Hart 3002: Reading the Contemporary Marissa Venter 390298 Has big money replaced the pundit as the

true authority in the art world? In this essay I will attempt to show how money has replaced the critic as the authority of the art world by looking at the changes, commercially and critically, in the Art Magazine and Journal from its beginnings up to today. In order to fully understand the state that art magazines and criticism are in today I will take a concise look at the history of art criticism with Artforum as a case study to show how the language of criticism became a problem long before the 21st century. I will compare the problems critics had in the 60s to the difficulties that are experienced today by looking at some informed opinions on leading national and international contemporary art magazines. One of the first noted art magazines to impact the art world with real criticism was Artforum founded in 1962. In the words of Sarah Thornton: Artforum is to art what Vogue is to fashion and Rolling Stone was to rock and roll (Thornton, 2009: 145). 1962 was the same year that the notorious critic Clement Greenberg released his collection of essays named Art and Culture. It was after the release of these essays that Greenbergs dominant thoughts on art worked their way into the next generation of artists and critics. Greenberg won over many young critics, first Michael Fried and Barbara Rose then Rosalind Krauss. Collectively they were known as the Greenbergers. The Greenbergers wrote for Artforum and so Greenberg himself wasnt actively present in the magazine (Foster: Newman, 2001: 143). In his 1967 essay Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum) Fried criticized minimalist art, or as he called it literalist art, for its inherent theatricality. He argues that the modernist arts, namely painting and sculpture, were dependant on their ability to defeat theatre for their continued existence (Battock: Fried, 1995: 116-140). An example of the power such critical writing had on artists can be seen by the impact Greenberg had on discovering Jackson Pollock by writing him into the publics eye. According to Rory Bester this remains an astounding example of the art critics ability to pre-write art history (Bester, 2007: 58). Their criticism appeared so powerful because it was practical and verifiable, but to its opponents it appeared presumptuous because they were putting over the impression that they were writing the final draft of history as it happened (Foster: Newman, 2001: 143). Greenbergs system was also very hard to argue with because when he was challenged on questions of history he would defend his critique on a matter of taste, and when disputed on taste he would defend it with history (Foster: Newman, 2001: 143). By the mid-sixties Greenberg was, according to Amy Newman, betting on the wrong ponies and many Artforum writers were trying to update and outflank him (Foster: Newman, 2001: 143). In Artforum there was a sense of sibling rivalry within the publication. On the one side were modernist critics like Fried and on the other were the new breed of artist-critics like Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Carl Andre who transgressed modernist mediums in the creation

of objects that were neither painting nor sculpture. These artists started writing seminal essays on their own work (Foster: Newman, 2001: 143). The Greenbergers also started breaking away from the orthodoxy of abstract expressionism one by one. Krauss wrote in 1972, what is largely considered her most seminal essay, A View of Modernism, in which she began to criticize Greenbergian art criticism for largely ignoring content and feeling (http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/kraussr.htm). Art criticism was already in a predicament with the birth of Minimalism because not only were artists critiquing their own work but there was also a major shift in artistic practice. Greenberg and the Greenbergers dreaded its birth because they knew that by leading art beyond the proper mediums of paint and sculpture it might lead art into a realm beyond modernist critique. Magazines like Artforum resisted this problem of writing on new work through a hyperrefinement of institutional forms like modernist painting. (Foster: Newman, 2001: 148). In other words they stuck to writing about the known institutional forms of painting and sculpture and the essence of modernist painting as defined by Greenberg in his essay Challenging Art. Some writers attempted to write about the materiality of the new substances and processes and the actuality of the artists body and new sites of work. They wanted to remotivate and reground the new art forms in order to make the meaning more clear to the public audience. Ironically the effect was opposite and instead they made art seem more subjective, rarefied, and incomprehensible. For Fried the ironic situation demonstrated perfectly that of the modernist condition (Foster: Newman, 2001: 149), irony being a big part of Minimalist Art. According to Rose they assert their own irony by asserting their functionlessness (Battock: Rose, 1995: 294). In short the problem with the language of criticism was this: It was founded by great critics of the modernist era such as Greenberg in order to critique only the purest art forms namely painting and sculpture. But with the birth of many new modernist art forms; some that dont even have colour, line or quality of paint to bring into visual references; the way of talking about art at the time was insufficient. Rose confirmed this notion in her essay ABC Art published in the October 1965 issue of Art in America by saying that in the case of Abstract Expressionism, being critical means only to be critical of the formal premises of color, composition, scale, format and execution (Battock: Rose, 1995: 274-297). She explains that these premises are adequate when explaining the evolution of Kenneth Nolands work for example, but they do not fully suffice to describe the reaction of these new minimalist artists. The modernist critics continued struggling to critique art forms like conceptual, land and performance art, which had none of the visual references they were use to. So instead of critiquing they tried to find a way to explain the works (Battock: Rose, 1995: 274-297) Today critics have been multiplied across many different disciplines and we still find ourselves in the repercussion of a capricious expanded field that could sometimes seem so vital but could also just as easily be seen as trigger to the inevitable deterioration of art criticism (Foster: Newman, 2001: 149). Today

