How much power do art critics really wield?
We’ve all heard about the pressure on critics to go soft. But what actually happens when an artist gets a bad review? By Jo Lawson-Tancred
When R.B. Kitaj was invited to stage a retrospective at the Tate in 1994, he was a well-respected painter at the centre of the ‘School of London’, the term he had coined to describe a loose group of London-based figurative artists two decades earlier. In what would become known as the ‘Tate war’, the exhibition was derided by the British press. The Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell famously accused Kitaj of producing ‘thoroughly bad pictures at a prodigious rate’ while Andrew Graham-Dixon in The Independent wrote that the exhibition ‘presents the dispiriting, admonitory spectacle of an oeuvre ruined by fatal self-delusion’. Kitaj took it badly and blamed the stress of the situation for the death that year of his wife, Sandra Fisher, from a brain aneurysm. Following the artist’s own death by suicide in 2007, Jonathan Jones wrote an article titled ‘Did art critics kill R.B. Kitaj?’ ‘Why destroy an artist so cruelly?’ Jones asked. ‘What was gained?’
Though an extreme example, the Kitaj incident reveals some of the complexities surrounding criticism of living artists, raising the question of how a negative review might impact them personally – not to mention their careers. And indeed, with large amounts of money at stake, the issue has increasingly preoccupied not just artists but stakeholders across the industry, placing growing pressure on the opinion of the critic. As Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight tells me: ‘In my experience critics don’t shy away from negative reviews, editors do. In the trades, the managers have gallery and museum ad revenue to worry about.’
But should market players be worrying about negative reviews? In the 1999 book High Art Lite, the art historian Julian Stallabrass analysed the booming market for new British art in the 1990s, concluding that ‘[t]he realms of the mass media and the private art market are linked but distinct, each operating according to its own rules’. There are plenty of more recent examples that illustrate this distinction, with artists like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and KAWS frequently scorned or ignored by the press. Certainly, once an artist has already reached ‘blue-chip’ status, they are seemingly impervious to flack. Some have never known different and persevered anyway. With money rolling in, critical acclaim may not be their personal measure of success.
As Damien Hirst put it, when discussing the divided response to his installation at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2017: ‘As an artist, the best you can hope for is people arguing, mixed reviews. Love it and hate it. If you get that, then you’re on the right track. If everyone loves or everyone hates it, you’re in trouble.’
I recently spoke to an artist with a first-hand experience of critical disapproval. In the mid 1990s, just as Kitaj was falling out of favour with critics, the painter Marcus Harvey was beginning to make a name for himself amid the burgeoning scene of the YBAs. Though Harvey doesn’t believe he ever received a glowing review, he generally found critics willing to engage: ‘The interesting reviews understood the argument in the work and connected with it. It was an expected conversation around the boundaries of art, which I thought led to a fairly interesting debate.’
The tone shifted dramatically in 1997, when Harvey became the most reviled participant in ‘Sensation’, Norman Rosenthal’s provocative YBA showcase at the Royal Academy in London. Harvey’s image of Moors murderer Myra Hindley, a reproduction of her mugshot painted with child-size handprints, was attacked by protestors and had to be removed for restoration. The story was catnip for the tabloids in particular – The Mirror labelled it ‘sickening’ and several papers quoted the mother of one of Hindley’s victims, who called it ‘disgusting’. Harvey argued that the media had itself originally profited from the image that he’d ‘had forced down my throat since I was a toddler’. ‘There were death threats, so for me it was more than just criticism,’ he says. In terms of his standing in the art world, ‘it typecast me, and that was quite damaging’.
The denouncements weren’t enough to totally put buyers off. ‘Dealers are not really interested in even-handed art criticism, they are just interested in things that sell,’ says Harvey. Charles Saatchi, having purchased Myra for £11,000, later got an estimated £100,000 for it. Still, Harvey maintains that ‘notoriety doesn’t mean success in sales at all, it’s a much more complicated picture’. The sales figure for Myra certainly falls far short of the prices commanded by peers such as Hirst, whose Away from the Flock (1994) from the same exhibition last sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $4.5 million.
