Reflections on mistakes I have made as an art critic | Hacker News Reader

Reflections on mistakes I have made as an art critic

hyperallergic.com

62 pointsbrudgers33 comments

I have conflicted feelings about this. Is it really a "mistake" if you don't understand some subtle context about artwork that would not be clear to the casual reader either? Or, as an art critic, is it your responsibility to be aware of all these subtexts, so you can educate your readers about them?

More broadly, does great art have to be immediately striking and accessible? If a piece of art resonates only with people who share the artist's context (like the mentioned punning pronunciation of "boy" in a given dialect), can a critic lacking that context review it, or a viewer appreciate it?

As with any work, the great artworks do both. They are both immediately striking to laypeople yet also intrigue those deep in the art world.

> I have conflicted feelings about this. Is it really a "mistake" if you don't understand some subtle context about artwork that would not be clear to the casual reader either? Or, as an art critic, is it your responsibility to be aware of all these subtexts, so you can educate your readers about them?

I think this broadly depends on what role you view art critique as having. In the opening paragraph, the author does a great job (IMO) of outlining his perspective:

"As a critic, I’ll suggest that I can sensitize my readers and listeners to what they didn’t see or grasp or apprehend when they witnessed the same art or performance."

If you view critique as a way of exploring new perspectives, subtle context can be one of the ways in which a critic can help add to the conversation surrounding a work. While it's not necessarily a critic's responsibility to understand every piece of background info at every moment, it's also understandable that a critic might view their own omission of a particular piece of context as a failure to provide additional insight that they believe they might have been able to contribute in a review, especially they view the goal of their critique to be that act of "sensitizing."

> More broadly, does great art have to be immediately striking and accessible?

Part of what Rodney might argue here is that it's not necessary for art itself to be striking/accessible, but a good critic can make such art accessible by virtue of dedicating themselves to the understanding of "subtle contexts."

> If a piece of art resonates only with people who share the artist's context (like the mentioned punning pronunciation of "boy" in a given dialect), can a critic lacking that context review it, or a viewer appreciate it?

I'd argue that context isn't a strict requirement for appreciation, but that it can often be a useful way to construct additional meaning, to find additional appreciation for a work beyond the initial appraisal. It's different for everyone, but I love art and art critique, and these are the ways of thinking that I've personally found bring me the most joy/fulfillment when thinking about art.

I think his “boy” mistake was not getting the context that was obvious to the work’s main audience, Jamaicans, when he was reviewing a show as a (diaspora) Jamaican. Which I agree is a very forgivable mistake and probably nobody outside of social media would take him to task on it.

To the broad point, as an artist and also a collector I say emphatically No. Some of the best art is subtle and requires a lot of engagement to “get.” The striking, like the large, is often overrated.

Context is not everything. But it is a lot in how we think about images.

Da Vinci’s extravagance of Il Cenacolo was justified for its subject matter. When the fresco is falling apart and despite the technical sophistication of Leonardo’s hand, the meaning rides on nearly two millennia of words about the last supper of Jesus in Christian narrative.

Those familiar with the narrative and the painting title can’t unsee the context. Or contexts…there’s no single viewpoint.

I look at Cappa’s D-day pictures.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/robert-capa-d...

How I feel about them is tied to a lifetime. And the lifetime of my parents and grandparents generations as I experienced those people.

But still I have to be told that these are pictures from Omaha Beach. And it must be “Omaha Beach” because “June at the right bank of the Duove River” is the wrong context for interpretation.

  To make something beautiful 
  should be enough. 
  It isn’t. 
  It should be.

  Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors
     Richard Siken

https://poets.org/poem/landscape-blur-conquerors

Why shouldn't they know? Are you concerned that it is too high a standard? They are professionals. When you hire a mathematics tutor, shouldn't the tutor understand the subtitles of math? When you hire an engineer, shouldn't they know the subtleties of the issue they were hired to handle?

> More broadly, does great art have to be immediately striking and accessible?

