Is Art Criticism in A Crisis Master Thes

Is Art Criticism in a Crisis?
Jenifer Fulton Betreut von:

Masterthesis zur vollständigen Herrn Prof. Dr. Macho
Zulassung zur Promotion
Matrikelnr. 536679 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philosophische Fakultät III
Warschauer Str. 45 Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
10243 Berlin Unter den Linden 6
Berlin, 06. Februar 2011 D–10099 Berlin
Abstract
Art criticism is in a crisis. Unlike previous crises in the 1950’s and 1970’s, which can be seen
as cyclical debates between conflicting methods, the current crisis runs more deeply: it is a
crisis of both historic and systemic factors. Historically, the rise of the art market as
determinant of artistic significance, aided and abetted by artistic practices from Andy Warhol
to Damien Hirst, has negated the territory which criticism claimed as its own and defended:
critical questions regarding artistic quality have no bearing on auction results, aesthetic
criteria have been exchanged for economic criteria. Furthermore, the awareness that art is a
function of the social conditions under which it is made (Rosalind Krauss) has seemingly
retreated. Systemically, the possibility for criticism constituting its own sphere has vanished,
master narratives such as Modernism or the Neo-Avantgarde which grounded critical
practice have run aground. Where does this paradigm of no paradigm leave us, and what are
the implications for criticism?
I shall examine the siting of art criticism in the intersection between critique, art production
and the contemporary art market. Fundamental to this is the role criticism fulfilled in
constituting an autonomous field for art. This took place initially through Greenberg’s
understanding of the fragility of the modernist project in the face of the culture industry, and
then through the role that theory played in continuing the avant-garde project by other
means, when production of theory became as important as artistic production in the 1970’s.
Artistic practices from Pop to the Young British Artists attacked the division between high
culture and low culture this critical practice implied, apparently rendering art more democratic
and populist. However, the artworks were revealed to be constructs to slide right back into
the market, leaving no discourse or institution unchanged, as Hal Foster notes. The
incoherence of the project did not hinder its success, the artists were recast as celebrities
through the mass media, and the celebrity was used to demarcate an art brand in order to
ennoble serially produced artworks. Criticism was seen as either beside the point or sour
grapes: the critics failed to constitute a field against which criticism could be read.
Systemically, the postmodern attack on the foundational tenets underpinning modernism (the
autonomous artwork, the original artist, the diachronic nature of art), while initially successful,
also ran aground in a wave of “anti-theory” promulgated by the above-named groups of
artists. Theory was rejected as elitist, overly complex, and as incapable of encompassing the
sensuous experience in looking at art. Critique was rejected out of hand. This favoured the
resurgence of the “poet-critic”, writing criticism out of emotion and affect, the figure that was
so vehemently attacked by both Clement Greenberg and the early Artforum.
Masterthesis Jenifer Fulton 2

In a final twist that I shall examine, the recent (2009) art market crash has prompted an
apparent renaissance of criticism. Prices for artists without much critical or curatorial acclaim
(e.g. Currin, Hirst, Yuskavage) have fallen. Gallerists are eager to imbue their works with
cultural capital. Through providing this in the form of critical acclaim, the critic can contribute
to this cultural capital. However, this implies the full instrumentalisation of art criticism: the
market emerges as a new master narrative. Critique has been revived at the cost of an
independent critical viewpoint, the victory is Pyrrhic. The critic cannot autonomously
constitute the symbolic value of a piece, and is again a bit-player in a piece staged by the
market. Criticism can thus survive in academia, as poet-critic practice or as contributor to
symbolic value. The modern or postmodern ideal of the independent critic must be
abandoned. Criticism is therefore indeed in a crisis.

Contents
1 Introduction: The Crises of Art Criticism................................................................................5

2 Part I: Criticism in and on the market....................................................................................20
2.1 Introduction.....................................................................................................................20
2.2 Kitsch, high and mass culture........................................................................................24
2.3 Serialism........................................................................................................................36
2.4 Retrosensationalism, criticism and beyond....................................................................47
3 Part II: Concepts of criticism.................................................................................................52
3.1 Introduction.....................................................................................................................53
3.2 How art criticism earned its good name – Greenberg and Artforum..............................59
3.3 Octobrist Postmodernism................................................................................................65
3.4 Dantoist Postmodernism and beyond..............................................................................72
3.5 Poetic art criticism..........................................................................................................75
3.6 Where now for criticism?................................................................................................78
4 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................82
5 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................93

1 Introduction: The Crises of Art Criticism
„Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.“ Andy
Warhol
Art criticism is massively produced but also massively ignored. Every exhibition, be it in a
private gallery or an art museum, demands a catalogue. An ever-increasing number of art
magazines crowd the newspaper racks1, the internet abounds in art-related blogs. When an
artwork is exhibited without an accompanying text, it appears naked and defenceless, as
Boris Groys commented.2 Art critical texts are thus written more than ever before, however
3
they are also increasingly irrelevant: seldom read and unable to influence valuations.
Criticism has virtually no bearing on auction results or art prices, unless promotional buzz
attracts visitors and thus results in higher valuations. Its readership is „unknown,
unmeasurable and disturbingly ephemeral“, as the art historian James Elkins notes.4 Outside
of academia, no-one would miss the critics if they were to remain silent from now on, as the
critic Hanno Rauterberg commented in the Zeit5. This view is echoed by Arlene Croce and
Isabelle Graw, Croce cannot recall a time „when the critic seemed more expendable than
now“6 and Graw expands on this to comment that „outside of art critical circles, no one is
interested in a critical confrontation with art7.
The malaise pervades arts pages, academic discourse and academic press on both sides of
the Atlantic. Art criticism has lost influence. It is ignored by the wider public, it has little
bearing on market valuation or curatorial decisions. Additionally, the dialogue between critics
and artists which characterised the Modern and postmodern debate has come to a halt. I
shall argue that while talk about a crisis in criticism is not new, indeed, the words “criticism”
and “crisis” both stem from the same Ancient Greek root κρίσις (crisis) meaning “to judge”, so
the notion of a critical crisis is somewhat tautological, this crisis stems from the awareness
that traditional critical practice, with the critic occupying a neutral ground has evaporated.
This is due to both ontological and market-led concerns.
1 Elkins enumerates approximately 200 national or international art journals published in America or Europe,
and 500-1000 smaller periodicals. These however are not catalogued, so it is difficult to cite indicative
numbers. James Elkins, What happened to art criticism, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, p.5
2 Boris Groys, Kunstkritik als Kunst, in Hans Thomas, Die Lage der Kunst am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, J.H.
Röll, Dettelbach 1999 p.1
3 James Elkins, What happened to art criticism, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, p.5
4 Ibid.
5 Hanno Rauterberg, Die Feigheit der Kritiker ruiniert die Kunst, Die Zeit, 22.1.2004
6 Arlene Croce, Discussing the Indiscussable in Maurice Berger, ed. The Crisis of Criticism, Chicago, The New
Press 1994 p. 28
7 Isabelle Graw, Im Griff des Kunstmarkts, taz 14.04.2004

