Art Criticism | Does it Still Matter? An Art Curator's Honest Reckoning

Intro: Where to continue your Exhibitionistas experience.

This is Exhibitionista's Notes on Art. I am your host, Art Writer and Curator Joanna Piernevis, and this is your Art Wonderment Podcast in Brussels. That's where I am recording today. If you're new here, you may be wondering what is Art Wonderment? Well, you can go to the last episode where I dropped my Art Wonderment Manifesto of sorts. But in a nutshell, Art Wonderment is about having analog experiences, coming into digital spaces to discuss them, or to listen to those who are discussing them, and to enjoy exploring the different facets of composite realities, which is what defines, in my view, how we feel, how we encompass, how we absorb aesthetic experiences, and how we connect them to life. And also how they live with us through time. If you go to the bottom of the episode's description, so each episode has a little blurb in whatever platform that you listen to your podcasts. And at the very end, there's a link to something called Exhibitionist's Files. It's a subpage of my publication on Substack called Art Thinkosaurus. Over there, I publish texts that develop art questions that I also tackle here in the podcast. But, and I have an episode about this. There is a difference between thinking through writing and thinking through talking. And the episode is called Art Writing versus Speaking About Art, if I'm not mistaken. And if you're on YouTube, the link will probably appear in the right-hand corner, I think, of your screen. Exploring a topic through writing is a completely different relationship to it. All this to say that you can go there, sign up to it, and receive all texts as a newsletter. So heads up, I don't do episode announcement newsletters. They're all about post-editing reflections, continuing your exhibitionist's notes on art experience. But

Today's question: is art criticism still valid?

let's move on to today's question, which is yay or nay to yaying or neighing. A bit obscure, all right. I'm gonna give it another go is saying whether an artwork or an exhibition are good or bad, good or bad. Still going a bit meta here, so I'm gonna give it another go. Art criticism, exhibition reviewing. Are they still valid pieces of writing and critical thinking applied to art experiences? Now, why this question? I will disclose this immediately. It's not my favorite kind of read. But I was a bit negative in the last episode. I did review negatively a book that I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, and I felt a little bit bad about it. There is something in me, and I see that in younger generations as well, that says that in this precarious field that I work for and in this world of visual arts, particularly, not just culture, but really specific, specifically contemporary art and visual arts, is already so precarious, it's so criticized from the outside that if I am to focus on negative critique, I am not building something. I'm kind of destroying the foundations of this field that I treasure so much. But still, that question lingered. And I was reminded of the ongoing discussion about art criticism, which is very specifically the fact that it is in decline. There is talk of the death of art criticism. And so I thought I might as well come clean with the fact that I don't really enjoy that kind of writing because I'm one of those people who is perhaps not reading it as much. I may provide a good barometer, a good testing ground for the reasons why this decline is happening. I did some research and found a really interesting article in The Guardian published about a year ago in August 2025 by Jesse Hassinger. And the title

Why are art critics vanishing? And how?

is The Death of the Review, question mark. But it also mentions a very weird manifestation of that phenomenon in the New York Times. And so I'm going to read the excerpt that talks about it. Hassinger writes, and I quote, four culture critics have recently been reassigned, essentially stripped of their original titles, before being eventually replaced by, well, let's have culture editor Cia Michelle try to explain it. And here the text quotes Michelle as saying, quote, our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews, but also with essays, new story forms, videos, and experimentation with other platforms. And The Guardian Texts continues. Translation! Critics better learn to TikTok, and they better not expect to write so many of their dumb reviews. In reading this, my first reaction was I kind of agree with Michelle. Here I am talking to you via video slash audio. I kind of see where Michelle is going, but the point of view of the guardian critic, so this is someone defending their own territory, is that the art critic veterans are being left to the wolves through what he describes as a quote, misguided rethinking of what criticism even actually

