School of the Art Institute professor James Elkins was a bit peeved earlier this year by a call he got from the folks at the National Arts Journalism Program. They were embarking on a survey of visual arts critics and wanted his opinion of the business. “Newspaper art criticism in America today is entirely disconnected from serious discourse on art,” he told them. Based on conservative ideas and marketing hype, he continued, “it has no impact at art schools; it is not read, except by people who subscribe to The New York Times and The New Yorker. Their target audiences are people who know almost nothing about art and occasionally need to be placated by being told that contemporary art is not worth everything it’s said to be.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Now that the survey is done and his comment has been immortalized in the NAJP’s report, “The Visual Art Critic” (published on-line at www.najp.org), Elkins says “there’s a confusing antecedent” in his quote. The know-nothing target audiences are not the New York Times and New Yorker readers. Otherwise, he stands by it. And while he’s got some bones to pick with the survey itself–a piece of “American-style quantitative sociology,” deluded in its assumption of “unimpeachable accuracy”–he’s found, with a certain thrill, that it validates a theory he’s been working on for a while. According to Elkins, we are awash in “a kind of art criticism that essentially tries to avoid judgment.” This spineless commentary, which he calls “descriptive art criticism,” first turned up in the late 1950s and by now has eclipsed the evaluative work that used to be what criticism was all about. He’s writing a book on the subject–to be titled “What Happened to Art Criticism?” and due out next spring–and the survey came along just in time to give him statistical ammunition.
The really grievous part of the survey, Elkins says, is a list of 58 authors the critics were asked to rate for their influence. Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Robert Hughes, and Peter Schjeldahl came out on top, and Elkins himself showed up as a write-in. He thinks the list was “too miscellaneous,” failed to account for ideas (as opposed to merely recognizable names), and prompted people to respond in certain ways–with some wild results. Jacques Derrida and Sister Wendy show up together on a list of authors widely known by critics but not important to them, while the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman ranks just ahead of Immanuel Kant in a group of theorists the critics find influential. On the other hand, a section devoted to “mission” strikes Elkins as remarkably accurate. Only 27 percent of the critics think it’s important to have an opinion about work they review. Instead, they’re intent on description, historical information, and “creating a piece of writing with literary value,” none of which, Elkins maintains, is quintessential critical activity. The critic’s traditional duty and glory–forming and expressing a judgment–ranks rock-bottom on their list of priorities. So what does he think about that? “It’s not right to judge the lack of judgment,” he warns. “The question is really how to understand it.”
