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Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially

Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Peter Plagens

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Exceptions exist--as with the lead critics for a few of the major dailies--but they don't abound. More and more people in the audience for contemporary art would rather read Tyler Green snark somebody in his blog, Modern Art Notes, than ponder the considered judgment of Michael Kimmelman on a MOMA retrospective. Many art writers have either added unpaid blogging to their activities or been squeezed into it from want of other, traditional outlets--for which many bloggers don't have enough writerly inclination or discipline, anyway. Each of those art bloggers has a following of fans and other bloggers, and each of those bloggers has ... and so on. A growing form of art criticism consists of posting links to other people's criticism, which consists of posting links ... and so on.

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Meanwhile, says one art museum director, "The mainstream media have embraced and accepted the dumbing down of the American public; and the fact remains that contemporary art is an intellectual enterprise and thus not of interest for their coverage." A book critic agrees: "There was a time," he says, "when magazines felt comfortable ramming high culture down the throats of their readers because they thought they should. And they had profit margins that let them do what they felt like. Now they're scrambling to stay viable, so the first thing they do is panic and start trying to figure out what readers want, especially 18- to 30-year-olds. Which produces the sort of timid, pop-tilted coverage you see each issue."

Sure, some things have been worse in the past, especially in terms of enlightenment vs. philistinism. "At the turn of the century," Elkins writes, "Royal Cortissoz, the stubbornly conservative critic for the New York Tribune, fought everything modern except Matisse, and a generation later John Canaday, the backward-looking critic for The New York Times, battled Abstract Expressionism with a sarcastic violence that seems outlandish today." Christopher Knight (of the Los Angeles Times) finds, in fact, that much of the naysaying regarding the quality of current art criticism belongs, actually, to the art-is-going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket school of thought personified in the previous century by Cortissoz and Canaday. "The declinist view lives on--only now it has turned away from art and set its sights on journalistic art writing," he says.

Alas, we art writers, too, are nevertheless part of the problem. To paraphrase an old friend of mine from undergraduate days, too often we "don't write so pretty good." Which is to say that too many writers fail to write about modern and contemporary art in plain English that the general reader can understand--sans neologisms and intramural patois. Although I consider myself a better writer than most (Newsweek has beaten some clarity into me), my clotted, parentheses-laden and semicolon-worshipping style is usually still not smooth enough for mainstream monthlies. As Stevens observes, "Most critics entering the field are not writers. I don't think it ever occurs to most critics that they should try to write well. Not surprisingly, no one outside the pond wants to read them." When that's pointed out to us, many in the art-critical fraternity bristle and argue that "clear writing" is code for Roger Kimballesque right-wing bah-humbugism concerning art any more adventurous than Fairfield Porter's.

Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially

Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Peter Plagens

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