019, to which we invited specialists from various geographical and intellectual backgrounds to offer brief commentaries on the art critics of their choice. They explained why the chosen texts are important to them, what the texts stood for at the time of their writing, and what they stand for now. The approaches taken to the various critical positions are therefore personal ones, as the brief introductions to the source texts in this book show. To avoid resorting to texts already rendered into English and canonized, we chose to commission a number of new translations. While the publication has brought further art-critical positions into play, we do not seek to provide a systematic index or even a complete overview. Based on the contributors’ suggestions, our book encourages readers to engage with points at which art critics of various provenance intersect, and also where they differ from one another. We ask readers delve into texts from eighteenth-century Paris; nineteenth-century London and Dresden; the twentieth century’s New York, Buenos Aires, Delhi, Moscow, East Berlin, and Beirut; and the Kinshasa, Nairobi, and Tokyo of the twenty-first. Please also note that while all commentaries consistently use American English, in the source essays we have chosen to retain idiosyncrasies regarding translations, academic citation formats, punctuation, and regional forms of English, all of which underscore the sources’ heterogeneity.

Our profuse thanks are due to all the authors collected in this volume for their contributions, both for the art critics they have selected and for the illuminating commentaries they have written. We would also like to thank our publisher, Hatje Cantz, for their keenness to include the reader in their program, and Lena Kiessler for her outstanding support in putting together the volume. Kimberly Bradley has been an inspiring and thoughtful editor. The reliable hands of Catharina Berents held together the many threads of this intricate and complex undertaking. We owe much gratitude to the translators Angela Anderson, Brian Richard Bergstrom, Ralph de Rijke, Tiziana Laudato, Stuart L. A. Moss, Francis Riddle, Matthew James Scown, Bela Shayevich, and Katherine Vanovitch, and to book designer Neil Holt, picture editor Jennifer Bressler, and production manager Vinzenz Geppert. For their support, we would like to thank the student research assistants of Leuphana University’s Research Training Group—Jette Berend, Marie Lynn Jessen, David Mielecke, and Katharina Tchelidze—and the group’s office manager, Stephanie Braune. Finally, particular thanks are due to the German Research Foundation for its generous financial support.

Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss

Lüneburg, August 2021

Why Art Criticism? An Introduction

Right now, the voices calling for criticism, value-apportioning evaluation, and intervention are urgent and loud, in both social and academic contexts. “On the life of criticism”—the title of Ruth Sonderegger’s1 study, highlights the topicality, vibrance, and power of criticism while also shifting the focus away from the definition of terms and concepts and toward critical practices. But art criticism—a critical praxis that has mostly sought for and established relations to social phenomena—has had a difficult time of late. Even if no form of criticism is ever without its own crisis, recent attacks have been particularly intense, striking at the very foundations of art criticism. This introduction explores those attacks, with the hope that the panorama of art-critical positions collected within this reader can also vividly demonstrate the value of art criticism for the present time.

A peak in these condemnations occurred in a 2002 round table hosted and printed by—of all publications—the journal October;2 which, since its launch in 1976, has been one of the most important organs for critical reflection on art. October does not merely cultivate a politically engaged style; it also defends the use of strong criteria. And it is these which (according to depressing reports) have disappeared, having gone the same way as categories of classification. Some lament that art criticism has lost its independent voice; has become an art-industry mouthpiece and even a scribe to the royal court of the arts; mere applause for the artistic voices that the critic is promulgating. Given the dominance of the market in the artistic field, it has been said that neither discursive space nor knowledge of context are still required. There are no longer any utopian visions, and thus no social ones.3 Criticism would therefore always participate in inescapably problematic processes of canonization that affirm social conditions and serve the market in equal measure. The skills, responsibilities, and fields of critics, historians, and curators have intermingled; art criticism has allegedly lost its ability to make judgments, reduced at best to interpretation. Many critics are blamed with having literary pretensions that compete with art and seek to seduce through language. Criticism thus either acts in sales mode, or fosters romantic notions of fusing the critical text with the object of critique.

October has made a significant contribution to focusing attention on art’s potential to be critical in its own right. The criticality of artistic work quickly became the key marker of value in art.4 Art criticism has perhaps dug its own grave: if art is critical, who needs art criticism? What can it add to art? What can criticism produce that art cannot produce itself? Beyond this, artists themselves also write, framing their work critically and formulating critiques of other artistic positions. The fact that criticality has become a market value in art does nothing to improve things.

This fierce attack from a Western flagship of art criticism is not the only one the latter has been forced to endure. Feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial arguments have, with good reason, cast doubt on one of criticism’s core tasks—judgment—while to the same degree raising questions about the related concept of the Enlightenment notion of the subject.5 The rational, Western, overwhelmingly male subject of criticism has apparently suppressed the physical, sensual, and affective elements of the critical act, disparaging them as purely subjective. An awareness of the ever-varying situatedness of those speaking would therefore be indispensable; this awareness, however, would make it possible to define the generally valid criteria that are required to make a judgment, at least in terms of any potential generalizability. There also remains the urgent question of who is ultimately permitted to speak for whom, and in whose name,6 especially when it comes to socially engaged criticism.