I am defining art criticism as Harry Lehmanns protean „...wide field, which does not yield
itself to a single definition“, and may encompass academic art criticism published in specialist
magazines such as October and Texte zur Kunst, newspaper art criticism and catalogue
texts in catalogues accompanying exhibitions.8
The causes of the crisis can be characterised as systemic (relating to critical methods) and
historic. Systemic factors determining the current crisis in art criticism include the long
reaction against Greenberg’s interpretation of Kant, and the subsequent attack of value
judgements wrought by critics of the October generation, which were rejected in turn. There
are no longer Master Narratives such as modernism or the neo-avantgarde in which criticism
can be sited, it appears to be operating in a void, floating free of determination. Historic
factors include attacks by artistic practice, particularly through Concept Art, on art criticism,
as well as the larger issue of the art market. Auction results are decoupled from critical
assessments, an example being the generally negative critical reception of Julian Schnabel:
this has had little bearing on his market prices or on his entry into the artistic canon. The
public is also mainly uninterested in art criticism.
„The majority of art critical writing is now the equivalent of a press release,“ states Isabelle
Graw, editor of Texte zur Kunst. 9 The weakness of the texts (and the language contained
therein), which, Christian Demand notes, resemble “enthusiastische Erlebnisaufsätze” and
are characterised by the simulation of profundity. 10 This is reflective of the increasing
superficiality of the public debate carried out in the pages of mass market art magazines and
newspapers. Peter Plagens, formerly an art critic at the weekly magazine Newsweek, writes
that the popular press views contemporary art as a “quick study” kind of thing, something any
entertainment writer can, with some Googling as preparation, churn out. He attributes this
lack of interest and understanding to contemporary art not looking much like “art” any more. 11
Margaret Hawkins, art critic at the Chicago Sun-Times describes the situation of journalistic
art critics with a certain amount of pathos: they are viewed as writers who “wallow in the
shallow waters of bland irrelevance, pandering to an entertainment-oriented public,
abdicating serious discussion in favour of dumbed-down educational pap, doing nothing
12
more than describe art to an uneducated and uninterested public.” Hawkins’ attempt to
rescue the situation, describing herself as stealth philosopher attempting to conduct a public
8 Harry Lehmann, Zehn Thesen zur Kunstkritik, Merkur 11 2008

9 Isabelle Graw, Aufgaben und Kriterien der Kunstkritik in Transfer. Beiträge zur Kunstvermittlung, Verlag
Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, 2005, S. 88-96, S.89
10 Christian Demand, Die Beschämung der Philister, zuKlampen 2003, S.11, vgl auch Boris Groys 1997, S.11:
Die Rolle des Kunstkommentators wird verkannt, wenn man ihm verlangt, klar und verständlich zu sein. Je
hermetischer und undurchsichtiger ein Text ist, desdo besser schützt er ein Kunstwerk.“
11 Peter Plagens, Derriere Guard in The State of Art Criticism, London, Routledge 2008, p. 260
12 Margaret Hawkins, in ibid. 11, p. 295

meditation on the nature of perception in the midst of bad news, gossip and football scores,
rings somewhat hollow. 13
One of the key accusations levelled at art journalistic art critics is that their rejection of
evaluation in favour of description has a negative impact on the level of artistic debate. This
accusation was supported statistically by The Visual Art Critic, A survey of Art Critics at
General-interest News Publications in America, published by Columbia University in 2002.
The study surveyed 230 practicing art critics, working for daily or weekly non-specialist art
publications. 14 91% of critics surveyed viewed “providing an accurate, descriptive account of
15
the work or exhibition being reviewed” , thus fulfilling primarily an educative function.
Christopher Knight, Art Critic at the Los Angeles Times commented the findings thus: “…
Criticism is a considered argument about art, not a priestly initiation of the unenlightened into
16
a catechism of established knowledge” - the majority of critics are therefore failing to fulfil
their traditional role in writing about art.
Descriptions of exhibitions and pieces cannot replace substantiated and well-founded

confrontation with art movements and concepts. Magazines such as Artforum, which in the
Sixties established itself as the medium for evaluative art criticism, commission art historians
with the few lengthy critical essays still published. 17 Only 39% of the critics surveyed in the
“Visual Art Critic“ viewed “Theorizing about the meaning, associations and implications of the
works being reviewed”, i.e. an evaluation in the Kraussian/October sense as the core focus
of their work. Criticism has become less ambitious, if the aim of an ambitious critic consists of
examining the landscape of an artistic practice and not just a single facet in isolation.18
A broad brush categorisation of contemporary art criticism allows the identification of two
interrelated fields: academic art criticism (October, Texte zur Kunst) and journalistic art
criticism. Both are part of the continuum of writing which creates a textual field surrounding
contemporary art. As Victor Burgin notes …theory, criticism, reviewing…. are all practices of
writing, in institutional terms, theory tends to issue from a different site from that of criticism
and reviewing; academic institutions and journals in the former, art magazines and the press
in the latter. The spectrum of discourses runs from scholarly research to consumer
information. … I refer to a spectrum because…. Theory is (generally) a critical practice, and
19
criticism (necessarily) involves theoretical presuppositions. Concepts generated in
13 Margaret Hawkins, in ibid. 11, p. 295

14 The Visual Art Critic, A survey of Art Critics at general-interest news publications in America, National Arts
Journalism Program, Columbia University 2002
15 Ibid. p.27
16 Christopher Knight, Critic's Notebooks, Los Angeles Times, Nov 8th 2002,
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/nov/08/entertainment/et-knight8/3 (retrieved 03rd October 2010)
17 Michael Brenson Resisting the Dangerous Journey: The crisis of journalistic criticism in ibid. 5 p. 106
18 Ibid. 3, p. 12
19 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, Macmillan, London, 1986, p.141

academic discourse are adopted by journalistic debate. 20 Academic art critics such as Beat
Wyss and Benjamin Buchloh also publish in newspapers and mass-market art magazines.
The bifurcation in art writing results in two almost entirely oppositional approaches to art
writing: “academic” art criticism aims to subsume critical and political theorising into
contemporary art discourse, imbuing the art under consideration with intellectual legitimacy.
While some artists welcome this (Hans Haacke, for example), the attempt to academically
legitimise more populist formats of art and therefore expose them to more “serious”
consideration ultimately results in the instrumentalisation of academic art criticism for the
market. (Isabelle Graw). Journalistic art criticism is subject to the pressures which
characterise the broader media landscape: word limits, reader accessibility and tight
deadlines, as well as the necessity of attracting a broad readership. 21 This is a contemporary
phenomenon (Clement Greenberg published his groundbreaking critiques in The Nation):
before the establishment of October with its ideological maxim of grounding art criticism in
theory, most art criticism was published in mass-market media. Artforum magazine (founded
in 1962) aimed to establish a serious, complex and rigorous form of art criticism. Its aim was
to place contemporary art against a historical context, and to introduce verifiability into art
criticism: claims about the work in question had to be referable, allusions to the artists
22
biography or history were rendered illegitimate. The writing was restricted to the actual
artwork. The founders of Artforum were frustrated by the belle-lettres style of art criticism,
which emphasised the stylistic aspects of writing, “poets composing emotive catalogue
prefaces for artists.”23 Artforum for a while was a changed beast – debates on contemporary
aesthetics have been relegated to publications like October and Texte zur Kunst, and
features heavily favour such top ten lists as “artists to watch in the coming year.” The few
long, critical articles which are printed in publications such as Artforum and Parkett are
assigned to art historians, as these render the article academically legitimate. The articles
have an art-historical emphasis, focus on established artists or present yet another analysis
of Modernism. 24 October, for a period, also reduced its focus on contemporary art, preferring
instead to “rescue” well-established artists such as Andy Warhol and Richard Serra from art-
market or spectacularist discourse, although recently there has been an effort on part of the
editors to re-ignite the debate surrounding contemporary art.
Developments in the art world have bifurcated the discursive basis of criticism. As with the
popularity of neo-expressionist painting during the 1980’s art boom in New York (which
ignored the questions raised by Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and was derided by critics
20 Gemma Tipton, First Roundtable, in ibid. 11, p176, see also Robert Enright, Criticism: The Zoo of many-
backed Beasts, in ibid. 11, p. 315
21 Ibid. 8
22 James Elkins, The Absence of Judgment in Ibid. 11, p.84
23 Rosalind Krauss in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974
24 Michael Brenson Resisting the Dangerous Journey: The crisis of journalistic criticism in ibid. 5, p. 106

