Having it all: uncritical critics in today's art world.

IN THE COURSE of covering the New York art scene, I recently met a man who believes that Peter Paul Rubens was the Son of God. According to this man, a successful television psychic, Jesus Christ returned to earth anno Domini 1577 and chose the body of the new-born Rubens as His earthly tenement. An incident of this magnitude ought to have provoked comment at the time, and it would have done so, the psychic contends, but for a massive cover-up on the part of the Church hierarchy. It would be tedious to describe how he arrived at this startling conclusion. Let it suffice to say that, initially impressed by the similarity between Rubens's self-portraits and his depictions of Christ, thc psychic is confident that both will start oozing blood before the year is out.

Like much of art criticism these days, this theory suffers from an almost irrepressible credulity. Now, by his own admission, the gentleman in question is not interested in art and knows nothing about it. But there is no reason to suppose that his ratiocinative skills fall noticeably below those of many of our professed art cognoscenti, or that his opinions are substantially sillier than much of what one reads (or does not read) in the major art journals of our day. Ultimately, what brings him into conformity witb contemporary art criticism is the peculiar nature of his methodology, which amounts to an unusually vigorous will to believe. This will to believe precedes the belief itself, as the belief precedes the proof. As if through hypnotic suggestion, the conviction is implanted in the brain, and the justification follows quickly and effortlessly.

It will be argued that this can be said with equal justice of most other critical, and indeed intellectual, prepossessions of the present moment. And it is surely true that art criticism, with its taste for "vulgar" Marxism, deconstruction, and all the rest, is but one reflection of a larger, homogeneous contemporary culture. But to dismiss it in this way, as is usually done even by those enlightened enough to disapprove, is to obscure what distinguishes art criticism from all other critical activities.

Of all forms of criticism, the criticism of art is the most crucial to the existence and vitality of its subject. Even without movie reviews, the film industry could probably thrive through publicity and word of mouth alone. Most books that are read by most people would continue to be read, and most concerts and recordings would continue to be patronized, even if the critical act were abolished from those precincts once for all. But conceive of today's art world if, through the imperial edict of some World Congress, art critics were silenced for the space of one human generation. The entire art world would presently descend into a nocturnal chaos of primordial, Ovidian conflict, in which a million anonyms moired in almost total obscurity. There would still be galleries and group exhibitions, stylistic schools would form and battles would be fought-but all in silence. The larger world would know nothing of these tremors, and collectors, guided only by their erring instincts, either would fix their support on those artists popular before the Edict, or would endorse a scattered, illdefined complex of artistic practices that could never coalesce into a few competing and complementary trends such as now characterize the art market.

AND YET, a paradox is immediately evident. As important as the critic is to the vitality of the art world, his direct influence on art is all but non-existent, and such influence as he is apt to have merely consists in obediently ratifying the Zeitgeist. He is to the art world as a megaphone is to a demagogue. He has been reduced to a role of ceremonious consenting. By an extension of this paradox, critics in other cultural realms, though less essential to the survival of their subject, can yet have a far more immediate and impressive impact. A pan by the drama critic of the New York Times can close a multimillion-dollar musical even before it reaches Broadway. A book critic can drastically reduce the sales of a new novel with a well-placed bad review. A film critic can turn people away from the box offices, and an opera critic can kill a singing career in the bud. A bad review from an art critic, if such a thing existed, would merely cause its author to be labeled a crank, while blessing its victim with scandal, catapulting him to unwarranted fame. The only weapon in the critic's Lilliputian arsenal is his silence, and silence pays poorly. All things considered, it is easiest simply to praise.

To understand how such an absurd state of affairs could have come about, it will help to consider for a moment the history of art criticism as we, now know it. Like all criticism, it emerged in the eighteenth century within the context of an ascendant bourgeois culture. Culture, it is fair to say, had become a commodity for which there were more buyers and, consequently, more sellers. Yet the very premise of this new culture was a bourgeoisie that acquired its purchasing power through hard work, ruling out the exquisite leisure of earlier patronage. The buyer of art, his life consumed in getting and spending, could no longer hope to be the most knowledgeable person about art. He now needed help in knowing what to look at and what to buy. Writing in a new kind of medium, the periodical, which was bought and sold on the streets, the critic devoted his life to providing the expertise that had passed out of the capacity of the general art-lover.

In its genesis, then, art criticism was much like other forms of criticism. But it soon parted company with them. For bourgeois culture, which exercised .so salutary an influence on the novel and the opera, initially had no very benign effect on art. Precisely at the moment when the middle class became the foremost patrons, the art they endorsed and patronized, based on the Old Masters, was losing its energies and its reason for being. It would take more than two generations before people started to realize this, and this realization came in the revolt of the Modernists. But the success of these artists would have been inconceivable without those art critics who, by attacking the enfeebled older order, heroically won the day for the art that was then being born. In the process, these critics dramatically justified their own existence and assured themselves a permanent place in the life of culture.