So what is to be done with art criticism? Especially in view of the widespread diagnosis that the transformative power of (art) criticism is disappearing, Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke assert its necessity and value; the freedom that can be found in an act of distancing that is aware of its own participation and even its entanglement in what is being criticized.7 The relational concept of criticism they have proposed and that Graw has further pursued in collaboration with Sabeth Buchmann involves reflection on one’s own discriminations—both in the sense of discerning and distinguishing differences as part of the critical act, and in terms of the exclusions that each act of differentiation must entail.8 Given that art criticism refers to a subject matter—the artwork—that is in turn the result of a sensual, reflexive act that articulates itself in specific materials and media, we feel art criticism has a unique potential to take what has often been excluded from the Western notion of criticism—the affective, the physical and sensual, the involved—and showcase it as part of the critical act.

There have been intense discussions in recent years on how to reach transculturally informed understandings of an art that is subject to globalized conditions. Only recently, however, has the significance this expanded art field has for art criticism come into consideration.9 The journal Contemporary And is named here as an example, initially presenting and discussing art from African perspectives. It has since founded a second magazine focusing on Latin America.10 Our reader is an attempt to bring diverse voices and perspectives into conversation with each other, but to do so without claiming to be comprehensive, nor to provide a systematic index or illustrate the history of art critique through model texts by its most important purveyors. We see this reader neither as an expanded canon, nor as a new anti-canon. Our aim is rather to create a renewed awareness of the historical and contemporary plurality of art critique; to demonstrate its value and diversity as a genre and highlight what is has to offer to social discourses.

Criteria

Among the authors included in this volume, Stefan Germer emphasizes the necessity of forming criteria, even if the problematic nature of generally binding critical yardsticks and normative decrees is very much at the fore. For Germer, art criticism’s role and function is to make distinctions and review them—and even go so far as to evaluate them—in relation to both artistic-aesthetic questions and sociopolitical ones. This not only addresses the content-form debate—that is to say, the question of how the subject matter of an artwork is determined by the form and medium of representation or placed in a certain light;11 it also speaks to an aporia, vital among other things to the formation of criteria, that exists within modern art or at least what is regarded as avant-garde. This aporia plays an important role in many of the contributions gathered here: namely, the question of how artistic criteria should be linked to political issues.12

Within the avant-gardes of around 1900, there were demands for art to intervene in life—even to merge with it—and to therefore counteract the impotence of an increasingly self-referential art. But to have any kind of potency as art, even the avant-garde must assert a right to autonomy; to an at least relative self-governance and liberation from any other purposes and vested interests. However, this results in a disentanglement from the social and a loss of potency. The question of the relationship between art and politics has vehemently returned to the stage, especially with the attention paid to global entanglements in the artistic field.13 This is linked to the challenge of defining the criteria that can still be used to assess artistic works, given that the possibility of making normative justifications and the fiction of independent criticism have both reached their ends.

Another important criterion is in which (socio-)political issues are picked up on, made visible, problematized, or criticized in artistic work. Whether sexism (Annemarie Sauzeau-Boetti, Adwait Singh), racism, or post-Fordist labor relations (Melanie Gilligan, Aruna D’Souza); commodity fetishism (Walid Sadek), social change, and environmental destruction (Arlene Raven); territorial struggles (Helia Darabi, Lothar Lang, Marta Traba, Igor Zabel), or war and its cultural consequences (Ješa Denegri, Sadek, Luis Vidales); art criticism’s task in each case involves highlighting the means and persuasion with which each of these sets of issues is articulated.

Art critiques that place form in the foreground of their reflections cannot dispense with commentary on what has been expressed in a particular form, even when they insist on a pitiless self-reflection on artistic materials, media, and procedures. The spectrum ranges from the communication of creative, spiritual power (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Roger Fry) or authenticity (Victor Hakim) to expressions of the body (Roland Barthes, Patrick Mudekereza, Francis Ponge) and questioning the appropriateness of a form in relation to its function (Clemens Brentano/Achim von Arnim).

A differently incisive criterion for exploring the interconnection of art and politics is the social value imparted via artistic form and artistic practice. Even where self-exploration through aesthetic experience—as it was understood from an Enlightenment perspective—is seen critically (Gilligan, Peter Gorsen), experiences of community are showcased either through artistic production itself (Coomaraswamy), via collective artistic practices (Raven, Vidales), or via shared experiences in the (self-)perception of artists (Denegri, Sauzeau-Boetti).

From his place on the left of the political spectrum, Peter Gorsen supports the provocative position that art should not be at the direct service of society. Rather than advocating for the rejection of the culture industry, he pleads for pleasure—and explicitly not in the sense of bourgeois pleasure in art. Gorsen instead demands new, (un)productive forms and experiences through art, to be generated within the framework of non-instrumental networks. He thus addresses a criterion utilized in equal measure both by art criticism and in artistic-critical practices: particularly addressing the cultural, institutional, and economic conditions in which art is produced, received, and distributed (Lawrence Alloway, Mary Josephson, Oscar Masotta, Hito Steyerl, Julia Voss).

