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Why Art Criticism?
Soentgen/Voss_Aufbau.indd 1
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Why Art Criticism?
A Reader
Eds. Beate Söntgen
and Julia Voss
Soentgen/Voss_Aufbau.indd 2-3
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Commentary
8
Foreword
10
Introduction
24
Commentary
Source Text
Passion, Performance
and Soberness
beate söntgen
denis diderot
Essays on Painting
34 In Conversation
johannes grave
heinrich von kleist
Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape
Clemens Brentano , Achim von Arnim
In Front of a Friedrich Seascape
with Capuchin Monk
42 Emotional Collectivities
julius meier-graefe
stephanie marchal
Fellows in Reality
46 The Leak
julia voss
52 Crafts and the Spiritual
monica juneja
62 Practical Formalist
beate söntgen
berta zuckerkandl
The Klimt Affair
84 Snapshot
margarete vöhringer
90 Decomposition
malte rauch
96 Decolonizing Art History
ananda k. coomaraswamy
110 Advocating the Collective
camilo sarmiento jaramillo
alexander rodchenko
For the Snapshot
ananda k. coomaraswamy
The Indian Craftsman
roger fry
The Futurists
The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence
Alma Tadema, O. M.
Independent Gallery: Vanessa Bell
and Othon Friesz
72 Agitation
sergei tretyakov
valerija kuzema
The Work of Viktor Palmov
Photo-Notes
Soentgen/Voss_Aufbau.indd 4-5
georges bataille
Critiques
parul dave mukherji
Why Exhibit Works of Art?
luis vidales
The Aesthetic of Our Time
Colombian Painting
119 Materialism and Proximity
isabelle graw
Source Text
francis ponge
Note on the Hostages,
Paintings by Fautrier
132 Censorship and the Authorial “I”
l othar lang
valerie hortolani and
Annotations on Painting in Leipzig,
valerija kuzema
with an Update on Tübke
Hermann Glöckner
The Hans Grundig Exhibition, 1973
Harald Metzkes at the National Gallery, 1978
144 Trespasser of Gatekeeping
oscar masotta
juli carson
I Committed a Happening
158 Embedded Chronicler
victor hakim
monique bellan
The Artistic and Literary Life
Reviews from La Revue du Liban
et de l’Orient Arabe
165 Undisciplined
peter gorsen
thorsten schneider
Prolegomena to a Hedonistic
Enlightenment
176 In Drag
mary josephson
astrid mania
Warhol: The Medium as Cultural Artifact
187 Self-Reflective Networker
lawrence alloway
beatrice von bismarck
Network: The Art World Described
as a System
199 Vulnerability and Resistance
marta traba
florencia malbrán Two Decades of Vulnerability in
Latin American Visual Arts 1950/1970
210 Fellow-Feeling
roland barthes
sarah wilson
Réquichot and His Body
223 Documentarian in Image and Text allan sekula
michael f. zimmermann
On the Invention of Photographic Meaning
236 Deculturization
annemarie sauzeau-boetti
sabeth buchmann
Negative Capability as Practice
in Women’s Art
243 Coming Together
bob bennett
azu nwagbogu
Architecture and Environmental Designs
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Commentary
Source Text
249 Gathering Voices,
arlene raven
Feeling Relations
Two Lines of Sight and an Unexpected
oona lochner Connection: Helen Mayer Harrison
and Newton Harrison
266 Drawing Another Line
maja and reuben fowkes
interviewed by ervin dubrovi
A New Turnaround
276 Chronopolitical Intervention
mark sinker
ana teixeira pinto
Loving the Alien in Advance of the Landing
284 Fiction Writer
lynne tillman
isabel mehl
Madame Realism’s Diary:
The Matisse Pages
291 Criteria Against All Odds
stefan germer
peter geimer
How Do I Find My Way Out of This
Labyrinth? On the Necessity and
Impossibility of Criteria for Judging
Contemporary Art
302 Decentering
igor zabel
maja and reuben fowkes
The Soil in Which Art Grows
Greetings from the Provinces
309 Tactics of Alienation
walid sadek
ghalya saadawi
From Excavation to Dispersion:
Configurations of Installation Art
in Post-War Lebanon
324 Historiography
vardan azatyan
angela harutyunyan
Toward a Dilemmatic Archive:
Historicizing Contemporary Art
in Armenia
338 Hatchet Job
julia voss
wolfgang kemp
What World Does this Prince Want to Rule?