The sort of writing that these Modernist critics turned out, and that the critics of the opposing camp turned out in reaction against them, was quite remarkably different, in tone and substance, from what our own critics have done. Here is Dumas fils, apparently an anti-Modernist, with his unforgettable description of Courbet: "From what fabulous meeting of a slug and a peacock, ftom what genital antitheses, from what fatty oozings can have been generated this thing called M. Gustave Courbet? Under what gardener's cloche, with the help of what manure, as a mixture of what wine, beer, corrosive mucus, and flatulent swellings can have grown this sonorous and hairy pumpkin, this aesthetic belly, this imbecilic and impotent incarnation of the Self?"

From the other side, Joris-Karl Huysmans, in summing up the entire French art establishment as represented in the Salon of 1880, threw up his hands in evocative despair: "Within this immense chaos of canvases, I shall pass over the new boys. What's the use, ultimately, of taking stock of these millions of pupils, each of them doggedly returning to the same old worn-out formulae, the same routines, that have anchored themselves in our artists' brains from father to son, from teacher to pupil, down through the centuries? Alas, this time mediocrity labors with greater rage than ever before!"

In the end, of course, Huysmans and subsequent Modernists won the day. Two features of their critical assault, which lasted up until the middle years of this century, are essential to understanding art criticism at the present time. First, because the art that was being championed, which was also great art, was so obstreperously new, Newness in itself, the Rejection of the Old, came to seem an heroic virtue, whatever form it might happen to take (including Post-Modernism's phony classicism). Second, because this great art was highly individualistic and unprecedented, the usual criteria fell into abeyance; and critics, fearing to seem out of sympathy with the newest thing, acquired the habit of abstaining from judgment altogether-or, more precisely, of looking favorably on everything that comes along.

BUT TO PARAPHRASE Marx's oft-quoted aphorism, all great historical facts occur twice: the first time as drama, the second time as farce. The artists and critics of Modernism wrote the drama, and we are now living out the farce. Artists and critics and dealers, however much they now claim to disavow the Modernist heritage, are pleased to believe that they are carrying on the revolution. I shall not repeat the litany of grievances against contemporary art, for they are well known. And I shall also say, in extenuation of what is now being done, that the greater portion of artistic practice in most periods has been mediocre or bad, although perhaps not quite as bad as this. It is also well known, though not well known enough, that contemporary artists, the pampered darlings of the leisure classes, make their living by going through the motions of a purely factitious rebellion. What still needs to be defined is the role that the critic plays in this farce, even if he is relegated to the wings.

Actually, he has a choice of two roles to play. Corresponding to the first feature of Modernism, its revolutionary newness, the critic can see himself as the heroic champion of some startlingly new artist or school, which he alone is saving from the clutches of an entirely imaginary opposition. Or, corresponding to the second feature, he can perceive himself as standing serenely above the fray, inspecting all art, old and new, and then, after much soulsearching, finding all art, new and old, to be ultimately grand.

The critic of the first sort will tell you that everything is wrong with the world, and that much is wrong with art. And yet there are some few inspired souls whom, by singular good fortune, be happens to know personally, and who are stretching the boundaries of art through performance, self-mutilation, and other practices that have lately proved far more remunerative than their inventors appear to have intended. But they have powerful enemies: the male, the pale, and the psychotically right-handed. Who will speak for them? Ah, he, the critic, will! Indeed he must, no matter how many CIA agents, alerted by the latest issue of Artforum, molest his passage to and from his place of dwelling. He takes his message to the people by writing long articles for publications like Arts Magazine, Art in America, Artscribe, and FlashArt, which not even he will have the patience to read through. What is important, ultimately, is that these articles are furnished with full-color illustrations, and that they represent several yards of prose.

In a recent issue of Artforum, the photographer and critic Barbara Kruger, ostensibly writing of television's pervasive influence on art and life, manages to take up space in the following impressive way: "Fixed by its relentless delivery of doubtless declarations, we are touched by its untouchability and untouched by what we thought we touched. Its constant confusions have the velocity of an oral high colonic of such proportions that we are drenched in its residue of chattering waste and flatulent candor." Or, in a passage chosen more or less at random from The PostModern Scene (1986), the authors, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, have this to say (with approval, incidentally) of a typical work by Eric Fischl: "[It] expresses perfectly the pestilential spirit of postmodern culture and society. The painting exists at the edge of ecstasy and decay where the consumer culture of the passive nihilists does a reversal and in a catastrophic implosion flips into its opposite number-the suicidal nihilism of excremental culture."

And what is the sum of all the agitation generated by a critic of this sort? Those artists whom he mentions will gleefully list him in the bibliography of their next catalogue, while their dealers will accordingly hike the prices, which the collectors will gladly pay, impressed that the artists are important enough to be mentioned in long articles and books. This is yet one more twist in the paradox of art criticism: that art critics are generally paid very little (which is not the same thing as saying that they are underpaid); yet they are absolutely essential to the profits of the dealers and their stable of artists.