We have covered only some of the central criteria (and these by no means represent all art-critical criteria) deployed in this volume. They hold their ground with remarkable persistence, from the beginnings of modern criticism in the mid-eighteenth century up until the present, and across cultural, political, and intellectual divides.

Tasks and Roles

Having problematized judgment as a task of art criticism, the question arises of what other or further roles it has, given that many critics remain wedded to judgment as one of criticism’s core roles. Hal Foster made a number of suggestions in the aforementioned October round table;14 art criticism could, for instance, work archeologically to bring what has been buried, suppressed, and forgotten to light. Not only a memory-related role, but also a political one would therefore be evoked. By changing the focus and shifting the subject of attention, art criticism can also govern processes of canonization—and is also able to shed light on the justifications and categories behind these processes. According to Foster, art criticism can also take an explorative approach, researching figures at the margins of the art field and, in the most high-impact case, even establishing a new paradigm for evaluating art. With such a tableau of tasks, however, the already-blurred line between art criticism and art history becomes even hazier.15 This reader, however, does not seek to mark boundaries; its aim is rather to make visible the variety of tasks and roles that art criticism could assume.

It remains a key function of each form of criticism and of art criticism in particular to intervene in artistic and social fields and to raise objections against any such restrictions. Given the increased attention being paid to the globality of the art field, many art critics feel it important to give hitherto neglected tendencies and regions their own voices (Darabi, Sadek, Zabel), to probe territories anew (Denegri, Traba, Vidales), to highlight hierarchical structures, power imbalances, and inequalities (D’Souza, Traba), and to unfold new narratives at the same time (Darabi, Allan Sekula, Zabel).16 Two Latin American critics illustrate how these evaluations of hegemonic structures in the art field can or should be countered. Traba separates the Latin American art scene into open and closed areas; into areas open to Western influence, and ones that have insisted on their own autonomy. While she preferred “closed areas” due to the identity-creating power of art (see also Coomaraswamy), Vidales advocated a generation later for an opening to US artistic practices—an opening the critic hoped would lead to a revitalization of art in Colombia and an increased attention being paid to Colombian art, as part of an art understood as universal. This optimism about globalization is one that Vidales shares with a number of others, such as Zabel or, to a more limited extent, with Darabi. Critiques of humanism can be found from decolonial, feminist, and queer perspectives (Coomaraswamy, Sauzeau-Boetti, Singh, Lynne Tillman). This is a context in which representational or identity-centered arguments are often accompanied with the assertion of stigmatized or neglected categories—the artisanal, material, and spiritual (Coomaraswamy, Sauzeau-Boetti), the affective or the physical (Mudekereza, Raven, Tillman).

Art criticism’s mappings of the artistic field often come in the wake of wars and the formation of new political systems (Denegri, Lang, Sadek); here, art criticism is ascribed not only a documentary/archival role (Vardan Azatyan, Hakim, New Culture magazine, Sekula), but also a very diagnostic, politically orienting, or even world-changing one (Alexander Rodchenko, Mark Sinker, Sergei Tretyakov). This empowerment of the collective—against the grain of the humanist, Enlightenment notion of subject-creation through art—is a task frequently assigned not just to art, but also to art criticism: the latter would thus be capable of emphasizing the assembling power of art—its ability to bring people and concepts together—and its transcultural potential, but also its potential to create cultural, national, or political identities (Coomaraswamy, Denis Diderot, Fry, New Culture, Raven, Sauzeau-Boetti, Traba, Vidales) and to create networks (Alloway).

These notions and processes are often viewed critically, however. The social and economic conditions and exhibition politics under which art operates are analyzed from institutional-critical positions, as are the ways the various protagonists understand their own roles. Events behind the scenes are brought to light—how commissions are granted, for instance (Berta Zuckerkandl). Exclusions in the form of gatekeeeping, value-generating network creation (Claire Bishop, Masotta), and infrastructural constraints (Mudekereza) are addressed, as are race, gender, and class discriminations (D’Souza, Josephson, Peter Richter, Sinker, Singh) and questions of representation itself (Darabi, Rodschenko,Traba). Institutional issues are often spoken to in art criticism written by artists; these critiques provide a theoretical background to the artistic works of their authors, while at the same time explaining it, expanding upon it, defending it, or even undermining it (Masotta, Gilligan, Steyerl).

The translation of artistic issues and the strengthening of their impacts was already present as a concern in early art criticism (Diderot, Brentano/von Arnim) and is taken up anew and in different ways in the twentieth century (Barthes, Fry, Julius Meier-Graefe). Others set a different emphasis by observing where artists and critics share common strategies and alliances—whether shared concepts, values, and ideas (Sauzeau-Boetti, Sadek), comparable economic situations (Ponge), or the blurring of lines between roles with the aim of disrupting hierarchies. Some critics focus resolutely on addressing a broader public audience (D’Souza, Hakim, Lang, Tillman, Traba), something which depends not least on the publication media and also impacts their styles of writing. This also demonstrates how valuable art criticism is in discussions of social structure and urgent societal and political questions.

