Last Judgment

We are all here for the whipping: Way over a hundred people stuffed into Artists Space's basement, the air moist from human respiration and wet umbrellas. The many of us who do not manage to secure a seat are standing, sitting on the ground, or leaning on walls for the 90-minute conversation between long-time friends and collaborators Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster, moderated by Pam Lee. Buchloh’s 2021 retirement and subsequent publication of Exit Interview (2024) provide the occasion, and we are here to listen to this man whose intellectual influence is hard to overestimate: Tell us how to distinguish between good and bad art! What is the position of criticism today? Quo vadis, Benjamin? Like the script in a movie watched over and over, we know what is about to follow, and still, we are here for it, ready to rewatch this melodrama of art.

Sandwiched between pleasure and pain, we get what we got so many times before: a crash course in 20th-century art history combined with a theory of history, a story of complicity and recuperation, announced with Buchloh’s signature German syntax extrapolated into English: subject–object–verb, you must know how it ends before you even start. Only this time, this story is glazed with bits and pieces of an intellectual autobiography. We learn of the turns in his life that sparked turns in his thinking: From an obsession with Kafka to a short-lived stint in 1968 political activism in the midst of commune life in the Berlin bohemia, from an aborted Ph.D. in Literature, a failed career as a novelist to eventual settlement in the art world, first as an assistant of the gallerist Rudolf Zwirner and then as an in-house critic of various Studio M.F.A. programs to finally arrive in his late 40s in what was then CUNY’s powerhouse Art History Ph.D. program. The progression from one episode to another is recounted as involuntary passage, one of pressure and release, pressure and release, pressure and release.

Thought follows life, and accordingly, Buchloh narrates himself to displace the disappointed political aspirations of 1968 onto artistic practice, asking aesthetics to realize what wasn’t possible in politics. Very much in line with the New Left dictum, aesthetics is equated with ideology, and art is being charged, or overcharged, to debunk both simultaneously: Negate conventions, deconstruct institutions, deskill your craft, he demands. Art must engage in its own “self-destruction — as emotion, as experience, as aesthetic gratification,” he writes in Exit Interview. And it is only in art’s war on itself, this pathologizing of one’s practice, that a modicum of pleasure is finally allowed to emerge, a kind of inverse sublimation in which pleasure’s sole justification is the deprivation of pleasure. If this recipe is not abided by, if the artist is not fully negating their own complicity in ideology, neglecting their duty to confess their sins, we, the audience, will continue to live in our naïve ignorance. A kind of minister then, the artist preaches to protect his congregation, guiding us through the ever-looming seductions of the flesh. Art, and its demure assistant, the art critic, are thus neither really engaged in an aesthetic nor a political quest but a moral one, the impossible struggle for innocence and purity.

Alas, the struggle has a syntactical quality. How many of Buchloh’s sentences start with their own fallibility, the admission of mistakes, shortcomings, and selfishness, his confessions of having a “character flaw” and “idiosyncratic personality.” This incessant self-flagellation has several functions: first, the confessional quality makes it hard, if not impossible, to disagree. After all, you would out yourself as a real sadist if you took pleasure in hitting a dead horse. Moreover, applying impossible moral standards to himself gives Buchloh the right to extrapolate this rigid morality onto others. Accordingly, only the ones who recognize the impossible task they are up to, the ones who know that they are trying to do the right thing in the wrong world, the ones who continue to stage this very failure over and over, may survive Buchloh’s art historical purgatory.

Failing to concede this failure is inevitable. And Buchloh keeps the score. On his narrow list of enlightened artists, less than a handful manage to close their careers with grace. (Notably, Marcel Broodthaers’s museological deconstructions are spared thanks to his short career). The rest “sells out.” What exactly this means remains vague: In Daniel Buren’s and Donald Judd’s case, it is repeatedly mentioned that their respective selling out consisted in collaborating with fashion designers Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein. The implication is that they caved to art’s commodity status. But the point is less conclusive than it appears: When exactly does receiving money for services constitute selling out? Is this about a certain sum, e.g., when artists become greedy, not just generating wages but actual profits through their art? Or is this about artists accepting money from the wrong sources? Buchloh, unfortunately, never explicitly ventured these questions throughout his long career, yet again substituting the lack of an actual analysis with a moral conviction: Money is bad, ornament is bad, surplus is bad. Since art is based on society’s surplus, itself the result of exploitation and extraction, art is inherently guilty, and the only exit route is confronting and confessing its original sin, with each work anew.



By the time the talk reaches its conclusion, the script deviates from its regularity: Buchloh takes his self-flagellation one step further, announcing that his criticism has become obsolete, that he might have been wrong all along. Heads are red, sweat pearls on foreheads, it is very hot now, only three people left the room over the course of 90 minutes, and two have returned: There is obvious dissensus over these remarks in the crowd. Is there any light left in this aesthetic purgatory?

I personally feel ambiguous. It is true that I find his theory of history, the transfiguration of 20th-century art history into a game of chess, too schematic; it is equally true that I find the subordination of politics and art to a narrow ethics of consumption reductive. But there is something to preserve here. Take the close dialogues he cultivated with artists and the way he paired artists and theorists, most profoundly on view in the Nova Scotia Series, which he edited. For all the talk of deconstruction and negation, there is something impressive in his obsessive ordering, the distilling of practices into positions, almost giving way to something one might annotate as Buchloh’s joy. Yes, it is truly over, and we are free to go now. But make sure to buy the book, it’s a pleasure.