The other actor in the farce is, by contrast, altogether too happy. Great men, he contends, are still among us, rising in foison out of the inner cities of the Northeast and the accredited institutions of the West. Writing for the New York Times and other publications that reach a larger audience, he subscribes to the doctrine that "Whatever is, is right." He is troubled only by that stubborn clause in the nature of things that presumes to dictate that A cannot equal not-A. Rebelling against this, he is apt to praise, on the same page, both the cloyingly official portraiture of the National Academy of Design and Josef Beuys's excrementitious interlardings of felt and animal fat. At this point, it would be extremely difficult to conceive of any work of art that could fall below the standards of the New York Times. It may be that the critics of the Times do occasionally dislike things, though we shall never know for sure. It is more probable that, through the hypnotic suggestibility I referred to earlier, the moment anything strikes them unfavorably, these happy men and women conclude that it does not merit their discussion. Alternatvely, they can single out the subversive element, label it "disturbing," and thus turn it into a positive virtue.

One would like to cite examples, and yet how does one catch a writer in the act of mediocrity, of terminal, entropic chinlessness? Suffice it to say that in a recent Weekend section of the New York Times, 18 exhibitions were reviewed, all of them favorably. What is the typical tone of the Times critic-and, by extension, of almost every other newspaper critic now alive? In asking the reader to consider the concluding sentences of three of those reviews, I shall give neither names nor contexts, since (believe me) it makes no difference. I shall only ask the reader to savor the artificially cultivated "consideredness," the supportive, Pollyannaish understated-surprise-mingledwith-delight: "The magic of the piece resides as much in subtle irregularities of color and shape, placement and assembly, as in the central predicament. Like everything else in the show, it has a paradoxical elegance." Or this: "It is the kind of magical, disconcerting sculpture that undoes vision and logic, pointing toward forces inside and outside us that we barely understand." Or this: "Ms. Bowling reveals herself to be an impressive technician who can paint landscapes full of expectancy, quietude, and mystery." Now compare all that with what the Times's food critic, the incomparable Bryan Miller, writes in the same Weekend section about the Oak Room at the Algonquin: "As for the food, it would have been faster to walk to [the supermarket), buy lettuce, rinse it in the bathroom sink, mash the anchovies with the dull end of a pen, and grate the Parmesan against a table leg than get a Caesar Salad ($11.50) on a busy weekday." That, I contend, is how all art criticism should sound.

Ultimately, the first type of critic is far less corrosive of the life of culture than the second, Every age and every generation has had its stupid and irrelevant doctrines, which have been taken seriously for a time, until Fashion, the Empress of All, turned away in bored disgust. Every age, it seems, must have its window dressing, its store of superfluous intelligence, whose doctrines and language, once they have lost their currency, seem distasteful to the next generation, and deliciously "period" to the one after that. The present talk about texts, codes, and appropriation is only a little more idiotic than Giorgio Vasari's maunder about disegno and colorito, or Joshua Reynolds's search for sentiment and the sublime, or Charles Baudelaire's hankering after the Absolute, or Clement Greenberg's pursuit of pure painting. The difference consists in this: that those earlier theories were based upon, and occasionally inspired, great works of art, while the most recent of vanguard critics cannot hope to accomplish anything of the sort, and perhaps would not even want to.

The second sort of critic, in abdicating his sacred duty to pass responsible judgment, is really the principal culprit. In Auto-Critique: Essays on Art and Anti-Art (1987), Barbara Rose says very well that "the act of criticism is the value judgment. The rest is art writing." It is the most recent form of abdication, which praises everything in greater or lesser degrees of perfervidity, that has brought into being the Post-Modern world. Though the sequence of cause and consequence is complex, it is fair to assume that a more energetic opposition from the corps of critics would have prevented the present confusion. Nowadays, the irrelevance of the critic's opinion is understood so implicitly that artists Labor to please only their dealers, who in turn wish to please their clients, who, by a singular perversion, just want the artists to like them. Without the criterion of excellence, and the feverish pursuit of it, the entire art world becomes as exciting as moving chess pieces over a blank surface. It is a game of tennis in which the net has been removed and the white lines ripped up, in which the umpires have been shot and the players, when they are not colluding, are determined to cheat. The spectators believe that they are admiring the skill with which the players play the game, but in fact, if they were honest with themselves, they would see that their interest could not possibly find any purchase in such a sport as this. It is rather the manifold circumstantial details that have arrested their attention: the price of the tickets, the celebrity and good looks of the competitors, how much each of them stands to win, what the other spectators are wearing, the excellence of the wine and cheese.

In such circumstances as these, it would seem difficult to feel optimistic, And yet this is not out of the question. All it would take would be a shift in the winds of fashion, a mounting critical intolerance of what should never have been endured in the first place, and then, quite possibly, everything would change. If more art critics could, like Robert Hughes and Roberta Smith, see themselves as the judges, rather than as the friends and craven accomplices of artists and dealers; if more art periodicals would, like Modern Painters, The New Criterion, and The Journal of Art, see themselves as something other than toadying trade publications; if all artists and dealers, on the day after an opening, awaited the morning papers with the same trepidation that dramatists, singers, and restaurateurs have always known, then the entire art world could still be redeemed.