critics are never mainly critics. They are also artists, journalists, curators and art historians to name but a few. The chair of The School of Visual Arts in New York, David Levi Strauss, stresses the fact that critics can no longer afford to be specialists and therefore the school now offers a critical writing course together with the visual arts course in order to better the critical writing standards of our time. The course creates a basis for historical writing, essays and seminar papers as well as shorter reviews. The program also has a special emphasis on the history and future of the image. The critics of tomorrow must study images in all of their manifestations in order to better understand how we are subject to them (Strauss, 2011) Artforum today prides itself in being the art world leader. Although ArtNews and Art in America have higher circulations, Artforum considers itself the world leader due to its professional readership. The editor in chief, Tim Griffin, has a belief that Art is an intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual endeavor and says If you cant have intellectual dialogue in an art magazine, then where in the world are you going to have it? (Thornton. 2009: 154) Artforum may have intellectual writers, but as youll discover by reading Seven days in the Art World, between the publisher and the 16-person-strong editorial team no one has any fine arts or art history training most studied English literature. This becomes a problem because writers without a background in the history of art are trying to write critically about todays art. They may have the knowledge to write in a critical language but is that enough? How can a writer form an opinion on something new or contemporary if they dont have the history to give them any form of context? Is it not important to know where something has come from before you can make a well-informed opinion on where it is going? The art historian, Tom McDonough, says that to analyze complex ideas you need to have a complex language. He says that the justification for using all that footnoted, highfalutin claptrap as he calls it, is to perform a set of competencies in other words they are assigning themselves a peer group by using a specific language (Thornton. 2009: 170). This is where the problem arises. Artforum (or the people that write for Artforum) believes itself to be highly intellectual and prides itself on that, but when speaking to McDonough, we uncover that the opinions of intellectuals differ. McDonough finds that Artforum has developed a foreseeable formula. For him Artforum has become nothing more than a rapid turnover of Top Ten lists and cycles of obsolescent previews. The worst thing about Artforum is that it doesnt offer any real debate or controversy anymore. Its become a comfortable world in which people basically agree with one another. For McDonough this is the saddest part, the concept of a forum a public sphere in which ideas can be discussed has disappeared (Thornton. 2009: 170). Many critical writers feel the same as McDonough when it comes todays art criticism. David Hickey and Hal Foster have variously proclaimed its decline in the US (OToole. 2009: 2). In South Africa a Sunday Times columnist Barry Ronge also declared criticism to have become a fading flower. According to Ronge critical writing has become namby-pamby because it is so evasive when

