Image by Václav Pluhař.
This essay is for Andrew Woolbright
That artists can often have a distinctive old age style is a very familiar claim.. When the body ages, and the mind draws upon temporally distant experience, it’s almost inevitable that a painter will work differently. But less has been said, so far as I know, about old age art criticism, which also can be distinctive. A young writer enters the art world, meets some artists and writes about them. Then if some become successful, the writer may again want to discuss them. But while an artist usually develops even into old age using a promising youthful starting point, an adventuresome aging critic is expected to keep identifying new young artists who deserve attention. Consider how Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg were often criticized for failing to develop. Perhaps Leo Steinberg and Rosalind Krauss were wiser when they turned from criticism to art history. By contrast, I do admire Michael Fried for his ongoing ability to find new artists to discuss. But here, no doubt these examples will be criticized for revealing my age. Once an otherwise friendly commentator complained that I was still writing about older artists using theories I had discussed long ago. Still, there was something in his complaint: a critic can learn from younger contemporaries, and failure to do so may lead to tedious repetitions. .
This discussion reveals an important substantial difference in principle between art history and art criticism. When you write about old master art, you are describing work from a world that you can only know in a bookish way. When, however, you deal with contemporary work, then you are presenting art from an era that you know in an immediate fashion, because it is made by people who are (roughly!) your contemporaries. In the 1980s, for me there was a real difference between writing about Èdouard Manet, where I could only read the literature, and Robert Ryman, whom I had interviewed. Nowadays, however, if you are a young art writer, Ryman too is an historical figure. What defines art criticism, in contrast to art history writing, is this immediate relationship with the artist’a visual culture. His or her ways of thinking are familiar because they likely are, with limits, yours also.
When an entire culture changes rapidly, then what reason is there to admire older people? Their skills often are obsolete. A mechanic who know only 1980s cars or a political analyst who just understood 1980s America might not do well today in Trump’s country. This same point applies to art criticism. When I entered the art world, in the 1980s, arguments about the viability of painting were omnipresent. Whatever view you took of this issue, it couldn’t be avoided. A critic who started writing after 2000 is likely to see things differently. There may be an historical interest in rethinking these 1980s concerns, but now probably they are not still of living interest.
That analysis of old age criticism reveals an interesting sociological point. Because there are many more old people today, and many of them are still writing, these concerns with old age criticism deserve discussion. For all of its interest in multiculturalism, generally our art world is not very tolerant of critical differences produced by aging. That’s unfortunate, for the effects of age are important and inescapable. What, however, is more important are the philosophical implications of this analysis. To explain them, I will link this sociological point to a conceptual account of the distinction between art history and art criticism, a claim I’ve discussed in prior publications.
Art criticism is an activity of judgment, which normally concerns contemporary art. That activity is philosophically fascinating because, as experience shows and as theory claims, such judgments are frequently disputed. At least since Immanuel Kant’s third critique, The Critique of Judgment (1790), there have been highly contentious discussions about the status of critical judgments. An aesthetic judgment, Kant claimed, is neither a mere expression of opinion, just telling what we enjoy, nor a matter of fact, like identifying the color or shape of an artwork. Our aesthetic judgments are persuasive claims that aim to be generally agreed upon, though we know that often that will not happen. Any discussion of this objectivity of aesthetic judgments is too elaborate a point to even begin to discuss here. What matters for our purposes is the contrast with art history, and the link I propose to make with ‘old age criticism’.
Art history as I identify it is essentially different form of activity from criticism. An art historical account of Nicolas Poussin, to pick an artist I have repeatedly written about, attributes his works, describes his development and analyzes the subjects of his paintings. Here, then, we are concerned with factual analysis. That art historical discussion gives information about Poussin’s art and life, but it doesn’t tell what interests the art critic: how to judge his art. This, again, is the essential Kantian point. Someone might study Poussin’s art as an art historian whilst thinking it dull as a critic; or, vice versa, if a writer admires his art whilst being uninterested in his life. The former option probably seems perverse, for why study someone whose art bores you. But it’s easy to imagine being fascinated by an artist about whom almost nothing is known.
Here, then, let’s return back to our account of old age criticism. An art critic writes about artists whose reputation remains to be established, while an art historian deals with those figures whose status is relatively secure. That’s a useful generalization. But keep in mind that in our art world, there regularly are radical revisions of opinion, in which previously neglected or unknown artists are given massive attention. And, conversely, the possibility, at least, of dramatic demotions in which canonical figures are critically rejected. What’s happening right now, then, is a redefinition of the contrast between these two forms of art writing, in which the role of old age criticism plays a role. And that’s why a sociological analysis of the present practice of art criticism needs to be supplemented by discussion of these philosophical issues, which go back to Kant. He, incidentally, wrote the third critique in a difficult, old age style. As Ivan Gaskell once rightly said, speaking about that book, ‘I do wish that Kant had been better organized’.
