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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
Then why aren't more art critics better writers? I don't know. Perhaps there's something about writing on art--as opposed to writing on food or movies or religion--that--cramps one's style. Or maybe the cause is a kind of do-gooder mentality that affects art critics in the popular press. A 2002 National Arts Journalism Program survey of 230 art critics writing for large-circulation newspapers and magazines discovered that simply describing art, as opposed to judging it, is their favored task. Only 27 percent of the critics polled put "rendering a personal judgment or opinion" at the top of their lists. Critics also cited predictably wimpy and borrowed sub-goals: the entertainment reporter's tipping readers to "what's in town," the schoolteacher's informing them about "different cultures and alternative viewpoints," the arts administrator's "opening a dialogue" between artists and readers, and the dealer's "motivating readers to see and buy art." The question of what criticism should achieve, and how--and of whether the success rate is holding steady or plummeting--has lately been the subject of a fair amount of consternation; witness, in this magazine, Raphael Rubinstein's "A Quiet Crisis" [A.i.A., Mar. '03], and Nancy Princenthal's "Art Criticism, Bound to Fail" [A.i.A., Jan. '06]. Rubinstein, who edited the new Hard Press essay collection Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice, named reluctance to pass judgment a signal, widespread problem.
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While art critics' editors and readers of the popular press may not have gotten any more intelligent over the years, they've gotten sharper. Stereotypes to the contrary, popular-press editors are pretty astute men and women who know their publications' audiences very well. What they see are newspaper and magazine readers who are deluged with writing, much of which they don't read carefully but rather semi-absorb through skimming, skip-reading, and just hearing the buzz about. To commit to thorough reading, people demand craft and at least a bit of entertainment--and they're mostly not getting it. And for art critics to take the huffy high road--"Readers would want to read my art criticism if only my philistine editor had the courage of my convictions"--does no good. They just get published even less frequently. Neither does it help for editors to say, "All right, if you feel like that, to hell with art." When editors do that, they ignore a bellwether sector of the wider culture ("the antennae of society," etc.) and, in the longer run, shortchange their readers.
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What about the culpability of art itself? The majority of contemporary art still consists of one-of-a-kind art objects. That fact alone puts contemporary art at a disadvantage regarding coverage. Simply stated, tens of thousands of times more readers see the movie or hear the CD or watch the television program than view the art object(s) under consideration. The popular press's editors and readers much prefer articles about things they themselves have experienced than about things they haven't. Museum exhibitions that run two or three months and then hie off to venues in other sections of the country do better than gallery shows as subjects for coverage, but compared to movies, pop music and TV, they're still relatively arcane. Exhibitions in commercial art galleries, which are short-lived and almost never travel, have another drawback. Ninety-nine percent of the audience for gallery exhibitions arrives with an internalized knowledge--sometimes conscious, sometimes not--that they are, in the real estate agent's phrase, mere "lookie-loos." They're really not potential customers for the goods on sale at the galleries (the better the gallery, the less it depends on walk-in traffic for sales); they know that to a certain extent they're bystanders to commerce being done, a little like those tour groups at the New York Stock Exchange. My guess (and it's only my guess; I know of no scientific surveys on the matter) is that this audience cares a lot less than, say, the movie audience about checking their opinions of the art they see against critics' opinions in the popular press.