3 guiding questions of the episode: what is it, who does it serve and who is reading - or not

is, unquote. And so my question here is: what is art criticism? Who is reading art criticism? Who is not reading art criticism? And what kind of structure, what kind of system is it serving or is it creating? And finally, I will let you in on my personal arc with art criticism, and I will tell you my honest reckoning with the genre. But just one last thing. So we are having a global discussion or a discussion that globally encompasses all disciplines of culture. But film reviews, yes, by all means, bring them on. Book reviews, book banter, it can light up as a fire that spreads wildly. Visual art reviews, I don't see a lot of people fighting for them. So it really seems to either be something that is constantly overlooked, and we must do something about being more visible, or maybe also, and both can be true, this may be a good thing. It may be telling us that that five-star system of rating cultural pieces may not be right for our own field within culture. It's just a thought, just a hypothesis. But let's let's roll with it.

What is art criticism? A scandal and a text.

So the very, very revered art critic, Peter Sheldor, passed away a few years ago. He was the in-house art critic of the prestigious New Yorker magazine. And the question was: who is going to replace him? The New Yorker surprised everyone by hiring a young writer called Jackson Ahn, in the perspective, perhaps, of embracing the new type of art criticism that the other editor, Michelle, that we talked about before, was referencing. Jackson Ahn, two years in to his position in the New Yorker, was suddenly fired. And riddle me this: he was fired for bad behavior at an industry party, for inappropriate behavior. He has not been replaced thus far. So a year into his dismissal, there has not been a new art critic to replace Jackson Arne. So this is the mood. This is what's disquieting the fields. There won't be a testing ground for whatever is put out there in terms of exhibitions, performances, any manifestation of contemporary art. But I want to start first with one aspect of art criticism that I think is the one that we are afraid of losing, and that is also the most important thing and the thing that characterized it. Why not look into one of the reviews by Peter Sheldon of Wolfgang Tillman's exhibition at the MOMA? And I'm going to read the first two sentences. Here we go. Quote: To look without fear, the immense, flabbergastingly installed retrospective of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans of the Museum of Modern Art persuades me that the man is a genius. There's a downside to the concession. It dampens my quarrels of taste with certain items, among the show's predominantly brilliant several hundred, that I do not like. Unquote. There's three things that I will flag up in this very, very, very short text. These are only two sentences. The first one is the phrase, the man is a genius. The second one is the expression quarrels of taste. So the notion of taste. And the final one is this very simple statement that I do not like. So liking or disliking. The art critic is the person who has the authority to sport quality. So the art critic is the one that is going to establish the genius, the masterpiece. They are going to sport it for you. But then there's the question of tastes. But because they have built an authority, they know what the barometers of good and bad art are, they can rely on their subjectivity, so their tastes, their tendencies, their personal tendencies to assess any exhibition, any piece of art, because they have the experience, they have trained their taste so much that it aligns with notions of quality, established notions of quality overall, or the notions of quality that they established themselves. And here I will draw your attention to, I guess, the most prominent and the most spectacular case of the art critic that had this kind of influence, whose name is Clement Greenberg. So the critic that is attached to abstract expressionism, an American critic of mid-20th century. What Clement Greenberg did was to establish the parameters of what good painting was, to also choose painting as the paragon, the ex libris of modernism, of modernity. And then through those parameters that he established, he would judge whether the artists and their art were worthy or not to be placed in the pantheon of excellence. And so someone like Clement Greenberg could make or break an artist, they could establish an artist. There was enormous power. Across the 20th century, critique was established, so art criticism was established as such. And it was a monolithical, somewhat monolithical era where you had a few art critics, mainly cisgendered men, but not only. And then you had the artists that they promoted who were then found in establishments. This is not linear, obviously. Museums have bad reviews or had bad reviews all the time. It didn't mean that they wouldn't work with those artists, but there was something, there were consequences to having a bad review by revered art critics. I also want to talk about this subjectivity and this question of liking and not liking. So critique is very much predicated upon the notion of quality of something being good or being bad or being average, something in the middle. So that's how whether we like it or not, and whether critique and art criticism does something else, and it surely does, that's the point of the review. The review is accompanied very, very often by a rating from one to five stars. And then you have the question of taste associated with likes and dislikes.

