Death Becomes Them

Art criticism is a macabre business. In a realm that celebrates novelty, how could things be otherwise? Like fashionistas, market analysts and cool hunters, art critics are always on the lookout for the emerging trends – and all too happy to use the newest one to kill off the last. Once the critics sign the death certificate – for a medium, a movement or an epoch – the art historians take over, dissecting, embalming and sometimes erecting a memorial. Alas, death is the only way to get a chance at immortality.

These days, critics are being asked to confirm a demise that comes closer to home. A sample of the queries that have landed in my mailbox: Has the curator replaced the critic? Is criticism relevant? Is the collector the new critic? At a panel during the last Art Basel Miami Beach, money was the force threatening to take over the kingdom of criticism and its population of subjective opinions. We critics certainly deserve a taste of our own poison – although getting an invitation to one of these panels is like being asked to attend your own funeral, except you must prove that you shouldn’t be buried. If your eulogy is good – and lively – enough, the whole ceremony might just be called off.

Am I dead? There are some signs that my shelf-life is rapidly coming to an end, apart from the dark circles under my eyes. Rankings for top artists, gallerists and curators regularly appear, but no magazine ranks critics, let alone highlights new talents. What critic – what review, essay or catalogue – makes the top ten lists in the annual peer assessments? In the popular press, prices trump opinions. With spectacular selling prices, an auction will make headlines around the world; no one cares what critics wrote about the artworks under the hammer. One just never reads: Koons breaks own record despite Saltz bashing. When Vanity Fair mapped out the celestial bodies of the artworld – orbiting around Larry Gagosian – there wasn’t a single critic in the universe, not even as a falling star.

There are no easy solutions to this situation, whether dismal or well-deserved. The first problem seems obvious: who is going to rank the critics? In his reviews for The Guardian, Adrian Searle occasionally evaluates the catalogue essays, but that’s usually when he doesn’t like the writing. If Searle compiled the ‘bottom ten’ every year, who would list the top – and do so without citing rival publications? Curators, who regularly evaluate each other’s efforts, don’t have this problem, as there are far more exhibitions than magazines. While magazines shy away from relativising the judgements of their own critics, panel discussions about the critic’s death tend to reinforce the total autonomy of criticism. While tolling the death knell, these panels usually fail to invite the very rivals who have supposedly driven a stake through the critics’ heart. Indeed, the Art Basel Miami Beach panel united Searle with fellow critics Holger Liebs, Raphael Rubinstein, as well as critic-curator Dave Hickey and artist Liam Gillick – curator-critic Daniel Birnbaum moderated. We’ve all heard that money talks, but who exactly was the voice of money, representing its interests and explaining its perspective on this panel? Liam Gillick? Far from staging a fair trial – let alone a lively debate between sparring opponents with different callings – such panels cast the critic as victim, suspect, judge and jury all rolled into one. Left uncontested, criticism appears more powerful, but so do its opponents, whose positions are never expressed and thus also remain uncontested.

My own near-death experiences are strikingly similar. For the talk ‘Shaping Public Discourse: Daily Art Criticsm’ at Utrecht’s BAK in December, I spoke with Swiss critic Samuel Herzog and Dutch critic Rutger Pontzen; no one represented ‘the research-based, collaborative and discursive (!) practices … that call for a different sort of critical engagement’. My first trial was the symposium ‘Art Criticism for whom?’ held at Frankfurt’s Städelschule in March 2006. The quick answer to that question: a group of critics from America and Russia, a few student on-lookers and Birnbaum moderating as the rector of the Städelschule and director of Portikus. In his speech, Birnbaum said the heyday of Clement Greenberg was over. No one had managed to fill his shoes, although many had stepped on them. I couldn’t agree more – but likely not for the same reasons. Greenberg, as infamous for his opinions as his conflicting interests, could have never ended up directing something like Portikus and Städelschule while curating biennials and exhibitions around the world (and that’s probably a blessing for all of us). Whatever one thinks of Greenberg, in his heyday and beyond, critics could be just critics; Birnbaum belongs to a new generation that mixes criticism with curating. Ultimately, what we are mourning – or celebrating – is the death of the critic who did little else but criticise. What is forgotten is the birth of a powerful crossover in the critic-curator. But why do critics feel impelled to curate? Why are curators under pressure to publish or perish? The real ghost haunting all these panels is the long-gone autonomy of both activities – a bygone era when these were separate jobs to be done by different people. The conflicts of interest that can occur when one person does both tasks – like the conflict of top-tenning an artist, only to exhibit her work a few months later – are bodies that have been buried alive.