Styles and Modes of Writing

The question here is which manners, forms, genres, styles, and modes of writing art criticism can use to bring its interventions and its value to bear. All criticism is bound to the forms and media in which its descriptions appear,17 but criticism does not merely reconstruct its subject matter; it is rather the modes of representation, the styles, and the media that highlight particular aspects of the subject matter and the conditions surrounding it, placing it in a new light. Criticism always spotlights, frames, and illuminates its subject in a specific way; in doing so, it also creates visibility for the process of critiquing and the situation in which it takes place. Criticism thus implicitly or explicitly also addresses the techniques and processes of critical description; these are in turn participants in the constitution of the subject matter as it appears within critique. This means that when the mode of description changes, criticism’s subject matter changes, too.

By way of its subject matter alone, art criticism knows the power of representation, as one of its tasks is evidently to describe and examine that very power. One of this reader’s aims is to highlight the diversity of art-critical modes of description and/or representation and their effects; we thus asked the authors of the commentaries to speak to the peculiarities of the various styles and modes of writing they selected. According to Roland Barthes, these differ in the following ways:18 style is a “self-sufficient language”19 which, based on linguistic conventions and grammatical norms, unfurls from within the writer. Regarding the mode of writing—Barthes’s translators called this literary form—we speak rather of the relation between the written and the social; Barthes speaks of “literary language transformed by its social finality,”20 the “morality of form.”21 Art criticism refers to an artwork, to a materialized approach to the world that has taken form; and it addresses an audience. This means that art criticism is writing that refers to an outside in two ways, yet can be shaped by an author’s will to write in a particular style.

The relationship between self-sufficient modes of expression and reference to the subject matter, world, or society always varies in how it plays out. In the early days of art criticism around 1800, it was often understood as a space in which the artwork resonated (Diderot, Brentano/von Arnim); a notion that one hundred years later is taken up again in the specific literary form of Kunstschriftstellerei (Meier-Graefe), whose German appellation can only loosely be translated as “literary art writing”; but it is also deployed in critiques that understand form as a medium of communication (Coomaraswarmy, Fry). Here, the authors are concerned with amplifying the message hidden within the work of art, doing so via expression that is both linguistically adequate and conscious of form. This is proof at the same time of the author’s will to pursue style; of the author’s descriptive skill. Last but not least, a form of criticism that linguistically reinforces the qualities of an artistic work in this way also serves as a testament to the validity of the author’s own understanding of art; discussed in emphatic terms, the work demonstrates the impact art can have, with the impact corresponding to the critic’s own criteria (Diderot, Meier-Graefe). Another form of resonance is the recording of bodily, affective reactions to an artistic work; reactions that are then showcased as a factor within the critique (Barthes, Mudekereza, Raven, Richter, Tillman). Ponge, for his part, anthropomorphizes painting to highlight parallels in the material, social, and economic contingencies of criticism and its subject matter.

During the twentieth century, there emerged a demand to find (or invent) new modes of writing that would be adequate to developments in contemporary art, thus enabling art criticism to play a greater role in debates beyond art (Bataille, Raven, Sekula). This can come in the form of modes of writing not previously regarded as criticism, such as autofiction or fictional criticism (Sinker, Tillman); text/image constellations (Bataille, New Culture, Sekula); or unusual print type, via which the changes in criteria, argument, and modes of writing are also shown visually. Another tried and tested method is for the critic to write in voices other than their own. With his alter ego Mary Josephson, Brian O’Doherty exposes the patriarchal power structures of the art field. With Berta Zuckerkandl’s leak, it is not the critic herself who provides information; rather, it is letters sent by figures whose cultural policies are being denounced by their own writing.

Differing modes of writing are also conditioned by varied political contexts. In times of revolution and upheaval, art criticism can become a form of agitation, bringing art itself along with it in pursuit of shared political goals (Tretyakov). In political systems that make offensive interventions into the artistic field, smart language games can evade the censor, without abandoning the mission of criticism. Ultimately, and as previously outlined, the mode of writing in each form of art criticism is ultimately produced by its media and genres.

Genre and Media

Art critiques can diverge massively in style. They can be written dispassionately or vehemently, descriptively or as judgments, exuberantly or minimally, academically or lyrically. There are whole worlds between—for example—the passionate literary style of Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century, the consciously adopted first-person perspective of Lothar Lang in twentieth-century East Germany, and the matter-of-fact analyses of Patrick Mudekereza in the twenty-first century. Some authors are keen to distance themselves from the artists they write about, whereas others, like Viktor Hakim in Beirut, speak about them in more informal terms and call them by their first names.

