Critic on Criticism

Amy over at ARTery tipped me to a really interesting article by Jerry Salz on art criticism. Read that article here.

And Amy also notes that NYC gallerist and fellow blogger Edward Winkleman has responded and his response has created a whole series of interesting comments, with the usual anon attacks that seem to follow any art discussion, and the usual easily bruised writer who dishes it out with brutal gusto but can't take it when it bounces back, etc.

There are, however, otherwise some really good points in the comments.

The key issue to me?

Winkleman smartly notes that

With art, in New York City, there's no such guarantee you'll ever know [whether a critic liked a show], even when you know they saw it, even for the largest artists or most powerful galleries. If The New York Times, for example, on average, publishes 7 major reviews and two articles in each Friday edition, that totals about 470 reviews each year. The problem is there are more about 470 exhibitions per month*, meaning that more than 11/12ths of all exhibitions will not be reviewed in the Times. For the Village Voice, the number of reviews is fewer than half that. So if you are the lucky artist who gets a review, you've already beaten incredible odds. At that point, for the review to be unfavorable seems almost cruel.

Translate that into Washingtonese, and remember that the WaPo has only two gallery reviews a month, plus one in Weekend section every once in a while (and thank God for those!).

And, uh... the WaPo's Chief Art Critic is too good to write about DC area art galleries or DC artists on a regular basis (except to note when they are barely emerging).

So let's say... four gallery reviews a month (and yeah, I know once a month is the multiple mini-review day) at the WaPo.

And on any given month in the Greater Washington area there are (by the time you add the independent fine art galleries, the non profits, the embassy galleries and the cultural centers) around 100 different visual art shows to choose from.

And at least NYC has a whole bunch of newspapers, plus all the NYC-centric art mags, all the freebies, etc. to augment the NYT's coverage.

Other than the WaPo, we should be grateful that the City Paper covers as many shows as they do. But even adding the CP's coverage, the chance of an artist or show to be reviewed in print in our area is pretty slim.

As Larry David would say: "Pretty, pretty slim!"

So if we take Winkleman's point that "at that point, for the review to be unfavorable seems almost cruel" -- then we have some pretty f&^%$# cruel writers in the nation's capital area, don't we?

Art criticism should (in fact it must) have teeth; but it must also be even. When was it the last time that you read a published review around our area where the critic was really passionate about a show that she/he really liked?

Pretty, pretty cruel.