Art can't be required to be anything at all, and as soon as you impose requirements, some artist will no doubt find a way to challenge them (like good hackers ;) :D ). But of course, much of it isn't immediately striking and accessible.

I get the question, but first, we can't make blanket statements about it: "can" someone appreciate it? Who knows? It depends on the artwork, the person, how much time they have, maybe the lighting and the information they find (including from the critic), etc. People aren't prisoners of their contexts - we all are necessarily very limited by our short lives, but we can learn. I know more about the world than what I've directly experienced. The choreographer Mark Morris said,

"I don't think everything's for everybody. I like that people specialize and have specific interests. I like the idea that people remain curious; I like to say that my work is not for everyone, it's for anyone."

One major effect or benefit of much artwork is to see the world through someone else's eyes - someone with great vision, observation, and skill in conceiving and communicating what they see, who has thought deeply and worked for many hours on how to say this one thing.

You can (if you wish) forget what you bring into the room - the artist doesn't know you, they didn't create this with you in mind - and dive into a totally alien point of view and personality, one that does not respect or understand you at all, one that isn't pulling punches for your sensitivities. It's a personal conversation with this creative, thoughtful person, someone creative, has thought deeply, and expresses themselves in highly creative ways - but who is completely unaware of you. You can stand right next to them, observe them closely, walk around them, explore, leave and come back, stalk them (the artwork) obsessively, and it's not even rude. It's a good way to get out of yourself; it's space where you can be deeply, disturbingly challenged, and consider and reconsider, in perfect external safety without anyone knowing, if you wish.

I like the way this piece highlights the network effects involved in the art industry. The primacy of “politics and intrigue” over aesthetics or craft, is so sad to me. It’s good to see some of that truth make it’s way to the surface, if only unintentionally.

I had the same take.

Honestly, I don't know how people work in environments like that. Forgetting to give honorable mention to some person or cause shouldn't become a conscience issue boiling over into a penitent confession about all the people and causes forgotten over the years. Sadly, I fear that the "silence is violence" claim is influencing more and more of our society. It's like we're intentionally creating new mental health situations.

I really really like this article. I'm trying to think of something useful to add beyond that, but it's hard. I just think it is both personally admirable and useful for society to put out messages like this that accept a level of fallibility and seek compassion and understanding.

A pretty disappointing piece.

Used hind-site to change earlier value judgements to be more political correct, and just pointed out times they made simple mistakes.

How about times they said someone was great and now realise it was garbage, or vise-verse.

We've all re watched movies we thought were good and now realise they were crap and the opposite. Or not liked a movie but later came to understand it had components of value outside of what we like.

That must also happen in art. We also know critics often (most of the time?) get caught up in group think, why not talk about that?

It feels like their job interview answer of tell us about something you'd like to improve.

My problem with critics is epistemological. How do they know what they know? The latest example is with a critic who makes a strong connection between the improvisational style of African-American Bebop music and the expressive style of the Beat Generation. He draws a direct line of influence from Bebop to Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It's a nice theory, but I can't verify it. It feels true, but is it? Can we say Bebop influenced Kerouac because "it was in the air" at the time and there are similarities when we compare them?

The connection is explicit in On the Road, e.g chapter four of part three. And implicit earlier such as when Bull Lee talks about the dullness of New Orleans bars and the prohibition of whites going into black neighborhoods (where presumably the jazz would be better).

Ginsberg himself is generally believed to be the inspiration for the character Carlo Marx. But that’s something I read…generally accepted scholarship so to speak. But here is what purports to be a picture of Kerouac and Ginsberg.

https://granta.com/kerouac-ginsberg-the-letters/

It helps to be a bit manic about these things…

I am often a bit manic about these things so I need to check my assumptions often. I get the Jazz connection for sure, but Bebop? Bebop was developed in Harlem in the early 1940's. Neal Cassady was a juvenile delinquent in Denver in the early 1940's. He enjoyed the ecstatic release of Jazz, but the fact that he was a speed freak (benzedrine inhalers) may had a far greater effect on his style than anything else. In fact, he may have been the one to introduce Kerouac to amphetamines, which is how he was able to write On The Road in three weeks on a roll of continuous paper. My critic doesn't talk about speed. I don't know much, but then again, it seems like a lot of critics don't either.