as a result), recent years have seen a resurgence of Pictorialism via the work of Peter Doig
and the Leipzig School artists, parallel to the art market boom of 2004-2008. The continuing
popularity of this type of painted format ostentatiously ignores forty years of theoretical
debate, and, perhaps for this reason, enjoys huge success in the commercial sector.25 This
has serious consequences for art criticism, both in nullifying the critical developments of the
past forty years, and thus rendering the discursive basis impotent26, and, through the market
success of such art, directing the debate in the more market-complicit press. Thus the
debate between critics and artists has broken down: art criticism in this case has become a
market complicit tool, reporting auction results and reifying the artists successful at auction.
This is a somewhat paradoxical development: while the formats used are anachronistic and
can thus be subjected to an earlier type of Greenbergian, judgement-centred criticism, this
avenue is rendered nul by the lack of influence a critic has on the market, with the
concomitant result that overt judgement has almost completely vanished from the press.
Systemic Causes
Art criticism emerged in the 19th Century to seek out work that contested the bourgeois order
of the academy. There was space for art and for critical practice to work out conflicts and
contradictions inherent in that order. This “testing” dominated advanced art and criticism for
the greater part of the 20th Century, until well into the 1960’s, most famously through the work
of Clement Greenberg. The avant-garde collapsed under the weight of the onslaught on the
boundaries between mass culture and “high” culture, fought out in the culture wars of the
1980’. This famously originated with Andy Warhol’s appropriation of mass-cultural signs into
his work, and developed under the aegis of such artists as Jeff Koons and Keith Haring. If
there is no longer an avant-garde, then this critical role disappears. Furthermore, as George
Baker observes in the Round Table, there is an “immediate affirmation of almost every
practice imaginable, an instant circulation of artists through the global venues of the
biennales.”27
The traditional remit of the critic since the avant-garde has been to judge an artwork, to give
a reasoned opinion on its relative merits. Probably the most influential defender of
judgement-based criticism in the 20th century is Clement Greenberg: he based his art
criticism on two principles: firstly on a constitutional theory of art: art can be defined based on
ontological, formalist criteria, and secondly, on a theory of general value judgements which
he derived from Immanuel Kants „Critique of judgement“. The notion of “quality” has lost
25 Isabelle Graw, Introduction, Texte Zur Kunst 77 Spring 2010, p. 107
26 although recent efforts by David Joselit among others have sought to rescue this, see Joselit, Painting beside
itself, October 130, Fall 2009, p.125, and Texte zur Kunst, Issue 77, Spring 2010
27 George Baker, Round Table: The present conditions of art criticism, October 100, Spring 2002, p.210

validity owing to the emancipation of criticism from aesthetic criteria28, has resulted in overt
judgement losing relevance in all forms (academic and journalistic) of art criticism. 29
Art criticism and secondary discourse about art were attacked by artistic practices of the
sixties and their subsequent developments. Concept and minimal art strove to eliminate
purely aesthetic reception of art by introducing conceptual elements into the practice,
30
introducing the primacy of intellectual reflection over visual reception. The inclusion of
verbal elements in artworks, as well as the establishment of performance art and fluxus
meant that the written context of the artwork, governing the epistemological criteria of its
reception, were of primary importance, rendering aesthetic judgement meaningless. The
artist, therefore, not only rendered the traditional critical praxis of aesthetic judgement
irrelevant, she also usurped the elucidating and contextualising role of the critic. Through
defining the framework in which discourse about the object takes place 31, the artist displaces
the critic: he can add nothing new to the debate, but must be content to merely add to the
textual discourse. This necessarily implies that the critic must participate within a given
framework, and cannot retain the neutral ground which was a pre-condition for aesthetic
evaluation32.
The critic must collude with the artistic practice, however he does not expound criteria,
whether ontological or aesthetic, for artworks or artistic movements, but participates in the
artwork, shrouding it in a “protective textual mantle”.33 The relationship between artwork and
text has changed: previously, the aim of the critic was to comment appropriately on an
artwork. Currently, the emphasis lies upon illustrating a text adequately, as Boris Groys
remarked34. This implies that the commented picture no longer is of interest, it has been
usurped by the illustrated text. The boundary between artist and critic has been blurred. The
attack on the primacy of the aesthetic as a mode of reception, and the concomitant attack on
evaluative art criticism results in the ousting of qualitative concepts from the art-critical
35
discourse. Judgement as a form of art criticism thus loses its legitimacy. The critic must
define her role anew: she practice may critique, reflecting on the conditions for critical
judgements, try to embed the artwork in some form of philosophical, sociological or
psychological discourse, or chose to collaborate in an art project, a role which Boris Groys
28 David Joselit, ibid. 27, p.209

29 Julian Stallabrass, The Ideal of Art Criticism in ibid. 11, p. 335
30 see Joseph Kosuth, Malcolm Budd, Andrea Fraser and the Arts & Language Gruppe and others
31 Benjamin Buchloh, ibid. 27, p.205
32 Boris Groys, Ballyvaughan Round Table in ibid. 11, p. 169
33 Ibid. 2, p.1
34 Ibid. 2, p.10
35 Michael Newman, Specificity and the Need for Philosophy, in ibid. 11, p. 30

has taken on in his work with Ilya Kabakov. 36 The latter necessarily implies the abdication of
all pretence of critical distance.
The second attack on aesthetic judgements occurred at the end of the seventies through
Rosalind Krauss37. She developed a form of art criticism which based on structuralist,
linguistic, neo-freudian and post-structuralist theories and thus generated a definition of the
postmodern interpretation of an artwork, which emphasised the subjective conditions for the
reception of an artwork, focussing on social, political, gender and other aspects. The critique
of criticism demonstrates the conditions of an aesthetic judgement, a self-reflection on part of
the critic38. Krauss co-founded the art-critical journal October with Annette Michelson in 1976,
in part as a reaction against the evaluative, formalist criticism practiced by her erstwhile
mentor, Clement Greenberg.39 Krauss and Michelson broke open critical discourse by
treating criticism as a quasi-academic discipline by including Merlau-Ponty and Saussure in
their phenomenological and structuralist analysis of Minimal Art and Photography
respectively. This resulted in a wide variety of practices being included under the banner of
criticism: simple evaluation yielded to practices borrowed from literary analysis and
contemporary French philosophy.
The critical discourse expanded to include values, which, depending on the perspective of
the critic in question could be sociological, feminist, linguistic or psychoanalytical. The text is
now characterised by its heterogeneity, manifoldness and diversity. 40 This also has negative
consequences: George Baker, an editor of October, remarked in a round table on the
present state of art criticism, held in spring 2002 that “interdisciplinarity became an
opportunity for increasingly esoteric languages and for the abandonment of stakes that art
criticism had always claimed as its own and defended.” 41
Academic art criticism is in part suffering owing to the wholesale rejection of “theory”
following the end of postmodernism. During the postmodernist period, October defined art
criticism (indeed, October was the first publication to borrow the term “postmodernism” from
architecture, and apply it to art), much in the way that the magazine Artforum had formed the
debate in the years 1962-1974, when it established a rigorous form of art evaluation.
However, October’s direction and intellectual foundations have been much questioned, with
Boris Groys describing the work as “not sexy…. Just taxonomy”.42
36 Michael Newman, Revising Modernism, Representing Postmodernism, in Postmodernism, ICA Documents,