Comparing the criticism of the 1990s to that of the present day, Harvey believes art has become harder to criticise because ‘it’s now so closely tied to personal identity that to criticise the work is to criticise the person’.
One high-profile example of these shifting circumstances was New York’s Whitney Biennial in 2019. That year, the long-running survey of contemporary art featured a majority of artists of colour and women artists. Many of the works on view were politically engaged, with prominence given to themes of gender and race.
In an overall tepid review for The Art Newspaper, Linda Yablonsky accused the show of not being radical enough, writing that ‘some artists in the show identify as activists, but there are no revolutionaries among them’. The piece sparked a debate about who is qualified to assess work that relates to experiences tied to specific identities.
One of the show’s heavyweights, sculptor Simone Leigh, addressed the debate on her Instagram. ‘I need to say that if you haven’t read […] a single thing written by Saidiya Hartman or Hortense Spillers,’ the statement begins, referring to two Black American scholars, before reeling off other references including the Lagos-based arts festival FESTAC 77, Congolese activist Pauline Lumumba, and African American dancer Katherine Dunham. ‘If you thought I was being weird when I told you I was too busy sharpening my oyster knife. If you’ve never heard of the Herero Genocide. Then you lack the knowledge to recognize the radical gestures in my work. And that is why, instead of mentioning these things, I have politely said black women are my primary audience.’
Expanding on Leigh’s clear implications, the critic and curator Antwaun Sargent, who has since been appointed a director at Gagosian, wrote on Twitter: ‘it’s not that POC are not writing about art. They are! I read them all the time! It’s that they are never given the big assignments or positions at magazines and newspapers to do so consistently.’ Sargent went on to comment, ‘It’s 2019 and we are in the middle of a Renaissance in black artistic production. And you are telling me the best people to evaluate that are the same ones that basically ignored black artists for decades?’
What these observations foreground is the identity position not just of the artist but also of the critic. They expose the inherent bias of any commentator’s point of view – no longer can the (usually white, male) critic make any kind of claim to objective judgement. In the end it could be the critic who takes the fall rather than the artist.
If they totally miss the point of a work, reviewers fail to illuminate an artist’s motives or ideas. The risk is that an artist loses out on meaningful insight and commentary – even if this takes the form of less-than-positive critique. But should critics – who might certainly be expected to bring some level of expertise to the topic – not also be permitted some space for conjecture?
Responding to the Whitney Biennial controversy in Hyperallergic, Seph Rodney – who has been vocal about his own role as a Black art critic in an overwhelmingly white industry – was sympathetic to Leigh’s point of view and unimpressed by Yablonsky’s use of the undefined yardstick ‘radical’, but cautioned that ‘there are many valid responses to art’ and not all rely on an exhaustive knowledge of historical and theoretical references. ‘Despite my lack of knowledge, the work spoke to me and still keeps speaking,’ he wrote of Leigh’s sculpture in the exhibition. For Rodney, the defensive posture of artists and their advocates risks becoming a ‘kind of gatekeeping’. In a subsequent reflection on his career as an art critic, published upon his departure from Hyperallergic earlier this year, Rodney argued that ‘insightful criticism’ in fact ‘ignores the maker’s sentiments and intentional rhetorical framing of their work; it goes further than that’.
Other critics might choose to focus on evaluating the exhibition and its curatorial premise rather than art itself – perhaps more useful to a reader deciding whether to see a show featuring artists they already know and like.
Either way, the right audience for a work will likely identify itself. Perhaps, then, the industry’s gatekeepers ought to spend less time worrying about what one or two scathing reviews might do to an artist’s career – and instead focus on supporting systems of independent criticism that are separate from market forces. This applies to editors and dealers but also collectors, who may understand more than anyone how subjective the value of art can be. In the end, most will be willing to make their own minds up when looking at art rather than assuming that a single critic’s opinion is the right one.
Jo Lawson-Tancred is an art writer and part-time research associate at the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology in London.