Genius, excellence, quality: are these outdated questions?

And I will draw your attention not to the last episode, but the one before the last, where I talked about Walter Meniemann's seminal book, The Arts, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1935, where I made a point in saying that it is widely misinterpreted because when Walter Benjamin talks about the aura of the artwork, so the here and now being the presence of the artwork as being broken, as being and eroded by the possibility of reproducing images of the work of art through technology and through mass production. When this specific power of the work of art is dampened, Walt and Benjamin doesn't say that that's a bad thing. In fact, he sees this as a liberation from traditional parameters of the existence and the system of the work of art. He says that technology, and these are my words, would allow us to get rid of exclusive access to art and its gatekeeping, along with, and here I quote Walter Benjamin, creativity, genius, everlasting value, and secrecy, unquote. So for Benjamin, this notion of the monolithical assessment of quality that inscribes once and for all an artist or a work of art in the pantheon of excellence is over and done with. It's irrelevant. Now art does something else. What does it do? It becomes political. Not political in the sense of activism. It becomes political because it becomes part of the fabric of society, being accessible to all and being evaluated and judged and contextualized in regards to audiences, to the general public, to curators, and to a plethora of people that come from different cultures, different class backgrounds that can diversify the relationships we have with a work of art. Of course, I'm not saying that now there's no critical relationship with the work of art. There is a sort of multiplication of the function of critical thinking that is not contained by notions of genius, of masterpiece, of excellence, and of everlasting quality. Which means that, and this is Walter Beniemen's philosophy, that certain times call for certain artworks. It doesn't mean that they are dismissed from history, it means that history changes, we change, our needs change, and it's a constant shifting of perspectives that occurs precisely through critical thinking and through this expectation that art has a role in society. If they need, if they have this majestic, irrepressible need to create art, everyone deserves to show it if they want to. There is an audience for every art piece that is being produced out there. I think that there's there aren't enough art spaces. There's this notion nowadays in the markets, this is a very market-driven reflection, that there's too many galleries, there's too many artists, there's too many art fairs. But that's not right. That is, you see, and this is a great example of a critical thinking applied from a certain standpoint, from a certain perspective, from the market point of view, there may be a sort of exhaustion of the collector who is a bit lost in all the offerings that's presented to them. But from another standpoint, from the standpoint of the need to create and the need to see art and to engage with it, why doesn't every hamlet, every village, every little town, every big city have at least one art center, um, one art workshop? And when I say this, I also mean a biology experimentation lab for general audiences. I don't contain this frame of thinking and of institutions and offerings out there only to contemporary art. Going back to what is art criticism and what the art criticism does, so the art critic develops across time and by publishing very regularly genius adjacent status. Because if they are the ones that point to excellence, then by proxy, they also have a certain type of or some of that little gold, little glitter that kind of sprinkles onto them. In the end of his article, Peter Scheldle, you know, the Wolfgang Tillman's article that I read from, Peter Scheld says something that I also find to be kind of the last characteristic of art criticism, which is the man is a genius, which I honestly nowadays find to be a very uncomfortable expression, because we all know that the notion of genius is applied or was applied for all throughout the 20th century and before to males and to male artists, and kind of created this hierarchy. And we know that for each genius there's a long shadow under which many, many great artists are hidden. And so that expression is quite strange, but it is always complemented by the pressure at the end. He be able to pursue this quality, to continue, to keep up with the parameters that he, Wolfgang Tillmans, himself established. And that is also the thing that I think characterizes art criticism, but also sustains this hierarchical structure of culture that has been going on for more than a century. This is not only contemporary and modern art. This has been going on for a while. This notion of keeping up with the quality. Nowadays, you have perhaps less criticism. So the criticism layer is thinning, but on the other side, you have loads of exposure through platforms, through social media, through internet, everything now is exposure. And so this pressure that comes with the tag that is granted to you as the genius is multiplied. Beefs, polemics, um, scandals are constantly being reassessed. There's a big thing called the discourse, which is basically an online phenomenon. And therefore, art criticism in this context becomes even more drastic if it's effective or irrelevant, if now art, as Walter Benjamin suggested, has even if partially entered this space where it is alive and it is an entity that is engaging with the fabric of reality as it unfolds. So what did art criticism strive for? What was it there to do? What is the ideal situation for art criticism? It's the gasp, it's the collective gasp. The no he didn't, no, she didn't, no, they didn't. Is it still happening? For it to be happening, it means that people need to be reading it on an individual level, but it also needs to be read on a collective level.