For anyone interested in the language and vocabulary used by art critics, this site used a Google Colab notebook to train a NLP model with 50+ years of art reviews from ArtForum. Novel art reviews are generated with Tensorflow and served with a Flask app.

https://artreviewgenerator.com/

I have a hard time understanding the concept of "art critic". Art should be something emotional, so how can one person speak on behalf on someone else's emotions?

I like Marvel movies. I hate some movies that are "classic art". How can someone classify ones as "wonderful" and others as "crappy" - and how Iam i expected to react to that? Trust someone else's emotions?

I like Middle Age art and architecture very much. My wife and children are in danger of luxating their jaws when yawning when we visit a MA museum or building. I can understand that, I do the sam ewhen we visit the Orsay museum which I find horribly boring. As "art experts", we would have very different opinions on the artefacts.

Critique does not imply criticism. Its more about analyzing the significance, historical significance , aesthetic value, or meaning of art.

Exactly-- a lot of things that I found boring became much more interesting once I had some more context to understand what is happening in a a given work of art.

A lot of things that I previously had enjoyed have become more boring as I learn more about the world and have greater context.

I find people doing that work useful for the same reason I find it useful to have explanatory signs in parts outlining the natural mechanisms of various features.

> Exactly-- a lot of things that I found boring became much more interesting once I had some more context to understand what is happening in a a given work of art.

In fact, I'd say this is the norm. An accessible version that I'd expect many people have experienced is hearing a genre of music as "noise" or boring or simply not especially pleasant, but then listening to more of it and learning more about it by paying attention to artists and, yes, critics and even (gasp) academics, and coming to really enjoy and appreciate it, and even beginning to be able to articulate why a given piece is especially good. The same holds for painting, for sculpture, for film, for books, for poetry—practically everything. Breezing through an art museum, say, without some pretty serious context for and experience with the sort of art you're looking at, is a great way to have, at best, a small fraction of the optimal experience—maybe still worthwhile, to be clear, but just because a great piece doesn't grab you as all that special your first time through doesn't mean it's wrong.

It's unusual for great art not to greatly reward education on the part of the person experiencing it, even if it's not entirely lost on those lacking it. A lot of excellent art may be downright off-putting without that education, even. Look at all the people who complain that most books regarded as "literature" are boring, worthless crap, or that what are regarded as some of the best jazz albums are ugly, random noise, or that a variety of fine art is ho-hum or stupid (maybe some of it is! But people expressing these attitudes tend to apply their opinion far too broadly)

It may even be the case that the sine qua non of "greatness" in art is that the deeper you look into it (and the network of signifiers surrounding and defining the work) the more interesting it becomes.

And that's not to say that "accessible" art isn't 'great'-- the more pedal steel I play, the more jazz I find in country music. It was fun when I was just listening to it, but the more I listen to (some of) it the more useful, interesting musical I find.

That's the sort of nihilistic relativism that gives postmodernism a bad name.

While taste plays a role in art, and can famously not be judged, art also has aspects that define a ranking, from "good" art to "bad".

These qualities are harder to define than it is for judging the long jump olympics, because they cannot be quantified. But it suffice to observe that when people spend a lot of time studying art, they tend to value similar things.

One quality I have als noticed with good critics is a tendency to appreciate a far broader range of art (form and era) than "normal" people.

I'll take the opposite approach. Children are the best judges of Art.

They don't care about historical baggage, they only see beauty.

A pile of dead bodies and a naked person crying isn't beautiful, even if it's realistic and has an interesting style.

Maybe this view of art is too narrow. Wine supposedly tastes better than juice, despite the strong taste of ethanol. I side with the child on that topic too.