New approaches to writing have continually been introduced and tested throughout the history of art criticism, with the differences of form being at times so pronounced that it pays to divide the texts into genres. Examples of this are numerous in this reader: the Yugoslavian critic Ješa Denegri chose the interview as a way to do formal justice to the diversity of art currents in Yugoslavia in 1989, both in one-on-one dialogue and in conversation with larger groups. In 1808, German poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim invented a fictitious dialogue in order to approximate a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Around a hundred years later, Zuckerkandl in Vienna got involved in a dispute about paintings Gustav Klimt had been commissioned to create by the city’s university; for this she chose the form of the leak, publishing excerpts from letters addressed from the ministry to Klimt and not intended for public consumption. Yet another hundred years later, Australian art critic Jennifer Higgie deployed the serial format to give visibility to women artists: on Instagram, she posts an image of a female artist every day, to an audience of 60,000 followers. Even the recommendations website Yelp has been used as a platform for art criticism.22

By looking at genre, it becomes possible to avoid the trench warfare in which different approaches to art criticism have been pitted against each other. One example of this being how value-apportioning art criticism was elevated to the status of art criticism’s definitive genre, with less normative approaches being interpreted as signs of decline.23 There is no doubt that the review is an important genre; it is represented here by a Julia Voss article on an exhibition by the painter Markus Lüpertz. Other genres still have value, however; in a catalogue text for the artist Bernard Réquichot, for example, Roland Barthes gave up on any form of distancing and instead sought forms of intense empathy in the work, body, and life of the artist. In this instance, we feel it makes sense to also designate catalogue texts as a possible form of art criticism. Often, these are bound too closely to requirements set by those commissioning them—galleries or museums—for them to count as art criticism; Barthes’s catalogue texts, however, went well beyond friendly, scholarly contemplation; in doing so, he created the genre of immersive, literary, bodily resonance. This is quite different to the genre of the chronicle as represented by the critic Hakim and his gesture of plain description, largely absent of empathy and value judgment.

The various genres and formats—interview, fictional dialogue, leaks, serial chronicles, catalogue texts, reviews—are closely interlinked with the platforms they appear on. The form is made possible by developments in the media landscape, from the emergence of magazines and daily newspapers to the mass media and social media. Each new medium opens possibilities that were not present before, thus also begetting new genres. To name another example from this reader: in the Netherlands, “Anonymous” (an unnamed female blogger) nestled herself exclusively in the comments section of articles published online, where she trolled against the poor representation of women. These interventions took place within the literary field, but could easily be transferred into the art field and have thus been included here. The expanded prospects of a “hypermediatized” cultural journalism are set out by Kenyan author Enos Nyamor.

A look further into the past shows that the media history of art criticism began unfolding long ago. The changing alliances that emerged in the wake of the varying forms of publication are also reflected in this reader. We begin with one of the founding figures of art criticism, Denis Diderot, who wrote his critiques on behalf of Friedrich Melchior Grimm and for a select, mostly courtly audience across Europe. He was guided in this by the notion that exhibitions, like theater, served to educate the people and nurture good citizens.24 It was no longer members of art academies and rather laypersons, like Diderot himself, who selected the criteria of discernment and judgment. The example of art would thus be used as a means of training critical thinking and public debate. This is an idea that also appears in the bourgeois salon culture that emerged around 1800, modeled on the courtly culture.25 Their mouthpieces were journals and newspapers such as the Berliner Abendblätter that Bretano and von Arnim wrote for, and later the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, in which texts by Zuckerkandl appeared. Fin-de-siècle art critics had other organs of publication at their disposal, from art trade catalogues to specialist art journals.26

The so-called Kunstschriftsteller*innen—art writers of a more literary bent—are a consequence of this publishing boom, which also included art books issued in large editions. The excerpt from The Indian Craftsman by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy means that academic publishing as a possible medium of art criticism is also represented in the reader.

Further stages come into play over the course of the twentieth century. The fact that artworks can now be easily and affordably reproduced in high quality has spawned an international glut of new, specialist art magazines with various aims, from entertainment to scholarly debate. The latter has long been typified by Artforum, founded in 1962 and the journal in which Claire Bishop’s essay originally appeared.

Art critics’ careers can also be boosted by visual media like television, as with Argentine critic Marta Traba. The explosion of media in which art is critiqued or at the very least reported on was recounted a few years ago on the basis of the Documenta exhibition series, founded in 1955 in Kassel. By the time Okwui Enwezor curated the eleventh edition of Documenta in 2002, 15,000 journalists from Germany and around the world were accredited to cover the event.27 Those keen to take the trouble to index these journalists’ pieces by media and genre would have had much material to discover.

The transitions between old and new media are fluid at times; almost all publications that began in analogue form now also have digital versions. Still, there are a number of differences that must be sketched out, at least in brief. With digitization and social media, voices previously unable to get past the editorial departments of printed publications are now able to have their say. This has led to debates previously pushed to the margins of art criticism being returned back to the center. Founded in 2009, the online art magazine Hyperallergic offers a daily-updated and explicitly politically engaged art criticism that tackles issues of race, gender, and classism as a matter of course. Generally, it can be said that digitization has brought with it a widespread politicization of art criticism. Activism and art criticism are also moving closer together.28 Given these developments, it seems to us all the more necessary to examine to what extent and for which reasons the various genres can be regarded as art criticism.