expressing negative opinions and so politically correct that it has lost most of its power and impact. Ironically, while most academics lament the state of what art criticism has become, the majority of art magazines still declare their main goal to be art criticism. In 1976 the British art journal Studio International did a survey of 68 contemporary art magazines to get an insight in to their inner workings, motivations and perhaps through that the entire practice. In 2006 Frieze, a contemporary art magazine re-conducted the same survey with 31 publications. Of the 31 publications invited to respond, 6 declined. 18 of the publications in the 2006 conduction said that the magazines first priority was art criticism (Cork, 2006: 238 249). So while magazines are firmly under the impression that they are forwarding art criticism, academics are mourning its degradation. In Art South Africa the content is solicited from specialist writers according to its website. Previous issues have featured profiles by engaged art critics such as Ivor Powell and Hazel Friedman, as well as thoughtful academic writing by the likes of Colin Richards and Thembinkosi Goniwe (OToole, www.artsouthafrica.com). One would think that having specialist academic writers would amount to good criticism, but according to Sean OToole (the previous publishing editor of Art South Africa) the most frequents comments he hears on South African criticism is that it has become mawkish, tame, insipid, promotional, unsophisticated and dumb. On the other hand, he also states some readers are of the opinion that the publication is turgid and incomprehensible (OToole, 2009: 4). An interesting fact to keep in mind is that OToole himself has no fine art or art history training but he has become one of South Africas most pivotal writers. This may be because he has been in the field for quite some time and he has seen and visited many exhibitions and museums that give him a good backdrop of knowledge about the art world. He has the ability to view works in different, unexpected ways and that gives him the edge that makes a good critic. It would appear that critical writing has somehow bordered itself into being too academic for some readers and not sophisticated enough for others almost like its trying to be elitist and all encompassing at the same time. After saying that there are no serious art magazines, David Hickey explained in an interview with The Believer (a US literary magazine) that weve gone from a totally academicized art world to a totally commercialized art world in the span of twenty years. This is made very clear when you compare advertising in todays art magazines with leading art magazines in the late 1970s. In the 1976 Studio International survey almost 20% of the responding magazines overtly stated that they didnt take advertising (Bell, 2006: 191). Whereas only 1 publication (3%) from the 2006 conduction of the survey didnt take advertising (Cork, 2006: 238 249). Advertising revenue has become essential to the funding of publications. In her Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton expresses her difficulty in trying to flick to 1000 Words a regular column in Artforum written by an artist on their own work due to all the advertisements in the magazine (Thornton, 2009: 146).

Upon writing about Art South Africa the first fact that previous editor Sean OToole unambiguously states is that Art South Africa is a non-affiliated and independently published magazine that relies solely on advertising and retail sales (of which there have never been more than 2000 copies during a quarterly shelf-life) for its subsistence (OToole, 2009: 4). On its webpage Art South Africa proclaims that a maximum of 30% of each issue is allocated to advertising space. In the newest issue of Art South Africa (Vol09Issue03Autumn2011) 32 of 84 pages are covered in advertisements that means that 40% of the magazine consists of just advertising. The advertisements in art journals and magazines are art related and mostly advertise galleries and exhibition openings. This evokes the idea that art information has become more important than art criticism. Advertising may not directly compromise content when paging through the magazine but indirectly the time spent by the team on issues of advertising could be spent more productively on the quality of editorial content of the magazine. The most interesting about these statistics is that while advertising space has grown in magazines (therefore giving the publications more income), the critical writers are still being paid minimally. The Greenbergian critics were writing for a reputation rather than a living (Thornton, 2009: 159). Perhaps that is the reason why pure critical writers have become extinct. In adding to a quote from Joan Stocks Are Critics Useful (Bester, 2007: 58) Good critics of art are a rare breed, probably due to the fact that criticism causes enemies and few people are sure enough to embark upon a course of almost chronic unpopularity and starve to death in order to do so. To tie up all the loose strings of information Ive bombarded you with I will restate the quote by Dave Hickey There are no serious art magazines. In twenty years weve gone from a totally academicized art world to a totally commercialized art world This statement may not seem controversial or even important but in truth it summarizes the endemic problem that contemporary art faces today. If critical writing to a very high extent pre-writes the pages of art-history, and magazines and art journals are seen to be at the front line of critical writing today, what kind of history are we leaving behind? In that I leave you with my opening question from Adrian Searle; Has big money replaced the pundit as the true authority in the art world? (Searle, 2008: p8)

Reference list: 1) Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World. Granta Publications: London 2009 2) Hal Foster Review 2001: Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 19621974, Soho Press: New York, 2000 3) Gregory Battock, Minimal Art a critical anthology. University of California Press Ltd: England 1995. 4) Rory Bester, Posh White Writing. Art South Africa Vol06Issue02Summer2007 5) http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/kraussr.htm 6) David Levi Strauss, 2011, http://artcriticism.sva.edu/?page_id=49 7) Sean OToole, A blind mans Stick, 2009 8) Richard Cork, Periodical Table Studio International Survey reconducted by Frieze Magazine, 2006 9) Sean OToole, www.artsouthafrica.com/about, 2009 10) Eugenia Bell, Collected Writings, Frieze: June-July-August 2006