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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
They have at least part of a point. Twenty years ago, I participated in a sham National Endowment for the Arts confab (I didn't know it was bogus at the time) at which we were to discuss the NEA's individual critic grants and recommend whether, and in what form, they might be continued. (The decision to drop them had already been made, and our get-together was just retroactive cover.) The chief cudgel with which the already-dead grants were beaten into further oblivion was the complaint--voiced mainly by conservatives in on the fix--of unintelligibility. Still, it's a fact that the critics who craft the most limpid prose these days are esthetic, if not political, conservatives such as Hilton Kramer, Jed Perl and Mario Naves. On the other hand, critics like these gravitate to art about which they can write without stretching their rhetorical ligaments. Art outside their comfort zones they can dismiss with a few well-turned snide remarks.
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It's also true that not enough art writers function well in both the art world and a corporate newsroom environment. Before I could be hired at Newsweek, the culture-section editor who recruited me and I were required to go to lunch at "21" with a higher-up suit. He told me that finding an art critic was "the most difficult hire" he'd had at the magazine, and he seemed pleased to find out that I didn't wear a green ponytail and could indeed eat with a knife and fork. But when we popular-press critics do pass Miss Manners muster, many of us still carry the debility of having other fish to fry. In "The Crisis in Journalistic Criticism," Brenson wrote:
... not one of the critics writing for a national publication wants to be known exclusively as an art critic. Peter Plagens of Newsweek is a painter. Mark Stevens, who took over as the art critic of New York magazine in the spring of 1994, is also a novelist. Robert Hughes of Time has written significant books on non-art subjects, almost all his ambitious articles appear outside Time, and for a good while now his primary energy has gone into a television series on the history, of art in America. Michael Kimmelman came to the New York Times as a full-time music and part-time architecture critic and has been writing regularly on music for Vogue. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker has made it clear that he wants to be known as a man of letters.... In not one of these critics is there now the full commitment to being an art critic that the current challenges of art criticism demand.
Times and personnel have changed, but Brenson's contention is still largely true. Exceptions exist, of course, and primary among them is Roberta Smith at the New York Times. Week in and week out, she's entirely devoted to journalistic art criticism, mostly in the trenches of catalogue-free exhibitions of alive-and-kicking artists in commercial galleries. Nevertheless, many popular-press art writers are writers, and have writers' grander ambitions. They're not satisfied merely by keeping dutiful critical tabs on gallery and museum exhibitions, or by trotting along as Boswells at the heels of famous-artist Dr. Johnsons. Rather than compensating by lusting after the power to make or break artists' reputations in the manner of Clement Greenberg (who was much less of a kingmaker than his legend has it), they want to write books or poems untethered to the art world, which will give them status as writers per se--that is, as artists in their own right.