Who is reading art criticism?

So second question that I'm asking is who is reading art criticism, who isn't? And regardless of the situation of art criticism nowadays, let's try to understand also what system art criticism is creating. What is it serving? Who is it working for? And who is is it not working for potentially? Remember Jackson on the um art critic that was fired from the New Yorker. So shortly after his the scandal that ended his career at the New Yorker, Annie Armstrong wrote on Artnet. The same day it was reported that New Yorker art critic Jackson Arne lost a job after misbehaving at a company party. I got a text from an emerging art dealer with a simple request Who do I reach out to try and get press on the show? And Arnie Armstrong continues, within a few seconds, he followed up to clarify, so sent a second text message, and this was the follow-up message like who reviews shows and stuff, unquote. So if professionals don't read reviews, if the art agents within the art field are not keeping up with the opinion makers and the gatekeepers, who is reading reviews? Who isn't? Why are they not reading reviews? That is the question. But before that, we're gonna go on a short break. We're gonna go into the art etiquette segment. This time I have a great guest who is also a friend, as you will see. Um, she is in Washington, DC, and she has a fabulous, fabulous, amazing, exciting, fascinating job. And as a reminder, art etiquette is the segment where I invite guests who don't work specifically in contemporary art as curators or any adjacent jobs that you may find in that specific field to bring in a question about art. So hang in there and find out what my guest this time brought in as her question. Art etiquette. Elizabeth Botton from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art is a reference specialist. I went there for three months to do some research for my PhD, and we became fast friends when I noticed that she was holding a book of a friend of mine, Pierre Le Guillon, the collection of personal business cards by artists or art-adjacent people. Elizabeth, welcome to Exhibitionistus. Tell me a little bit about the archives.

First, I want to say thank you, Joanna. It's such a pleasure to be here talking with you today. The Archives of American Art was founded at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1954 as a microfilm repository by Edgar P. Richardson, who was the director of the DIA, and Lawrence A. Fleischman, who was a Detroit businessman. And they had this idea that there should be a central repository for American art research and microfilmed archival collections and primary source documents. And they soon realized that they should be actually collecting artist papers. We joined the Smithsonian in 1970. Since the archives was founded, we've amassed more than 6,500 collections, 295 of which are fully digitized, more than 2,600 oral history interviews, about 1,800 of those have online transcripts. It's the world's largest oral history collection. We have more than 2,200 online finding aids. Those 6,500 collections take up about 20,000 linear feet. And in archival terms, a linear foot is about the size of a banker box. We really are the world's largest resource for uh primary source documentation of the history of American art.

It's not art objects, but it's letters and documentation and things that you study when you're researching an artist beyond whatever they produce, right?

We do have, you know, sketchbooks and drawings and some things that are technically works of art, but we don't collect paintings. We do have some uh artifacts as well. We have, you know, like a couple of death masks and purview is broad. We um have the papers um by the directors of the 1913 Armory Show. So you really can't tell the story of the history of modern art and that important exhibition without coming to the archives. We have the papers of one of my favorite artists, Alma Thomas, who is uh um was a DC teacher and was the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art in the 70s.