Free Association Books, London, 1989, S. 95-154
38 Rosalind Krauss, Introduction to The Originality of the Avantgarde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge MA,
MIT Press, 1985
40 Michael Orwicz, Art criticism and its institutions, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994, p. 185
41 George Baker,ibid. 27, p.201
42 Boris Groys, Cork Roundtable in ibid. 11, p. 154

The loss of master narratives such as Greenbergian Formalism and the critical discourses
associated with Postmodernism to ground critical practice has resulted in a pluralism of
discourses, where no position can be privileged above another. Saul Ostrow stated that “In
the context of contemporary culture, criticism cannot be thought of as a theory or history,
though it may use both. For this reason it must be thought of as a node, a point of
convergence within a dynamic system that cannot be codified, classified, or envisioned as a
thing in itself. As a system of extrapolation and interpretation, no one model of criticism can
circumscribe the totality of a given practice.”43 And so there is no canon to form or reform, no
grand historical project to be advanced, supposedly no more oppositional ideologies. 44
The advent of concept art and minimal art resulted in the loss of an ontological basis for
separating art from non-art, as Arthur Danto postulated in his theory of the End of Art. 45 As a
result, as Boris Groys claims, contemporary art is in a state of pluralism where everything is
relativised, and no critical judgement can be justified. 46 No particular position or opinion can
be privileged over another. Artworks are now judged in isolation, not in relation to a particular
47
discourse or artistic practice, and this is reflected in the writing on contemporary art. If
(almost) everything can be art, and there is thus no ontological or formalist definition of art,
then the possibility of a critic constituting and theorising a “master narrative” in the modernist
sense vanishes. As criticism currently can only be a reflection of the art being made and has
limited influence on artistic practice, the commentary is merely a reflection of the status quo.
The dialogue between artists and critics has come to a halt, as current artistic practice does
48
not reflect critical debates. Young artists became disillusioned by the premises and
practices of the criticism practiced during the postmodern period, and feel that criticism has
no relevance to their work. 49
The second result of the advent of critique, i.e. the displacement of the critics’ opinion
through the inclusion of reflection on the circumstances surrounding judgement, is that there
is an apparent levelling of competency with regard to art viewers and art critics. The art critic
no longer can, through recourse to experience and education, claim a privileged role in
relation to art reception and evaluation. “Reader and spectator competence had reached a
level where the meddling of the critic was historically defied and denounced,” 50 as the critic
Benjamin Buchloh stated in the October round table. This results in the marginalisation of the
critic in the formulation of the reception value of an art piece. The critic Beat Wyss
43 Saul Ostrow: Criticism: Politics Phantom Limb as an Exemplary Supplement, ibid. 11, p. 268
44 Lane Relyea, Impure Thoughts in ibid. 11, p. 259
45 Arthur Danto, The End of Art in The Death of Art, Hrsg. v. Berel Lang, Haven Publishers 1984
46 Ibid. 2 p.6
47 Saul Ostrow, Criticism: Politicals Phantom Limb as an Exemplary Supplement in ibid. 11, p. 264
48 James Meyer, ibid. 27, p.203
49 Robert Storr, ibid. 27, p.203
50 Benjamin Buchloh, ibid. 27, Spring 2002, p.205

commented that the viewer now enters in an immediate dialogue (“unmittelbare
Zwiesprache”) with the piece in question, which he criticises as “romantische
51
Selbstüberschätzung”. This is exemplified by a comment by the artist Jeff Wall when
describing his use of transparencies (which often are used in advertising) for his
photographs. He states that his choice of material was in no way related to the medium’s use
in the commercial sphere, and thus could not be taken as a comment on commerce or the
market “a fact that has been misrepresented by numerous critics.” He goes on to state that “if
the public want to see it thus, however, that is their right.”52 The critic, it seems, can be
incorrect in his interpretation of an artist’s piece (by placing it in the context of a commentary
of the role of the market) yet the public is entitled to their (incorrect) opinion. This approach
marginalises the critic: his opinion has no bearing on either the work of the artist or on public
reception. The historic role of the critic as cultured, erudite amateur thus is obsolete, his
place is filled by the increased competence of the viewer53.
The discursive space, in which an artwork had to be sited in order to reflect on the impact
and meaning of a piece, to identify precedents and establish dialogue with contemporary
practice has also vanished from art publications and gallery catalogues54. The public sphere
is an essential, performative element of art criticism, and as postmodernist theory has failed
to constitute this virtual subject, art criticism cannot succeed in actually constituting the
sphere in which it will be read.55 Michael Newman describes this as “the political dimension
of criticism”. Now that the concept of a bourgeois middle class, which traditionally constituted
the public sphere for criticism, has come under attack – and the opening of the museum’s
gates has not resulted in a wider public, receptive sphere for the art in question, but rather
has resulted in increasingly diverse, disparate and atomised audience, the critical debate has
concomitantly diversified. The ideal of the critic as Baudelairian “public citizen” has been
attacked through the public’s indifference to the figure itself and results in the figure’s
dissolution. Furthermore, as Ostrow and Newman point out, the notion of “the public” has
become deeply questionable, perhaps one should speak rather of “publics”.
Historical Causes
The identification of commercially successful art with “good” art has led to a concomitant
marginalisation of non-compliant criticism. This has been aided and abetted by artistic
strategies since the 1960’s: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. (…)
51 Beat Wyss, Stil und Kritik in Wiederkehr des Neuen, Hamburg, Philo & Philo Fine Arts, 2007, S.340
52 Jeff Wall, Artists Talk, Tate Modern, 25th October 2005, http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/27567879001,
retrieved on September 3rd, 2010.
54 Rosalind Krauss, ibid. 27, S.202
55 Michael Newman, The States of Art Criticism in ibid. 11, p368

making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” 56 Andy Warhol
wrote in 1975. The identification of art production with commodity production was continued
by what the critic Terry Smith terms the “Retrosensationalists”, artists who “embrace of the
rewards and downsides of neoliberal economics, globalizing capital, and neoconservative
politics, pursued during the 1980s and since, through repeats of earlier twentieth-century
avant-garde strategies, yet lacking their political utopianism and their theoretic radicalism,
above all by Damien Hirst and the YBAs, but also by Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and many
others in the U.S., and by Takashi Murakami and his followers in Japan.”57 The practitioners
of this group stood in opposition to critique, seeing it as unreflective of the pure, hedonistic
enjoyment of the art viewing experience, and unable to encapsulate their practice. This had
wide-reaching consequences for criticism, as an ever-expanding market has emerged as an
alternative master narrative.
“Business art” appears immune to criticism. As Benjamin Buchloh states in the October
Round Table “You don’t need criticism for an investment structure, you need experts”.58 An
artist will automatically be regarded as “good” if their work achieves success on the primary
gallery market or at auction, without consideration of the critical response to their work 59:
examples of artists who are poorly reviewed but highly valued at auction include Julian
Schnabel, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Economic criteria have displaced artistic criteria
when it comes to art evaluation. The market is a deciding factor for the type of art being
produced.
The market plays, in many cases, a decisive role for the “conceptualisation of a piece,
influencing the choice of formats and materials. Ideals fall by the wayside,” as the critic
Isabelle Graw has commented. 60 Criticism, in this case, is ignored entirely by collectors and
auctioneers. The Art Review Power 100 is a reflection of this. The Power 100 is an annual
assessment of the 100 most influential actors in the art world: it presents an evaluative
reflection of quality in market terms and is characteristic of the current trend for art
magazines to publish “best of” lists. Curators, collectors, critics, galerists and artists are
considered. 61 The 2008 list included three critics: Roberta Smith (New York Times), Peter
Schjeldahl (The New Yorker) und Jerry Saltz (New York Magazine). Smith, who was the
highest place of the three, was ranked at 71, Schjeldahl and Saltz were ranked a few places
lower. As Saltz commented in his commentary for the magazine: „Now that much of the art
56 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, New York, Harvest Books, 1975, p. 92.
57 Terry Smith, Questionnaire on the Contemporary – October 130, Fall 2009, p. 50.
59 Ibid.9, p.89
60 Ibid. 9, p.91
61 Art Review Power 100, Art Review, November 2008

