Michael Fallon weighs in on the conversation about a growing decline in good arts criticism, and offers a sampling of examples of arts writing done well, drawn from the archives of mnartists.org's articles.

It’s easy to imagine a future time when there is no more art criticism. After all, daily newspaper art coverage, these days, is going the way of the mighty Wurlitzer, while new art magazines come and go more quickly than new iPod models. And the digital media replacing these old analog communication forms has turned out to be much more fickle and impermanent and generally incomprehensible than what once was. That is, the noisy web profusion of writing on every imaginable subject on websites and weblogs, in podcasts and on social networks, on web forums and in chatgroups has yielded a world where few pieces of analytical writing carry much critical weight among a significant readership.

Considering criticism’s vanishing act, asking what makes good art criticism seems a bit pointless. A better question to ask may be why does the culture care so little about art criticism now? Every answer to this question that I’ve considered or heard in recent years, and some I never thought of, are collected in a 2006 collection of essays edited by Raphael Rubinstein called Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. According to the writers in this anthology, there’s no real consensus on the reasons for the fall of criticism. Some of the essays in this volume blame the decline on the various sins of modern artists—from their tendency to shift styles weekly and avoidance of creating work that is meaningful to the wider society or, conversely, their enthrallment to the entertainment industry. Other essays blame larger forces—recent deep shifts in the art market and the art “power structure,” the globalization and rampant commercialization of art, the rise of authority granted to curators and museum professionals (and resulting loss of authority granted to critics), and the disappearance of critical publications and their committed readerships. Still other authors pin blame on problems that are internal to contemporary criticism. In particular, they point to the tendency among critics to resist passing actual judgment or any sort of discriminating appraisal when they write about art. Art critics are being killed off, apparently, by the rise of what Jerry Saltz calls the “no-risk non-criticism” that is being written by egalitarian-minded modern “art writers.”

The wide range of notions about what’s wrong with art criticism today reveals that no one has figured out how to keep art criticism from fading away. However, if we examine the criticisms of art criticism listed above, we do at least see what we used to appreciate about criticism—that it interpreted what art meant and what artists were on about; that it was an outsider, non-institutional perspective that didn’t have a vested interest in how and what art was valued; that it made judgments about art and gave readers something to think about and react against.

It so happens that these facets of art criticism—informed interpretation, an independent perspective, strong judgment—are what I generally value in art criticism too. And the good news is such writing can still be found, and probably always may be found, if you are savvy enough to know where to look amidst all the clutter and confusion. (Here’s a hint: Try perusing the articles archives on mnartists.org, where the following pieces of writing, each of which fit the above criteria, were published along with hundreds and hundreds of other critical pieces over the last five, very critical years.)



About the curator: Michael Fallon is an arts writer and arts administrator based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Since 1998, he has written more than 160 reviews, feature articles, essays, and profiles for publications like City Pages, Art Papers, The Orange County Weekly, Modernism, The Pittsburgh City Paper, Fiberarts, Public Art Review, Art in America, and Hope. Michael has been a member of the American chapter of the International Art Critic’s Association since 2000, and in 2002 he founded a local arts writers association, the Visual Art Critics Union of Minnesota (VACUM).

He currently makes a living as the executive director of the Northfield Arts Guild, a community art center south of the Twin Cities. You can check out his director’s blog at: www.northfieldartsguilddirector.wordpress.com. Michael is also the administrator of Art Canary, the Twin Cities-Area Student Arts Writing Initiative, of the Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America, and of the Art Happy Hour!

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