Do rules need to be learned to observe art?

yeah, "beauty" isn't the only quality of good art. What you're thinking of "art" is just interior decorating.

I believe that the assertion of absolute artistic merit is more dangerous than nihilistic relativism.

A critic can be relativist and still be informative. Their goal is not to assign a score to the art, but to communicate about it in an informed, meaningful way. Even if you have a completely different set of values from the critic, you can still appreciate criticism that informs you of what they saw and what it meant to them.

Roger Ebert famously hated having to give stars to films, because he was afraid you'd be misled. He could give a move five stars for being a very good slasher film, or action movie, or anything else in a genre he might dislike. Film critics see that aspect in spades, since they have often seen so many movies that even a "good" example will bore them simply because they've seen it all before. But that just gives them a reputation for only being interested in the obscure and outrageous, which appeal only because they're at least different.

A good critic can communicate what they see, without having to put an absolute judgment on it, because their judgment is unimportant to your decision to go view that piece of art. What you want is a preview of what that piece might mean to you, a thing established by your relationship to the critic.

Some critics write for the audience of people who may go see a piece, and others write for posterity -- the first draft of art history. Either is fine, though they're different modes.

This is a postmodernist view of what criticism means, and my point is to show that it doesn't have to be nihilistic. Art still has meaning to you, or not. But the art critic's job isn't to rank it, but to talk about that meaning -- and there's a lot to say. A nihilist just wouldn't say anything at all.

I have a discomfort about people showing off their consumption habits or tastes. The other day I read a sentence like, "I admire a person who listens to tasteful music, does their research and has a carefully curated music hobby" or something. As if there's a pride or effort to be had in being a "more discerning" passive consumer.

There's "showing off", and there's having "pride" and putting in "effort". I don't think these are the same.

It does take effort to become a more discerning (even if passive) consumer. That doesn't make you a superior person in some broader sense, and I'd also be uncomfortable with someone showing off about this. But taking some (mostly innder) pride at putting in the work? Why is that a problem?

>(mostly innder)

I suppose the problem is when it stops being inner, and it starts spilling outward.

The critics are for people who have more refined taste and don't enjoy strictly commercial movies - so, it's ok if you don't get the critics, as they're not their audience.

The "art critic" is there to foster consensus on the appreciation of the art so that the market can more easily set a price tag, like an erudite stock analyst.

> The "art critic" is there to foster consensus on the appreciation of the art so that the market can more easily set a price tag, like an erudite stock analyst.

Most art criticism is for museum shows, where the work is not for sale.

That the artists' work in a museum is not for sale only increases the value of it.

Does it? And value to whom? The work has no sale value, because nobody is selling.

You might be interested in the book, 'Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe' by Robert Jensen.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691029269/ma...

Here's how I approach art criticism: It used to be intimidating for me, because I worried I was failing when I didn't understand some 'great' art, or when I liked a less appreciated piece. Art isn't technical writing; easy understanding isn't the goal. It's made for exploring and growing; if I already knew it all and understood it all, it wouldn't be art (arguably); it certainly wouldn't be the art for me.

I don't see art experts "classify" art as good or bad; they aren't scoring art like an Olympic gymnastic performance. What they do is provide a way of looking at a piece of art that may open your eyes and show you things you might not have seen, like a tour guide to ancient Rome. The guide necessarily makes value judgements about what is most worth seeing, which is helpful to me - if I chose by myself, I wouldn't chose nearly as well. And the guide can give me context and perspective and point out details and patterns that I might not have noticed. The guide has a lifetime of studying and touring Rome; I just visited for the week.

When I read an art expert say, for example, that a piece is a 'great art' and I don't grasp it, now I think: There's something here I'm missing, something to find that's wonderful. I don't always find it, sometimes it takes decades; there's no rush. I've learned to see much that I couldn't before, and it's indeed been wonderful and life-changing, and I wouldn't have looked in many of those places without someone who had already been there telling me about it.

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