world is obsessed with power and money, it's a tremendous time to be an art critic. Art critics
can write whatever they want and it has no effect on the market. I can write that Damian Hirst
is basically making Damian Hirst logos, and none of it has any effect on status or sales. I can
write that a young artist deserves more, or less attention, and not much happens. The art
market is so dumb it believes anything you put in front of it. The market isn't about quality: it's
a self-replicating organism that assigns values, fetishises desire, charts hits, and encourages
junkie-like behaviour.“62 Saltz’s comment is reflective of much recent commentary of both the
reduced role of the critic as well as the superficial nature and absurdity of the art market.
„Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches,“63
commented Andy Warhol in relation to negative criticism. Negative judgements serve to bring
a work into focus, which neutralises the effect of the judgement. Publicity of any type serves
to promote the artist. Abigail Solomon Goudeau, an art historian at the University of
California, notes that “there have never been two pages of serious art criticism about Julian
64
Schnabel. This has not affected his entry into the textbooks of contemporary art.” Jeff
Koons has similarly never received a good critique, which also has not affected his status as
art world star65, with recent exhibitions in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2008) and in
Versailles (2009). By extension, not only has the critic lost influence in market valuations, but
also in their advisory capacity to curators and art historians. While October and Texte zur
Kunst remain cautiously silent on market-hyped artists such as Hirst and Koons, more
market-oriented publications such as Monopol are effusive in their coverage. Divergent
viewpoints usually lead to critical debate, in this case, however, the debate is rendered
impossible due to the fact that academic art publications are unwilling to surrender column
inches to a topic which will inevitably raise the profile of the artist discussed. In Boris Groys’
words: “The zero option is a decision – a political, aesthetic, and ethical decision – to
overlook an artwork, to let it remain in obscurity, in concealment. That is where real decisions
take place.“ 66 Art criticism therefore now takes the form of “either good or ignored”.
Critics have never had much influence on market valuations or purchasing decisions, as the
former editor of the art magazine Art in America, Raphael Rubinstein notes67, but more than
ever, their traditional function as talent scout and trend finder, as advisor to museums and
market, as well as dialogue partner for the artists themselves is rendered obsolete through
current practices. Artists now function as critics, curators or collectors establish movements
(cf. Nicolas Bourriaud’s work on Altermodernism, and Charles Saatchi’s work with the Young
62 Jerry Saltz, On Being on the Artreview Power 100, Artreview November 2008
63 Ibid. 56, p. 45
64 Abigail Solomon-Goudau, Chicago Roundtable in ibid. 11, p. 139
65 Michael Newman, Chicago Roundtable in ibid. 11, p. 196
66 Boris Groys, Cork Roundtable in ibid. 11, p. 154
67 Raphael Rubinstein, A quiet crisis: is there a serious breakdown in the dialogue around contemporary
painting? In Art in America, March, 2003

British Artists, the “first art movement established by a collector”) and artists work as
curators. The curator is now the person establishing artists’ reputations through group shows
and biennales, and the reputation is valorised through the market, which monetarises
68
institutional acceptance as “provenance”. The voice of the critic has little influence on
curatorial decisions, in contrast to the role that Clement Greenberg played when advising
Alfred Barr on the establishment of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. 69 This has
resulted, notes Helen Molesworth, critic and curator of the Harvard Museum of
Contemporary Art, in almost everyone gaining access to a Biennale or group exhibition.
“Nothing could be further from the festivalist pluralism of so many contemporary group
exhibitions (Documenta, the Whitney Biennial) that pat the darling tousled heads of all artists
equally," commented Raphael Rubinstein.70 In contrast to this uncritical representation of
artworks (as there is a lack of selective procedure), there is a loose canon of contemporary
international artists, which are represented in most biennials, irrespective of location. 71 This
canon is relatively small (Eduard Beaucamp, a German art critic, estimates that there are
approximately 40 participants72); and, given the increasing number of artists seeking to enter
the art market full time, the restriction in numbers does not reflect the reality of the market.
Given this low ratio, it seems questionable whether the artists included in the canon (and to
see who they are, it suffices to review a copy of Art Investor’s “Hot 100 List” 73, and eliminate
the deceased members) are representative of the art institution and contemporary art as
whole. Given that the “canon” also forms the bulk of artists represented in single and group
exhibitions, there is a significant reciprocal influence between market and curatorial decisions
– this is borne out by the analysis of the Art Investor Hot 100 list, which maps the status of
the artist in question by referencing museal representation of their work. While some critics,
most notably Roberta Smith of the New York Times still wield some influence over the
74
success or failure of an exhibition (and, by extension, over an artist’s career) , the view
75 76
taken by Isabelle Graw and Eduard Beaucamp widely reflects the self-appraisal of most
critics working today – that they have no influence over art represented or the appraisal of
the market.
The ultimate consequences for the dialogue surrounding contemporary art are negative: the
focus has shifted either to a historicised debate about established artists or institutions, or to

69 Helen Molesworth, ibid. 27, p.219
70 Ibid. 67
71 John Miller, ibid. 27, p.219
72 Eduard Beaucamp Kunstkritik heute: was kann sie, darf sie, soll sie? in ibid. 9 p. 79
73 https://order.artinvestor.de/index.php
74 As eg.. Roberta Smith of the New York Times. ArtReview writes that „Every Dealer in New York knows that
even a luke-warm mention by Smith is enough to drive traffic to the gallery door“. ArtReview, November 2008,
S. 144
75 Ibid. 9 p.89
76 Ibid. 9, p.92

a documentation of art market excesses. A serious confrontation with contemporary art and
its reception is thus avoided. 77
Unbiased evaluation of an artist or exhibition decreases as a result of the disappearance of

full-time, salaried positions for art critics. 78 A free-lance critic, who augments their income by
taking on additional assignments as catalogue contributor or curator, has little or no interest
to seriously critique an artist or gallery, if future work may be dependent on the self-same
gallery. This results in a critic necessarily becoming an advocate for the artists she writes
about. The critic is in a position where they are forced to critique the artist or gallery in
question due to a commission, and the resulting piece must present a positive spin – a
balanced evaluation is rendered impossible due to the conflict of interest the critic finds
himself subject to. 79
This is especially the case in the field of freelance criticism, where art magazines incapable
of paying a living wage cannot enforce a moral code on writers. Thus the conflict of interests
arising from critics fulfilling roles as curators, gallery-catalogue authors and exhibition
reviewers contributes to the critic’s loss of creditability80.
The reluctance to judge is not limited to American art criticism: in Germany, Hanno
Rauterberg has repeatedly accused critics of cowardice, stating that they write “superficial
reviews which do not contain clear critical evaluations, so as not to endanger their status as
multi-role players”. But he also has to acknowledge that the root of this lies in economic and
existential factors, and demands that critics “so gut bezahlt werden, dass sie sich Freiheit
und Meinung leisten können“,81 an acknowledgement that this is not possible under current
market conditions.
Even if a critic assumes a position contrary to the market evaluation of an artist (as has been
done in the case of Schnabel, Hirst, John Currin and many others), she is entering into battle
armed only with “bow and arrow against the tanks of the well-capitalised celebrity artists,
against globally operating auction houses, against multi-million dollar market art valuations,
and against highly influential collectors and sponsors of a globalised art scene” as Eduard
Beaucamp writes. 82
This paper will seek to address the question whether there still can be a legitimate role for art
critics outside of the university art theory department or as badly-paid tribute writers to artists