Alt etiquette.

The rule is very simple. So my question is: how do we make people feel welcome in museum and exhibition spaces when they are not used to museum etiquette and standards of behavior in those spaces? Felt nice to hear you say that our archives is a welcoming space because archives are surveillance spaces. My primary responsibility in my role when I'm sitting in the reading room is the health and safety of the collections. And we do have very specific rules that we lay out. So I'd love to hear what you think about that. When you get the boxes, you think, why am I touching this?

Like, I can't touch these. These are archival items, you know. So you get fast struck with objects. One of the things I really like about museums is that you don't need anything but yourself in there. Just need your body, just need to be, it's like sex. You can do it with your own body without it.

You can have props, but I mean, I I will say it's not about sex, but sometimes I'll go into a show and I won't read anything because I don't want to know. I just want to like have an experience with whatever is hanging on the wall. And sometimes that's quite profound. Although I do think, I mean, and I'm biased working in an archives, but the preparatory materials, the things that artists collect and save in their papers can be fascinating. Source material is fascinating to have that knowledge of what an artist uses to get to whatever ends up on the wall, that can really inform the viewer. Um, not all archival material requires reading or is boring to look at.

So the etiquette in the museum is like I was saying, you bring your lovely self, you only need your body, your eyes, your senses open, but it's always a sort of like fully embodied experience. And suddenly you see a vitrine with archives, you see vitrine with maybe objects or maybe books. And if they're presented in a certain way, that sort of hinders that experience of freedom of just, I'm just here, taking it all in.

I used to have a Saturday job at a non-Smithsonian museum in town for a few years. And sometimes it was hectic. Like, you know, it's always a little bittersweet to have to tell someone to step back when, you know, when they're, you know, this close to a work of art because they just want to experience and see it. It's also the way that museums keep objects around for many years so they can be enjoyed.

Yeah, there's the whole conundrum of to preserve is to kill the experience of the what.

I did see an interesting show in New York a few years ago. Um, this artist Ez Devlin at the Cooper Hewitt. They do all sorts of work, but they also are a um, they do like stage production design for like major pop and rock stars. But I remember going into the exhibition, and before you were allowed to go in, you had to sit down at this table. They used a lot of um projectors, projecting a flipping book onto a table. And it, I I will say, like in the moment I was not so open-minded because I had a little bit of limited time and I wanted to get on with looking at the exhibition and not be forced to watch this like A V presentation. And sometimes I just don't like to be told what to do. But I, you know, I listened and paid attention, and it was actually a an interesting presentation. But something that was also really incredible to me was they had this whole wall. You couldn't touch it, you couldn't pick things up and look at it, but this whole wall chalk full of sketchbooks and notebooks. It was like everything was facing out and there was like a cord that held them. And that was really interesting to me because it it gave me an insight into what this artist was about, without slamming me with, you know, didactic panels.

I I do take your point and I do agree with you. And I think this is really important because you, as a reference specialist, working in archives, you are saying that you value archive sharing by living artists.

I mean, our mission at the Archives of American Art is to collect material, preserve material, but the point of all of that is to make it accessible. Obviously, not everything is meant to be accessible, and an artist is not required to give away, you know, all of their secrets or everything about their life. But like we try to level the playing field by saying, here are the rules. You can work with one box at a time, you can have one folder at a time. You put this box marker in so all the folders stay in order. But we do that with everyone. The degree to which someone listens or not, I cannot control. I've also had to, you know, ask a donor looking at their papers, can you please put the folder flat on the table instead of leaning back in your chair? You know, and I know how that's tempting because it they are your papers, but like it's my job to protect them. And, you know, usually they're like, of course, and there's actually an appreciation because it it shows a care. If my contribution to art history is taking staples out of a group of documents before someone photocopies them so they don't bend and eventually tear, I mean, that's not a small thing.

