The collapse

The collapse of Artforum in October 2023 only accelerated an already dire situation for art criticism. Like a critically endangered species, its native habitats have been felled at an alarming rate in this no-longer-young century. Art needs new publications that pay writers a lot of money for intelligent criticism — so they can write about artists who don’t live in New York, work in registers other than facile praise or exegesis, and experience emotions other than the fear and desperation stoked by precarity. Also they should be actually edited, which is somehow not standard industry practice, so please pay editors too. My generation (millennials) was the first to natively experience art and artists’ social media and thus, amidst the simultaneous decline of art reviewing, had to suffer through the elevation of some of the worst artists in human history … but I think everyone has become a lot more sophisticated since then, and many probably have synthesized brilliant takes. Platform them!

There must be a firewall between money and judgment. Today’s ecosystem prioritizes the promotional over the analytical, and the financial entanglements between galleries, collectors, and publications merge in a feedback loop of affirming mediocrity. I have to say, book reviewing puts art criticism to shame — perhaps precisely because there are a lot fewer zeros in publishing. It’s no coincidence that the field where criticism remains most vital (perhaps too vital — I’ve lost track of the Place-name Reviews of Books) is, compared to art and music, the least profitable. You don’t stand to lose your livelihood — your spot on junkets, invitations to write for catalogs — if you pick fights with other writers. Indeed, the 2010s and 2020s, at least when X was still called Twitter, have been, as the critic Ryan Ruby has observed, a golden age for book criticism. Meanwhile, the art market floated higher and higher, inflated by hot markets and irrational exuberance, and today bobs merrily in the sky, from where art reviews must look like specks on the ground.

Book reviews regularly change their subjects’ careers, force introspection, affect sales, form Joker origin stories, etc. What would have to change for more and better art criticism to actually impact art? Above all, publishing venues that are both brave enough and profitable enough to alienate advertisers, mega-galleries, collectors, and board members — habitats where actual thought, not just press releases, can survive. Book reviews also change their writers’ lives: advancing a larger project of fiction or nonfiction, burnishing reputations, fostering new commissions. On one hand, duh — book reviewers are writers — but don’t forget, many more artists (Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Howardena Pindell, Barbara Kruger …) used to write. It’s exciting for everyone in the critical field to have some participants with extra skin in the game. So: let’s get artists reviewing again.