78 Peter Plagens, Derriere Guard in ibid. 11, p. 260
79 Blake Gopnik, Assessment of the Art Seminar, in ibid, p. 262
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid. 5
82 Eduard Beaucamp, Die Kapitalistische Moderne, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 4.4.2008

sanctioned by the powerful primary and secondary markets. Part I will examine the
conditions for art criticism in late capitalist society. It will trace the consequences of the
collapse of the high/mass culture divide, as defined by Greenberg and Adorno/Horkheimer,
on criticism. The existence of the avant-garde is dependent on the existence of a high
culture, as Greenberg has shown, and after the rejection of a formalist definition of art, the
avant-garde has to be continued by other means. The neo-avantgarde sought to keep alive
the boundaries between mass and high culture by shifting the burden of exploration on to
theory (Buchloh/Foster), but when theory came under wholesale attack, the avant-garde
collapsed. Furthermore, despite lip-service appeals to populism and mass taste,
Retrosensationalists depend on the continued existence of a realm of “high” art and the
autonomous artwork. Retrosensationalists declared art criticism to be invalid, stating that it
retained distinctions between high and mass culture, and that attacks on their practice were
therefore elitist. However, the Retrosensationalists have refused to fully accept the
consequences of the collapse of the high/mass culture division on their own practice. The
figure of the artist, and indeed, the realm of art itself are still constituted in Modernist terms,
rendering the artistic position incoherent, as I shall show.
Part II will focus on the systemic factors underlying the crisis in art criticism. It will trace the
evolution of art criticism from the Romantic “poet-critic” model into an academic practice via
Greenberg and the early Artforum writers. The two postmodern positions (Octobrist and
Dantoist) and their attendant influence on art critical practice will be evaluated. I will argue
that the Octobrist position, with its theory-laden texts, academic texts facilitated a wholesale
rejection of theory, leading to the current resurgence of the poet-critic. This type of criticism is
found in the writings of Saltz, Hickey and Schjeldahl among others, all of whom write for
mass-market publications. Dantoist postmodernism is similarly characterised by a rejection of
theory, and results in the rise of the Retrosensationalist, as I shall argue, with the
concomitant commodification of art.
Finally, the conclusion will evaluate the prospects for criticism after the collapse of Master
Narratives which affirm art as an independent practice. While practitioners such as Isabelle
Graw and Merlin Carpenter centred around the magazines Texte zur Kunst and a resurgent
Artforum argue for criticism’s reanimation as a device underpinning the “symbolic” value of
an artwork, American critics see this development as a final instrumentalisation of criticism
by the market. Galleries hire critics to write pieces for artists who achieve high prices at
auction, but whose critical reception to date has been muted (John Currin, Damien Hirst),
and exposure in “academic respectable” publications such as Texte zur Kunst once again
results in higher valuation. However, as I shall argue, this approach implies that the market
exists as new master narrative, and while the critic has the power to withhold publication, this

firstly is a power only few critics wield, and secondly implies the full subjugation of the critic.
Critical practice has altered inexorably, there is no return to the critic as the hand-maiden of
the avant-garde or even the evaluator of artistic quality. Instead, criticism has retreated to the
niches which remain to it: eulogising beauty as in the case of the poet-critics, examining
micro-narratives or “situated stories”, or acting as hand-maiden to the market.

2 Part I: Criticism in and on the market
2.1 Introduction
What are the performative conditions for art criticism in late-capitalist society? The siting of
art criticism in the intersection between critique, art production and the contemporary art
market represents one of the major challenges for art criticism today. How can criticism carve
out a niche between unquestioning affirmation of all art sanctified by the market, as is mostly
the case in newspaper art criticism, and on the other hand, condemnation of all market-
oriented practice? The former stance has the dubious consequence that all notion of critical
distance is abandoned, the latter seems to depend on appeals to avant-garde and neo-
avant-garde notions of art production that are questionable in the current contemporary art
environment.
I will evaluate the critical reception of Terry Smith’s first current characterising contemporary
art: the aesthetic of globalisation, which Smith terms “Retrosensationalism”, based on the
name of the 1997 “Sensation” exhibition, which introduced the Young British Artists (YBAs)
to a mainstream audience. Smith sums up the defining shape of Retrosensationalism thus:
“the embrace of the rewards and downsides of neoliberal economics, globalizing capital, and
neoconservative politics, pursued during the 1980s and since, through repeats of earlier
twentieth-century avant-garde strategies, yet this lacks their political utopianism and their
theoretical radicalism, particularly by Damien Hirst and the YBAs, but also by Julian
Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and many others in the U.S., and by Takashi Murakami and his
followers in Japan.”1
Smith offers a brief critique on the contemporaneity of this art: the “retro” aspect of the
naming is due to the movement’s incorporation of the key drivers of modernity: attachment to
painting as a medium and avant-garde experimentality – however, these aspects are
moderated via a post-modern approach, so that avant-gardism is not defined formalistically
(as with Clement Greenberg) or with reference to an off-mainstream practice, but determined
by the artists self-presentation as such. Furthermore, such art can be seen as a “style” in the
Modern sense of the term, taking on the defining elements of various artistic practices of the
late Modern and post-Modern period, but representing these without the criticality usually
inherent in Appropriation practices. For instance, defining elements of Minimalism (serial
production, use of industrial materials) are taken on, but without the critique of the Original
that was inherent in the movement; the tenets of poststructuralism (the Barthesian critique of
1 Terry Smith, Questionnaire on the Contemporary – October 130, Fall 2009, p. 50.

authorship, the Baudrillardian separation of signifier and signified) are compressed to
legitimise workshop production, and the creation of “branded” artworks, and in a final phase,
which Isabelle Graw identifies, the Debordian Society of the Spectacle, is recast as celebrity
culture, where the image of the artist and the artist himself become interchangeable, and
there is a direct transmission of value between the Name and the Object which bears the
Name. Finally, therefore, production of art becomes indistinguishable from the production of
luxury goods.
The retro-sensationalists conceptually underpinned their practice by stating that artistic