Yeah, I love what you just said because it makes me think that archives, sketchbooks, that's the material from where you bounce back into the work empowered. And there's another thing that I found interesting in what you said, which is that the specific behavioral rules of any place talking about exhibition spaces is a bit like a game. Enjoy it. You need to know the rules of the game.

You know, I make mistakes too. I went to a big retrospective of a famous Mexican artist who you definitely would have heard of and completely missed the sign that there were no photographs allowed, and I was just all over the place, like mapping away. And everyone was giving me these dirty looks. And I said to my friend after I was like, People were so rude. You didn't see the sign. Well, they should have told you then.

Why didn't your friend tell you? People were like, she's a fat ass, and she's just taking bitches. And as you said, both you and I have made horrible mistakes. I mean, I have the Hegie Haigui Young episode where I have a laughing fit because I realized midway there was a sign that set to touch and I was touching the wrong artwork. And everybody was looking at me like does she work here? Does your work in archives affect what you favor in contemporary art?

I sometimes secretly like the archives more than the works of art because I find the, you know, what goes into it so so interesting. And that's probably it's not gonna be a secret anymore. Maybe not, maybe not. Okay, just okay to say. Artists look at so many things besides art. Like obviously, art students grow up going, you know, you go to museums, you're looking at techniques, but artists look at nature, they look at literature, they look at poetry, music. Like art is really about life and philosophy and science and all these things. We have a lot of preaching. We have we have a lot of papers of ceramics. That's alchemy and science, you know. We have documents and papers of artists being witnessed to historical events. It was one of I don't remember which Peel it was. There were so many of these, you know, early American painters from the Peel family, but we have an account of witnessing President Lincoln's funeral cortege. Thinking about what that means. So it's like this insight into a historical event. I mean, you know, you can't really get much better than that.

Well, thank you. This was lovely. Thank you so much for this conversation and your question. That I think we kind of strayed from quite a bit. As per usual.

And we Lucy Lapard uh gave us an addition to her papers a while ago, so you have to come back at some point.

