Anyone that thinks that art criticism is dead should take note of the BBC’s Modern Beauty season. It’s provided a platform for a number of great, thoughtful long-form critical pieces examining modern art and the place of beauty within art. Sadly Matthew Colling’s treatise on What Is Beauty is already lost in the BBC’s archive (shown on BBC2, meaning a lack of endless BBC4 repeats), but two shows are still available for a few days: Waldemar Januszczak’s Ugly Beauty and Dr Gus Casely-Hayford’s Where is Modern Art Now?.
I have to read a lot of reviews of art for Loca London, and I’ll say it’s a pretty miserable experience – short-form reviews of anything tend towards “I liked it”/“I didn’t”, and on top of this the difference between professional critics and other journalists (or writing on the Internet) is huge. I’d love to include reviews from more offbeat places, but the newspaper critics tend to illuminate the subject more – feel free to tell me where I should be looking.
The world of art criticism is, thankfully, a league above that of food and restaurant criticism, which is mired in cursory glances at what was eaten, if you’re lucky. Restaurant review blogs tend towards the dreadful, with notable exceptions for those that attack one subject and can therefore provide background, history and multiple angles (such as A Hamburger Today and Slice). I’ve found the FT’s coverage of food and restaurants to be the best of the newspapers, but the real critics of food these days are the chefs themselves. Their cookbooks often provide context, history, and the thoughts behind the recipes; something like the Fat Duck cookbook is actually three books in one – a history, a recipe book and the science behind the food. The elBulli cookbooks don’t even include the recipes in the books any more – they’re stored on CD. What’s considered more important is detailing the thought process of each year’s creations, and documenting new practice.
I can’t help feeling that the food and restaurant industry would do well to encourage forthright, intelligent criticism, separate from those that make money from selling food. Some is starting to come from indie publishers – Meatpaper, Fire and Knives – but we’re nowhere near to the likes of Brillat-Savarin or MFK Fisher. Clifton Fadiman says in the introduction to the Art of Eating “The ability to enjoy eating, like the ability to enjoy any fine art, is not a matter of inborn talent alone, but of training, memory and comparison. Time works for the palate faithfully and fee-lessly.” Where are our generation’s faithful feerless food critics?
I think you’re already reading the right art critics, Chris. In the UK, I’d put Waldemar Januszczak, Jonathan Jones (though I fear his blogging for the Guardian may have reduced the force of his writing in the last couple of years) and Matthew Collings (for his wacky style) at the top of the list. Cabinet’s Brian Dillon and Frieze’s Dan Fox are also good, but more academic). And in the States, Jerry Saltz and Dave Hickey stand out.
(Last year the Economist attempted to identify the best arts critics – got the obvious choices for books (Wood) and film (Lane), but no/few art critics. http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/884 )
— Rod McLaren 25.11.09 #
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