practice should appeal to a mass audience and thus a Universalist notion of mass taste. This
levelling of the distinction between high and low culture has its roots in 1960’s Pop Art
practice, in particular in the artwork of Andy Warhol, with the use of popular/celebrity
iconography, for instance, the Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy series, as well as the use
of commodity brands (Campbells’s Soup, Coca-Cola) in his screenprints. Koons has always
appealed to popular culture, to mass taste, to inclusionism in his artworks; furthermore, he
has expressly placed himself in apposition to mainstream critical positions, critiquing the
“hermeneuticism” and closedness of the critical debate. This populism expresses itself
through what the critic John Roberts (speaking about the Young British Artists) terms “a
wide-spread alliance of the artist with the subordinate consumer of popular culture: if the
majority of people experience subordination in their working lives, so the argument goes,
they do not need to have this reintroduced through their exposure to art”. 2
The first explicit identification of artistic practice with commodity and the parallel denial of the
possibility of an avant-garde reading for the role of art within society was postulated by Andy
Warhol. He is the acknowledged inspiration for the amalgamation of market and art, or, to
use Adorno’s terms, the culture industry. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind
of art. (…) making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” 3 Andy
Warhol wrote in 1975. This, according to Jack Bankowsky, former editor of Artforum,
constitutes Warhol’s major legacy: to embrace, under the umbrella of art a multitude of
practices not previously associated with this sphere of action.4 The market is therefore
engendered with a primacy over and above other criteria for artistic practice. The critic
Benjamin Buchloh posits an alternative interpretation: upon first coming across Warhol’s
statement in the 70’s he felt that Warhol was parodying the expanding role of the artwork as
2 John Roberts, Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s, in Occupational Hazard, Critical Writing on
Recent British Art, Eds. Duncan McCorquodale, Naomi Siderfin and Julian Stallabrass, Black Dog Publishing,
London 1998, p. 74.
3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Harvest Books, New York, 1975,
p. 92.
4 Jack Bankowsky , Pop Life in Pop Life, Art in a Material World, Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Publishing 2009, p.
25.

commodity. Now, he says, he accepts the comment as genuine: one needs to recognise
Warhol’s prophetic ability.5
Warhol’s practice was expanded and institutionalised by the practice of artists such as Haim
Steinbach, Jeff Koons and Keith Haring, working in New York in the 1980’s.
Koons also, after Warhol, embraced the prices his works achieved on the primary and
secondary markets as vindication of their populist appeal. For Koons, the market is
consequently the most important voice in the art world: “The market is the greatest critic.”
Artworks validated by the market are the most influential: “What I’m saying is that the
6
seriousness with which a work is taken is interrelated to the value that it has.” This
wholehearted embrace of a market which seemed to valorise populism over critique
presented itself as a red flag to critics steeped in the late-capitalist critique of, for instance,
Fredric Jameson and Benjamin Buchloh7.
While Koons often worked in opposition to the media in the 1980’s (although latterly the
reaction to his work has been largely positive, at least in newspaper art criticism), art critical
reception of the second of Smith’s Retro-sensationalist representatives, Damien Hirst, was
overwhelmingly positive.8 This led to what many commentators have termed “the current
crisis in criticism”: not only is criticism displaced in its evaluative function by an all-embracing
market and its associated mechanisms of hype and sensationalism, but by aligning itself with
the propagators of retro-sensationalist art, has lost all claim to critical distance and neutrality.
Retro-sensationalist artists have succeeded overwhelmingly in displacing the function of the
critic to a degree not achieved by the anti-critical practices of Conceptual artists, who strove
to produce art which subsumed criticality; retro-sensationalism has succeeded in aligning the
critic with the art that is produced. This has resulted in a schism in critical practice: on the
one hand, “serious” critical practice has retreated to academia, and displays an unwillingness
to comment on the practices of branded artists, on the other hand, the newspaper press is
largely uncritical of branded artists and offers no viable alternative positions.
This chapter will examine the pre-conditions for the vanishing of a separate identity for art:
Retro-sensationalist art ultimately is fully subsumed into the culture industry, and the artists
5 Benjamin Buchloh, Talk held on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Texte zur Kunst, Berlin, 11th December
2010.
6 Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colors, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, p. 151.
7 See, for instance, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern
Culture, eds. Hal Foster, Bay Press 1983, p. 111-125, and Benjamin Buchloh, Introduction to Neo-Avantgarde
and Culture Industry, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.
8 ibid. 2

exist as celebrities practicing a form of product endorsement – a position not acknowledged
by the artists themselves, who attempt to subvert both the notions of the artistic genius and
the avant-garde as legitimising devices, thus resorting to a Modernist framework. As their
practice contends that it denies precisely this framework, their position is incoherent.
However, as we shall see, the critics’ position is equally problematic.
The subsumption of the retro-sensationalists into the culture industry hinges on a wide
variety of theoretical positions, it is necessary to examine these, and show, in turn, the
diachronic developments which facilitated the current status quo. I shall not restrict myself to
investigating well-received art-theoretical positions, but will expand my focus to include
critical treatment of the two best-known proponents of the Retro-sensationalist movement:
Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. While some contemporary critics, including Arthur Danto
applaud the levelling of the high/mass culture division that these artists addressed through
their practice, I will show that ultimately, the critique runs aground: Danto’s position depends
on a restricted analysis which does not examine the full implications of retro-sensationalist
claims.
Foster and Buchloh implement a post-structuralist reading of the retro-sensationalists claims

that their art emancipates the viewer from the fetishised object of “high” artistic practice. They
contend that rather than constituting an actual critical intervention the promissory note of
emancipation is left unfulfilled, since no institution or referential framework is altered, and the
viewer is left in the same position as under modernism. The retro-sensationalists use the
language of institutional critique, but the products of their practice, the “commodity
sculptures” are so constructed as to slide back into the framework of the market and of the
institutions. The claims are reducible to signifiers without any relation to practice. However,
this argument, while exposing the inconsistencies at the heart of retro-sensational practice is
also rendered inconclusive due to recursion to the high/mass culture divisions of art. A
similar fate befalls critics reading retro-sensationalism through Baudrillard’s separation of

sign and signifier (where the signifier is constituted as a thing in itself, a brand, rather than a
referent to a particular object, practice or linguistic device), who are also ultimately forced to
appeal to the mass/high culture distinction, as I will show. This is intimately connected to the
use of serial practice in the production of the artworks of the retro-sensationalists: market
value is maintained through an appeal to the artist’s name, which is constituted as a brand.
Thus valid critique, which avoids appeal to institutions such as the avant-garde rendered
problematic by post-modern practices, is difficult if not impossible in the face of retro-
sensational art. The art critic must acknowledge that normative positions are difficult to
uphold in the face of an incoherently constituted art field, where celebrity artists engage in a
form of product endorsement for serially produced artwork, and modern and postmodern
positions are dismissed as being unable to encapsulate the Spectacular, hedonistic aspects
of contemporary art. Rather than retreat into quietism, the critic must come to terms with this
incoherent field and posit alternative methods of critique. Should she fail, the critic is in
danger of sliding back into Modernist positions and sundering her role of yet more functions,
which have already been severely eroded by retro-sensationalist practice and art market
dominance.
2.2 Kitsch, high and mass culture
In order to understand the recurrent appeals to the avant-garde or avant-garde practice9

made by critics, as well as the wide-spread use of terms such as “culture industry” and
“kitsch” in the literature, it is necessary to understand the historical origins of these terms. In
the following chapter, I shall briefly sketch out the origins of the high versus mass culture
9 E.g. Hal Foster, Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.

debate which characterises much of the artworks produced under the banner of
retrosensationalism.
“By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the 'tastes' of the patrons.
Artists, gallery owners, critics and public wallow together in the 'anything goes', and the
epoch is one of slackening. But this realism of the 'anything goes' is in fact that of money; in
the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works
of art according to the profits they yield. Such realism accommodates all tendencies, just as
capital accommodates all 'needs', providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing
power. As for taste, there is no need to be delicate when one speculates or entertains
oneself.”10
This statement by Jean-François Lyotard encapsulates the view of popular culture which Pop
artists and retro-sensationalists set out to challenge. It is rooted in the work of Clement
Greenberg and Theodor Adorno/Max Horkheimer.
Clement Greenberg was the first critic to draw the distinction between high art and kitsch. In
his essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch” 11, published in 1939 in the Partisan Review, in which he
argued, leaning heavily on Hegel, that a society becomes less and less able to justify the
inevitability of its various art forms, and thus breaks up the accepted notions such as religion,
authority, style etc. which artists use to communicate endogenously with their audiences.
This, in pre-Modern cultures, led to cultural Alexandrianism, an academised stasis where
“the same themes are mechanically varied and yet nothing new is produced.” In Modern,
Western bourgeois society, however, the unprecedented phenomenon of the avant-garde
10 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi, Manchester, 1984, p. 76.
11 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939) 34-49.