Art etiquette. At a time where anything can be measured, we can know exactly how many clicks an article gets. We know how many people a certain author, a certain journalist drives to online publications. If art critics are being repurposed, as it were, or if they are being dismissed, it's because they do not bring clicks, they do not bring a readership important enough in terms of numbers to keep up with this tradition. You are not reading art criticism, I am not reading art criticism, we are not, and when I say we, I'm talking about our own field of contemporary art. So we as professionals are not reading art criticism, or maybe we all are, and the general public is no longer reading art criticism. Does this mean that contemporary art is in crisis and the general public is no longer attracted to it? Or does it mean that in fact none of us are reading art criticism? And there is indeed a crisis for that very specific type of writing. Both can be true, but the reality is that the clicks are not coming. Something is wrong, and good business acumen will tell you to let go of that specific kind of publication or to redefine it. Because there is a recognition that critical thinking is important, but maybe the shape that it has been taking is perhaps not on par with the needs of readers out there, be it within the profession or outside of it. Another thing that I want to point out that Annie Armstrong's article reveals plainly, clear as they is that there's still demand for art criticism because this particular emergent dealer wanted their exhibition, so their gallery show to be reviewed. And that tells me that art criticism serves a very specific purpose, which is to hold an argument for an artist, whether you're a gallerist or an institution. And here I can give you an example. I noticed something really, really peculiar at the end of last year in the museum where I had a show going, so I was particularly attentive to their presence on social media. And they did something quite odd, which was to rank their own exhibitions, so to give a sort of hierarchy of the exhibitions that they produced and therefore the artists that they showcased. I was really shocked by that ranking because, well, for me it was too late because I had just opened the exhibition, so I thought my exhibition, of course, is not there. For the artists who presented their work in that institution that supposedly has a mission of safekeeping, of promotion, of treating equally extremely famous artists and less established artists was creating a ranking. I wondered how that ranking was done, and I suppose that it was a ranking based on art criticism. So the number of stars that each of their shows garnered. Still, that left me wondering is this good practice? And I wonder if rather than defending themselves as institutions, using art criticism and using numbers, we actually should or shouldn't be teaching sponsors, uh the wealth system that we rely on to exist, to actually understand attention, to understand engagement, because compulsively clicking, and I talk about that in the digital hygiene episode, compulsively clicking on something because we're tired doesn't mean huge engagement. Shall we go a bit further in the analysis of a gallerist who doesn't read art criticism nevertheless still wanting art criticism to inscribe their exhibition, their gallery, their artist in that wall of fame that can be um five stars, four stars review of an exhibition. If we go a little bit further into this reflection, it means that it's not really the critical thinking that the gallerist is valuing, it is the exposure. And that's where the bow breaks. That's where I think this whole reflection and this whole reassessment of what art criticism is and what it does can hinge upon. Because we can understand what art criticism does, how it works, what kind of pleasure it gives the reader, what kind of information it provides. But within the art system, it is a matter of being able. To list at the end of a portfolio all the media appearances that the artist had, and therefore the attention that the artist garnered, which means the power that the artist has and the power by proxy that the gallery enjoys. So it is a question of sales, it is a question of promotion and marketing, and not a question of deep analysis, which is what Michelle was saying. She was saying, I want to replace art criticism with essays, with other kinds of texts, which the Guardian critic read as I need to open a TikTok account, brings its own specificity. And it's not because you have a TikTok that showcases art without going deep into analysis of the art that you're not bringing something valuable beyond inscribing the artist in something and giving the artist power and their gallery and the agents that surround them a lot of power to sell or to present their work to institutional representation, for example, it means that it might be doing something else. That TikTok account might be, this is just me reading Walter Benjamin, inscribing contemporary art in the realm of the present. However, you engage with it, however, you present it, then is going to be helpful and qualitative or not. But for me, the reading I have of also understanding that nowadays our critical thinking is spread along and across many diversified forms of media. It doesn't equate, so realizing that doesn't equate with diminishing the value of critique. But it might do that if you suspend critical writing altogether, because art reviewing is not the same thing as critical writing, as critical thinking. It is a side of it, it is one aspect of it that hinges upon evaluations of quality that may be a bit stale as we speak. So my arc with art criticism, and I'm going to be very quick here. I had a European education to start with. So neutrality really is the parameter through which you can build your own voice as an art critic, as an art writer. And Adrian Sell, when I was doing my art curatorial studies, came to our course and did a whole session about writing, art criticism, that blew my mind. He talked about writing in the first person. So I really enjoyed his criticism because I thought he's building his subjectivity, he's building a voice, and therefore I know what he thinks, where he comes from as an English, cisgendered male of a certain age, of a certain background. And the second discovery was that by reading really good art criticism, you know, going back to text by Lucy Lepard, for example, I realized that art criticism, art reviews also give you background information. So those are my