The Art Market and Networks

At an art criticism conference, Jörg Heiser spoke of the “sink-or-swim” strategy that accompanies gentrification. People who work in the “worst-paid artistic fields,” he claimed, “are compelled to keep the greatest possible number of fields of activity open and to slip into changing roles.”29 This pressure clearly also weighs on art criticism. Cities with particularly high densities of art institutions are often particularly expensive; rents in many instances have risen astronomically in recent years, while the fees paid to art critics have continued to fall. With the exception of the small number of editors on long-term contracts, very few people can make a living by writing about art. Art historians have often sprung into this gap, teaching at universities in the daytime and moonlighting as writers for art magazines. This necessarily leads to academization of art criticism, both in its style and in its content.30

There are also many freelancers who curate in galleries, museums, or at biennials, while writing art criticism at the same time. According to one widespread view, these many subordinations and precarious relations have made art criticism less polemic, less up for the fight. The texts in our reader shed a different light on the situation. Critics like Lawrence Alloway have taken networks as the subject matter of their writing, addressing at the same time their own entanglements within them. Other critics like Marta Traba, Annemarie Sauzeau-Boetti, and Arlene Raven call for nothing less than the formation of new networks or collectives, allowing them to become more assertive, more vocal, or more just. Finally, there are also tactics in which the author’s own identity is discarded; this can be read as a creative means of escaping the constraints of subjugation. Within our reader, the alter ego Mary Josephson and Anonymous could be cited as examples of this.

Just a few years ago, a foreword to an art criticism essay would have been obliged to include a statement on how collectors’ strong financial capital had long since replaced the power of critics’ opinions. A new generation of collectors had been described as mega-collectors, their emergence coming hand-in-hand with an increasing number of private museums. The intensive economization of the art field and the rise of art as an asset class have been described many times.31 Nevertheless, the situation has developed in an unexpected manner: on the one hand, because the relation between art and money has been anything but a niche topic, having been set out and analyzed in many ways by Bishop and other writers. The need for business models and art production to be examined in tandem is shown with great humor, via the example of the Japanese scholar Yuriko Furuhata.

On the other hand, we have witnessed how trustees at large museums have been compelled to resign and how institutions have refused to accept donations due to overwhelming criticism. Without the internet and activists’ digital platforms, these phenomena would be inconceivable. These activisms are accompanied by an art criticism that, taking its cure from institutional critique, examines economic relations and connections in far greater detail than in previous decades. In this reader, Gilligan elaborates on what the cultural logic of financialization means for art production, while D’Souza examines economic inequalities and the degree to which institutions practice what they preach.

As comprehensive as it has become, this reader is still pieced together from fragments of a multifaceted phenomenon. In constellation, however, we hope that they still shed some light on the value of art criticism, both within and beyond the artistic field.

1Ruth Sonderegger, Vom Leben der Kritik: Kritische Praktiken – und die Notwendigkeit ihrer geopolitischen Situierung (Vienna, 2019).

2“Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” October 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 200–28. The discussion featured George Baker, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Andrea Fraser, David Joselit, Rosalind Krauss, James Meyer, John Miller, Helen Molesworth, and Robert Storr.

3In The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York, 2005), Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello go even further in speaking of the recuperation of all critical enterprises within the artistic field. A differing perspective can be found in Helmut Draxler, Gefährliche Substanzen: Zum Verhältnis von Kritik und Kunst (Berlin, 2007).

4See Irit Rogoff, “From Criticism to Critique to Criticality,” transversal (January 2003), https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en (accessed August 18, 2021).

5See Sonderegger 2019 (see note 1); Katy Deepwell, New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester and New York 1995); and Deepwell, ed., Art Criticism and Africa (London, 1998).

6See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Lawrence Grossberg et al., eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 1988), pp. 271–313.

7See Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke, The Value of Critique: Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour (Frankfurt am Main, 2019).

8Sabeth Buchmann and Isabelle Graw, “Kritik der Kunstkritik,” Texte zur Kunst 113 (March 2019), pp. 33–52.

9See, for example, Anneka Lenssen et al., eds., Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York, 2018).

10The two publication platforms Contemporary And and Contemporary And América Latina launched in 2013 and 2018 respectively; they are accessible at https://contemporaryand.com/ and https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/.

11See Armen Avanessian et al., eds., Form: Zwischen Ästhetik und künstlerischer Praxis (Zurich and Berlin, 2009).

12Likewise relevant is Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Göttingen, 1974).

13As examples of the recent glut of studies, see Christian Kravagna, Transmoderne: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts (Berlin, 2017); Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham and London, 2015). On historic conceptions and the problematic nature thereof, see Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen: “Weltkunst” und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne, (Berlin, 2015).

14See “Round Table,” October 100.

15See Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 78.1 (2015) on “Der Ort der Kunstkritik in der Kunstgeschichte” (art criticism’s location in art history).

16See, for example, Melina Kervandjian and Héctor Olea, eds., Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino? (London and New Haven, 2012), which appeared as part of Yale University Press’s Critical Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art series.

17See Sami Khatib et al., eds., Critique: The Stakes of Form (Berlin and Zurich, 2020).

18See Roland Barthes, “What Is Writing?,” in Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston, 1985), pp. 9–18.

19Ibid., p. 10.

20Ibid., p. 14.

21Ibid., p. 15.

22In 2014, Brian Droitcour briefly used Yelp, a platform typically used for rating restaurants and shops, as a home for pithy critiques of museum exhibitions in New York. Droitcour is now an editor at Art in America.

