In his recent book What Happened to Art Criticism?, art historian James Elkins argues that “Art criticism is not considered as part of the brief of art history: it is not an historical discipline, but something akin to creative writing.”
If we agree that the state of current art criticism is worrisome enough to warrant some serious soul-searching, then his is the right way to come to grips with what it really is.
Elkins lists seven categories of art criticism: the commissioned catalogue essay; the academic treatise; cultural criticism, blending art and popular culture “in a rich stew”; conservative lambastings that set things straight, insisting on valuation and judgment; the philosophical essay (which could easily be merged with the academic treatise); descriptive art criticism — by far the most popular form, a shift from earlier conventions of art criticism when the objective was judgment and philosophical engagement; and poetic criticism, a form of writing that, though it has works of art as its subject, is really about the writing itself.
But to really differentiate between art history and art criticism, we need to take the liberty of adding an eighth entry to Elkins’s list: blurbs written by art historians expressly for the purpose of reproduction on the back covers and dust-jackets of books written by their colleagues.
You might argue that this isn’t art criticism, properly speaking, because what the blurb refers to is a scholarly argument and not a work of art, one that unfolds in a text and takes the form of a product that will be bought and sold. On the face of it, that would be true, but that’s why we also have to look the book in the rear, not just in the face. When we do, we can see that the art history book blurb is very clearly connected Elkins’s ideas, particularly of cultural criticism and committed valuation. Their brevity, and their purpose, almost demands that they be pure validation.
And it is of course also true that some blurbs, in their concise phrasing and ability to throw the weight of the blurb-writer’s status behind the sales pitch, are poetic in their crafting of language, emotionally compelling, and politically provocative. Here’s one good example, chosen nearly at random from my bookshelf:
“Crary is the historian-philosopher of our spectacle-lives.” — Artforum (back cover of Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2001).
Behold how the blurb’s aphoristic style permits the writer to launch into product endorsement and, just as it starts to sound like precisely that, to stamp it with illustrious credentials and cut and run, retreating into the polished taste and scholarly restraint that makes it look as though a blurb-writer would only pause from scholarship or artistry in order to advertise for colleagues (and then only for a few lines or so) if the book were really good.