two relationships with art criticism, which means that I do read it. But then at a certain point, because it's very small, because it's very much about saying whether something is good or bad, it becomes formulaic. It's a difficult exercise. And I respect that exercise because I also do it with my exhibitionist podcast. And that's one of the reasons that I chose to do the podcast in audio and video form, which is the fact that we are talking about visual things. And that's where it becomes a thing of the past, because art criticism serves audiences. Art criticism ultimately, or first and foremost, perhaps not ultimately, because it also serves the institutions, it caters to indirectly. But it is made for you when you go see an exhibition, or when you are choosing which exhibition to go to, you articulate your experience with the assessment of the art critic. And now we live at a time where we're no longer in this monolithic art space where there's a few very important museums in all the big cities, a few art centers, and a few commercial galleries, and that's it. It would be impossible to review everything. But I actually would love to have if for people who really think they need reviews, maybe that should be a publication only with very short reviews about everything. And there are a few actually. And what is happening with art critique is that it is going to end up serving the exhibitions that have the bigger audiences. And so they are only serving the big museums that already have the big money, that already have the big audiences, and they're closing up the rest of the art world. There is immense, huge, vast, a wave, a sea, an ocean of things to discover, which takes me to something that is a new reality. And that's why I spoke about my publication in the beginning of the episode, which is that actually there's a lot of art reviews and there's a lot of art critique going on, but not in big media outlets. There's a lot of art reviews going on and art critics, the ones, you know, remember, the ones that don't get published, that are being fired, that don't have any gigs, or that are being paid by publication, which is an unsustainable way of living. So they go on to Substack, they open their own websites and they are reviewing exhibitions in there. On Substack, there are a lot of art critics, art writers that write beautifully. They are reinventing the formula, is what I'm trying to say. I'm still not super fond of that kind of writing. It certainly is not for me. I don't think it's a very constructive thing, but I do read them once in a while. But there are a lot of us out there trying to make a living and reinvent other ways of people, audiences out there to engage with contemporary art rather than exploring a tradition that has proven to be too jargony, too formulaic, to really provide an interesting, informative and worthwhile experience of art critique, be it in writing form or orally, or as a sequence of images that tells you, if you're doing a research on textiles, for example, what is being done out there when you're just researching quickly and trying to go over a few cities around where you live, what is being done out there? What is wrong with that kind of representation of artistic creativity? I don't see anything wrong with it, unless suddenly the art forums, the all those powerful entities start going in there, which is what's happening with Substack, what's happening with YouTube, what's happening with podcasting. As soon as there is an editorial awareness of people having gone elsewhere, they are coming for it and crushing many, many times, repeatedly, soullessly, and without any regard for people like me, people like the person who wrote the Guardian article, people like Adrian Sell, who retired and who are now younger and trying to make a living from what they know how to do and what they need to do. Let's go back to that notion of need. And there's a through line in all this episode, which is the patriarchal judgment parameters, they're crushing those who actually were building a space there. Because we all have a tendency to click on the article about Shakira's wedding and to click on whoever appears to be the most powerful entity in the playground. Having said all this, here comes a brainstorm in a teacup. Thank you for sticking around and for supporting the podcast. Even if you are not a member, even if you're not supporting it financially, listening to it is incredibly helpful. Your downloads, your listens, and your clicks on our social media also are a way of supporting us. And for those who are members who uh give donations, thank you as well. You keep me going, you keep us going, and you are essential. You are, and I see you as our patrons. I often catch people's eyes drifting towards my shoulder area while speaking to me in spring or summer, when my tattoos are most visible, trying to read me. It pleases me to have become decipherable, but perhaps not understood. I have deliberately chosen English, which is not my mother tongue, Portuguese, and that I acquired after French. My parents told me that when I was five years old, a few months after they had enrolled me at the Char Lepierre school, they heard me speak French in my sleep. In the morning, my mother tried to chat with me in my new language. Nothing. She asked the teacher if I was already speaking it at school. Not really, she was told. My subconscious, on the other hand, was fluent enough to dream in the language I was slowly learning. I have no memories of learning French or Portuguese, but I do remember teaching myself English with subtitled films. That is why perhaps I live in it like a maze. Apparently, I also learned how to read on my own. I do have a memory of being in the car and finally reading an advert I had spotted days before. I relive it as a solitary experience, this joy of deciphering which inflated the world, making it wider and at the same time even more mysterious. I felt at home. What that home is is another matter altogether. That's it. Take care. Have a good one. See you in a couple of weeks. I hope the sound was not too bad. I forgot to take my recording devices to Brussels. Apologies for that. The next episode is going to tackle the notion of skill. Do we still need it? Is it still a parameter at all in contemporary arts or not? Or is there a new kind of skill that is completely different and perhaps not even taught at school as such? Have we caught up with the times in education and other areas of society? You'll find out next week. Until then, take care. Bye bye.