23See James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism (Chicago, 2003).

24Eva Kernbauer, Der Platz des Publikums: Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen, 2011)

25Richard Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism: from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford, 1993); overviews of the history of art criticism can be found in Kerr Houston, An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices (Boston, 2013); Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism, (New York, 1936); and Gérard-Georges Lémaire, Histoire de la critique d’art (Paris, 2018).

26On the significance of art criticism in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Cynthia A. White and Harrison C. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York, 1965).

27See Jasmin Schülke and Jürgen Wilke, “Multiple Medialisierung: Eine Fallstudie zur Kasseler documenta (1955–2007),” M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 59 (2011), https://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634x-2011-2-235 (accessed August 23, 2021).

28Julia Voss and Norman L. Kleeblatt, “Art, Criticism, and Institution,” in Danièle Perrier, ed., Art Criticism in Times of Populism and Nationalism: Proceedings of the 52ndInternational AICA Congress, Cologne/Berlin 1–7 October 2019, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2021, pp. 187–202.

29Jörg Heiser, “Strategischer Multi-Optionalismus: Untiefen eines postkritischen Konzepts,” in Ines Kleesattel and Pablo Müller, eds., The Future Is Unwritten: Position und Politik kunstkritischer Praxis (Zurich, 2018).

30On the relationship between art criticism and university art history departments, see the spirited early plea made by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, “Wie werde ich ein Kunstkritiker,” in Ruperto Carola: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der Freunde der Studentenschaft der Universität Heidelberg 13 (1961), no. 29, pp. 107–111.

31There is an enormous range of literature on this. See, for example, Heike Munder and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Das Kunstfeld: Eine Studie über Akteure und Institutionen der zeitgenössischen Kunst, (Zurich, 2011); Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2011); and Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21stCentury (London, 2017).

Passion, Performance, and Soberness:

Denis Diderot

Beate Söntgen

The Salons written by Denis Diderot (1713–84) are considered to be founding texts of modern art criticism. He wrote them on behalf of Friedrich Melchior Grimm for his publication Corréspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, a handwritten magazine that was distributed to a select circle throughout Europe by diplomatic post in order to evade censorship. His writings were detailed commentaries on the Salons, the yearly exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) from 1665 onward, which were held in the Louvre’s Grande Galérie starting in 1699. Diderot’s art criticism represented only a small part of his work; he also wrote novels and stories, as well as dramatic theory and stage works. With Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, he organized and authored the Encyclopédie. His conviction that empirical and rational observation should be accompanied by a sensual approach to the world that includes perception can be found in all of his writing, which distinguishes itself through its brilliantly rhetorical approach.

Between 1759 and 1781, Diderot wrote a total of nine articles under the title “Salons”; the densest are those from the seventeen-sixties. The fact that Diderot did not have the works in front of him while writing led to some imprecision. The form was not that of today’s art criticism, which is written for a large and anonymous newspaper audience. His readership was Europe’s political and intellectual elite, who were collectors as well, like Catherine II and Friedrich the Great. Diderot did not hesitate to recommend his most beloved artists to potential collectors.

Diderot himself was on a threshold. While coming from a culture of the emphatic contemplation of paintings, he was committed to the Enlightenment agenda of critical, distanced reflection. In his Salons, forms of passionate involvement with the subject are interwoven with cool observation, self-reflexively illuminating both the artists’ and his own practice. Diderot advocated for a kind of painting that would, like theater, portray everyday bourgeois life as an example, because the representation of what is familiar to the viewer touches them more profoundly and thus can better instruct them.

One of Diderot’s distinctive characteristics is the relationship of his writing style to the representations of the images he critiques. His writing adapts to what is being portrayed. His linguistic expressions evoke the themes, structures, and effects of the images in question, accentuating their particularities. The images thus become the expressive proof of Diderot’s theories of representation. It was in this way that Diderot’s impassioned descriptions of Jean-Baptiste Greuze brought out the emotionality of the viewer that he demanded, while showing how this was used for “moral education.” In the Salons on Chardin, however, a different, dispassionate speech oriented toward techniques of painting prevails, in which sociological aspects of art such as studio know-how and the conditions of production and exhibition become relevant. The focus here is on paint instead of subject matter, and new optical discoveries amalgamate with topoi from classical art literature, such as proximity to nature and vitality.

For Diderot, art criticism is not only the passionate and considered writing about an object. In his texts, which are arranged like theatrical scenes, the emotional entanglements in the image are presented just as convincingly as the reflexive refractions when passing judgment. Diderot articulates contradictions in imaginary dialogues, and in monologues he observes his own emotional reactions. The salons are a form of performative critique that shows itself and makes its methods transparent. To this effect, they conform to an ideal of self-reflexivity as a characteristic of modern culture, but without excluding sensual and even physical implementations of aesthetic experience and the writing on them.

There are three particular qualities in these texts that for me constitute an inspiring model for contemporary writing on art: First, the polyphony with which Diderot multiplies the perspectives on a particular work; second, his regard for the corporal in his reflection and writing; and third, his knowledge that the form of critique plays a role in the constitution of its object.