345 Bridging Borders
helia darabi
anita hosseini Found in Translation: Exile as a Productive
Experience in the Work of Iranian Artists
Dispatch: Tehran
357 Through the Digital
hito steyerl
Looking Glass
Politics of Art: Contemporary Art
ying sze Pek and the Transition to Post-Democracy
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Commentary
Source Text
365 The Cultural Logic
melanie gilligan
of Financialization The Beggar’s Pantomine:
holger kuhn
Performance and its Appropriations
377 Camp and Credit Cards
takashi kashima
yuriko furuhata
This Excess Called Lassen:
What Is it
That Art History Cannot Write?
386 Nearly Unbiased
patrick mudekeraza
julia grosse
Homage: Djilatendo Remixing Africa,
Again
Wolfgang Tillmans at the Échangeur
398 Retroactivity
peter richter
andreas beyer
Male Morals
405 Troll
femke van heerikhuizen
Anonymous (Reader Laureate)
Through My Reading Glasses
miriam rasch
415 Queering
adwait singh
rebecca john
Staying With the Sirens.
On the Resilience of the Past
Cracks in the Wall
Into the Light
428 Culture and Capital
claire bishop
Palace in Plunderland:
Claire Bishop on the Shed
438 Merging
enos nyamor
yvette mutumba
In a Hypermediatized World.
Visions of Cultural Journalism.
444 Follow the Money
aruna d’souza
david mielecke
Isaac Julien
Wendy Red Star
Marking Time
455 The Series
@jennifer_higgie
julia voss
Instagram, March 12, 2021
458
460
xxx
xxx
464
Biographies
Bibliography
Index
Credits
Colophon
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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 lends such form to the phenomenon of art criticism via critical
exercises and practices. Forty-three 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 studies pedagogy and as a suggestion
or even possible model for 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—Kulturen der Kritik: Formen, Medien, Effekte (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,
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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 to engage
with 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, Tiziana Laudato, Francis Riddle, Matthew James
Scown, and Katherin 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 Behrend, Marie
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
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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
always 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
1 Ruth 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.
3 In The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York, 2005), Luc Boltansky 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).
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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, moreover, have
literary pretensions that compete with art and seek to seduce through
language. Criticism 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
4 See Irit Rogoff, “From Criticism to Critique to Criticality,” transversal (January 2003),
https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en (accessed August 18, 2021).
5 See 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).
6 See 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.
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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 & 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
7 See Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke, The Value of Critique: Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour (Frankfurt am Main, 2019).
8 Sabeth Buchmann and Isabelle Graw, “Kritik der Kunstkritik,” Texte zur Kunst 113
(March 2019), pp. 33–52.
9 See Anneka Lenssen et al., eds., Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New
York, 2018).
10 The two publication platforms Contemporary & and Contemporary & América Latina
launched in 2013 and 2018 respectively; they are accessible at https://contemporaryand.
com/ and https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/.
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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.
11 See Armen Avanessian et al., eds., Form: Zwischen Ästhetik und künstlerischer Praxis
(Zürich and Berlin, 2009).
12 Likewise relevant is Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Göttingen, 1974).
13 As 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).
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Even when insisting on a pitiless self-reflection on the artistic materials, media, and procedures, art critiques that place form in the foreground of their reflections cannot dispense with commentary on what
has been expressed in a particular form. 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 noninstrumental 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 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
14 See “Round Table,” October 100.
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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, SauzeauBoetti, Singh, Lynne Tillman). This is a context in which representational
15 See Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 78.1 (2015) on “Der Ort der Kunstkritik in der
Kunstgeschichte” (art criticism’s location in art history).
16 See, 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.
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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
16
Soentgen/Voss_Aufbau.indd 16-17
(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 welfare.
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.
17 See Sami Khatib et al., eds., Critique: The Stakes of Form (Berlin and Zurich, 2020).
18 See Roland Barthes, “What Is Writing?,” in Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers
and Colin Smith (Boston, 1985), pp. 9–18.
19 Ibid., p. 10.
20 Ibid., p. 14.
21 Ibid., p. 15.
17
23.11.21 16:03
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 artwor