As many will remember, the most influential obit of the critic was penned by Marc Spiegler for The Art Newspaper in what now appears as an odd, if not ironic, argument: the curator was becoming more influential than the critic, as if critic-curator didn’t even exist. The key quote came from Power Ekroth, a Stockholm-based critic-curator: ‘TK.’ Of course, Spiegler now heads research and development for Art Basel – an appointment that put one of the most active market observers in the active service of the market. Both Spiegler and Birnbaum entered the artworld through publishing and then moved onwards and upwards. Birnbaum – while a philosopher involved with cultural-intellectual magazines, from KRIS to the excellent Materials – began writing exhibition reviews for Swedish newspapers in the 90s, first for the popular Expressen and then for Dagens Nyheter, which in retrospect looks like the most successful curatorial training program ever created by Sweden, at least if one considers the stellar careers of its former critics: Birnbaum, Maria Lind (now heading the Bard curatorial program), Sara Arrhenius (director of Stockholm’s TK) and Lars Nittve (director of Moderna Museet). Over in Paris, the case of Jérôme Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud, the founding co-directors of the Palais de Tokyo, is just as telling. Both started out as critics working for rival publications; Bourriaud, while writing for publications such as Art Presse and the once-superb documents, co-founded the review Perpendiculaire with Michel Houellebecq, among others. The passage of Bourriaud and Sans from criticism to freelance curating and then onto institutional positions was unheard of in France, where most directors go through the prestigious École du Louvre. When Serge Lemoine was appointed director of the Musee d’Orsay in TK, tongues were wagging because he had no other training beyond a mere doctorate – and in art history, of all fields! Now that model-singer Carla Bruni looks set to become the first lady, the job qualifications for public positions have obviously loosened up in France.

As a critic and journalist – with even darker circles under my eyes after all this work – I would never argue that Birnbaum et al were ‘mere critics’ who managed to turn journalistic careers into institutional curatorial positions. But somehow, during the 90s, writing about exhibitions and making exhibitions – reception and production – became intertwined. And so intertwined that today it’s next to impossible to find a critic who doesn’t curate and to name a curator who doesn’t publish. In the tale told about the rise of freelance curator in the 90s – which in fact saw the fusion of the critic and the curator, freelance or otherwise – Harald Szeemann is usually mentioned, if not as mentor, then as pioneer. Yet in comparison with Birnbaum, Arrhenius, Bourriaud and others, Szeemann walked in the completely opposite direction: beginning as the director of an institution and ending up with freelance curating and writing. While it’s significant that Szeemann was never deemed a critic, the key to the critic-curator may be Seth Siegelaub, who transformed the printed page with the help of conceptual artists into a multifunctional, mobile unit, combining the exhibition with the art work with the catalogue. Print – books, flyers, magazines or newspapers – still enjoys a wider circulation, a greater visibilty and a longer shelf-life than any institutional show, even one that hits the road. Because most artists have since come to view the published page as a format for exhibiting their work, the critic-curator seems an inevitable development, just as the confusion of criticism and art with publicity. Another key lies in the spread of critical theory from the 80s onwards. If artworks needed texts with more than art history, who else but critics – with an eye for novel concepts and not just art – could write them? Curators, who generally trained in art history before curatorial training programmes emerged in the late 80s, had to polish up on Derrida and postmodernism. Then again, one can argue that relational aesthetics required experts in public relations and thus invented the critic-curator hybrid, with an insider knowledge of the press and a spot on the editorial board. The realm of public opinions hardened – or blossomed – into institutionalized policies. In the end, these arguments may be nothing more than ghost stories. Yet telling them is less scary and more fun than wondering for whom the bell tolls.