Essays on Painting

Denis Diderot

from the Salon of 1763: Jean-Baptiste Greuze

This Greuze here is really my kind of person.…

Most of all, I like the genre. It is moral painting. What, has not the paintbrush been devoted long enough to debauchery and vice? Should we not be content to finally see it compete with verse drama to touch us, to teach us, to correct us, to invite us to be virtuous? Have courage, my friend Greuze! Moralize in painting, and do so always. When you are about to leave this life, there will not be a single one of your compositions that you will not be able to recall with pleasure. For were you not at the side of this young girl who, gazing at the head of your Paralytic, cried out with a delightful vivacity Oh, my Lord, how he touches me; but if I look upon him again, I believe I will cry; if only this young girl were mine! I would have recognized her by this wave of emotion. When I saw this eloquent and pitiful old man, I felt, like her, my soul becoming tender and tears ready to fall from my eyes….

Everything is related to the main figure and what is being done in the present moment, and what was done in the previous moment.…

From the top to the bottom, there is nothing that does not evoke the pity felt for the old man.

There is a large sheet hanging on a rope, drying. This sheet has been very well conceived, for the subject of the painting and for the effect of the art. One suspects that the painter was quite deliberate in painting it with such broad dimensions.

Everyone present has precisely the degree of purpose that corresponds to their age and character. The number of figures gathered in a relatively small space is very large; however, they are present without confusion, because this master excels above all in ordering his scene. The color of the flesh is true. The fabrics are well cared for. There is no unease of movement. Each person is focused on what they are doing. The youngest of the children are cheery, because they have not yet reached the age when one feels. The shared feeling of sadness among the older ones is expressed very powerfully. The son-in-law seems to be the most affected, as it is to him that the patient addresses his speech and his gaze. The married girl seems to listen with pleasure rather than pain. If not extinguished, the attention of the old mother is at least desensitized; and that is entirely natural. Jam proximus ardet Ucalegon (“Close by, Ucalegon’s house is already burning”—Virgil, Aeneid). She can no longer promise herself any consolation other than the same tenderness from her children, for a time not far away. And then comes the age that hardens the fibers, dries out the soul.

Some say that the paralytic is leaned too far back, that it is impossible to eat in this position.

He does not eat, he speaks, and one would be ready to raise up his head.

They say it was his daughter’s duty to present him with food, and his son-in-law’s to raise his head and pillow, because skill is asked of one and strength of the other. This observation is not so well founded as it seems at first. The painter wanted his paralytic to receive aid marked by the one he was least entitled to expect it from. This justifies the good choice he made in favor of the girl; it is the real cause of the tenderness on her face, her gaze, and of the speech he addresses to her. Displacing this figure would have meant changing the subject of the painting. To put the girl in the son-in-law’s place would have been to overthrow the whole composition: there would have been four women’s heads in a row, and the succession of all these heads would have been unbearable.…

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Paralytic (Filial Piety), 1763

It is said that this artist lacks fertility; and that all the heads of this scene are the same as those of his painting The Village Bride, and those of his The Village Bride the same as those of his Peasant Reading to His Children.…

If (the artist) encounters a head that strikes him, he will get down on bended knees before the owner of this head to lure them into his studio. He observes constantly, in the streets, in the churches, in the markets, in shows, on walks, in public meetings. When he meditates on a subject, he obsesses over it, follows it everywhere. His very character suffers as a result. He takes his character from his painting; he becomes brusque, sweet, subtle, caustic, gallant, sad, cheerful, cold, hot, serious or crazy, depending on the thing he projects.…

Ah, Monsieur Greuze, that you are different from yourself, when it is tenderness or purpose that guides your brush. Paint your wife, your mistress, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; the others, however, I advise you to send back to Roslin or Michel Van Loo.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Girl with Dead Canary, 1765

from the Salon of 1765: Jean-Baptiste Greuze

What a pretty elegy! What a pretty poem! What a fine idyll Gessner1 would make of it! It could be a vignette drawn from this poet’s work.

A delicious painting, the most attractive and perhaps the most interesting in the Salon. She faces us, her head rests on her left hand. The dead bird lied on top of the cage, its head hanging down, its wings limp, its feet in the air. How natural her pose! How beautiful her head! How elegantly her hair is arranged! How expressive her face! Her pain is profound, she feels the full brunt of misfortune, she’s consumed by it. What a pretty catafalque the cage makes. How graceful is the garland of greenery that winds around it!

Oh, what a beautiful hand! What a beautiful hand! What a beautiful arm! Note the truthful detailing of these fingers, and these dimples, and this softness, and the reddish cast resulting from the pressure of the head against these delicate fingers, and the charm of it all. One would approach the hand to kiss it, if one didn’t respect this child and her suffering. Everything about her enchants, including the fall of her clothing, how beautiful the shawl is draped! How light and supple it is! When one first perceives this painting, one says: Delicious! If one pauses before it or comes back to it, one cries out: Delicious! Delicious! Soon one is surprised to find oneself conversing with this child and consoling her. This is so true, that I’ll recount some of the remarks I’ve made to her on different occasions.