promises to “keep culture moving” by raising art to “the expression of an absolute in which all
relativities and contradictions would either be resolved or beside the point”; this it will
accomplish by eschewing the world of “ideological confusion and violence”. The price of
moving artistic production from bourgeois society to Bohemia, is the loss of a steady stream
of income. (However, it remains attached to the elite or ruling classes by the “umbilical cord
of gold” as it represented their idea of culture. Greenberg remarks, though, that the number
of elite thus sketched out is shrinking, avant-garde art therefore is in a state of uncertainty.)
Art becomes “art for art’s sake” and subject matter or content becomes something to “be
avoided like the plague”. Greenberg, in line with his later programme and vision of
Modernism, absolutely identifies the emergence of the Avant-garde with the emergence of
formalism; this, however, is not the aspect which later writers draw on, preferring to focus on
the avant-garde as a generative condition for practice which lies in opposition to mainstream
art tendencies, and has the capacity to produce an alternative vision of art. Thus the
existence of an avant-garde becomes a pre-emptive condition for “alternate spaces and
practices” – for which the traditional critic sought to provide a textual or semiotic
environment.
Contemporaneously with the emergence of the avant-garde: “the new urban masses set up a
pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption… a
new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those… insensible to the
values of genuine culture”. In kitsch, “there is no discontinuity between art and life”. Whereas
the values of avant-garde art are a reflection of values “projected” by the “cultivated”
observer, the values of kitsch are “included” in the art object, to be instantly available for

“unreflective enjoyment” – Picasso paints “cause”, Repin paints “effect”. Because kitsch is
so undemanding, it is the most in demand.12 As Burgin points out, Greenberg’s essay can be
read at the most immediate level as a protest of the growth “of the totalitarian philistinism
prior to the Second World War”. 13 However, Greenberg also explicitly critiques all forms of
popular culture as kitsch: “popular, commercial art and literature, illustrations, ads, Tin Pan
alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc.” Here, all manifestations of popular culture,
which can be “turned out mechanically”, and can be “capitalised at a tremendous investment
which must show commensurate returns” are by necessity deemed as kitsch. Greenberg saw
kitsch as an explicit threat to true culture, and “its enormous profits are a source of
temptation to the avant-garde itself. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under
the pressure of kitsch…”
This dialectic between “true culture” and “kitsch”, as well as the association of kitsch with all
forms of popular culture that Greenberg delineates, constitute the focal point of attack for art
practitioners from the 1960’s onwards, as we will see. Also, as Burgin and others have
pointed out, his account of the avant-garde as working in apposition to instantiation of mass-
culture is ahistorical – the Dada movement and, particularly, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is
considered by Peter Bürger and Benjamin Buchloh among others to be a pre-eminent
example of avant-garde practice14. I will not discuss here the many shortcomings of
12 I have drawn this summary from Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, Macmillan, London, 1986, p. 2 ff
13 ibid 12, p. 3
14 See, for example, Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avantgarde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984
and Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.

Greenberg’s essay: this has been done elsewhere15; rather it is Greenberg’s identification of
kitsch with objects of mass culture which I wish to highlight.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer expanded on the notion of mass culture and its
apposition to high culture in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception, published in the Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944.16 The critic Benjamin Buchloh
cites this as one of the art-historical texts which most influenced his thinking17, and indeed,
the term “culture industry” and its subsidiary ideas are important points of reference for
critical practice after the textual turn of postmodernism.18
Adorno and Horkheimer sketch out a definition of the culture industry which aims to subsume
all modes of cultural production into a serialised, standardised set of products, aimed at an
15 For example, see Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless, a User’s Guide, MIT Press, Massachusetts,
1997, and many others.
16 All page references here refer to the 1988 Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1988.
17 Round Table, The predicament of contemporary art, in Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh
and Hal Foster, eds, Art Since 1900. Thames and Hudson 2004, p. 600.
18 Cf. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC, Duke University
Press, 1991.

uncritical mass audience: “films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as
a whole and in every part”.19 The culture industry aims to entertain, rather than challenge the
consumer, to increase his or her subservience to a capitalist system. Art here no longer
exists to challenge society, but to lull consumers into passivity. The culture industry negates
avant-garde practice by grouping artistic modes of production under one banner and thus
neutralising them. Everything which does not conform to the dictum of the culture industry is
rendered powerless through economic exclusion20: this is an extension of Greenberg’s worry
of the erosion of the “umbilical cord of gold” which bound avant-garde artists to collectors.
While Greenberg located Alexandrianism in the cultural practices of a pre-Modern art
practice, Adorno and Horkheimer transfer this to mass culture: mass culture depends on
frozen genres such as Sketch, Problemfilm and popular songs which are imposed on
consumers as Universalist examples of taste in the late liberal stage of culture. The culture
industry is wary of the new: mass culture rotates on the spot. 21 The result is the circle of
manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, then, mass culture negates the possibility of its
transformation: all practices subsumed under the banner of mass culture are petrified. As we
will see, this has implications for artistic practices which centre themselves on becoming part
of mass culture.
Adorno and Horkheimer describe the “artwork” wilfully abnegating its autonomy to become
another commodity in the series of commodities under the culture industry. However, they
point out, art as a separate area of cultural activity was only possible under the auspices of
bourgeois society. Artworks in this sense were also always goods with exchange- and use
value, subject to the whims of their patrons and commissioners. They declare that scheme
which rules bourgeois art is the uselessness of the artwork for the declared aims of the
market, as opposed to being “purposive without purpose” to use Kant’s terms. 22 Furthermore
under the culture industry, enjoyment of an artwork (what they term the “use value of the
reception of cultural goods (Kulturgüter)) is replaced by “being in the right place” and “being
23
in the know”, a gain in prestige instead of enlightened connoisseurship. This is an
instantiation of what Isabelle Graw terms “symbolic value”. Adorno and Horkheimer’s
theories were very influential for critics who developed postmodernist critical theory,
especially institutional critique and the influence of the market on conditions of art production.
19 Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Kulturindustrie, Aufklärung als Massenbetrug, Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, p. 131.
20 Ibid., p. 141.
21 Ibid., p. 142 – “Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs,
and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and
retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger”.
22 Ibid., p. 167.
23 Ibid.

There are two methods for siting the erosion of the boundaries of high and mass culture
outlined above. The first method centres itself on the temptation for the artist to become
aligned with the culture industry as a producer, through appealing to populism and through
uncritical appropriation of mass cultural iconography. Both Greenberg and
Adorno/Horkheimer recognised this danger, with its concomitant implications for artistic
practice (ossification and the denial of the utopian spaces promised by the existence of the
avant-garde). Benjamin Buchloh focuses his critique of the retro-sensationalists on these
implications. The second method is based on the post-structuralist deconstruction of sign
and referent, where the detached signifier is subverted into use as a brand name to validate
a series of artworks aligned with commodity production because of the serial nature of their
manufacture. Using an analysis of serial production undertaken by Rosalind Krauss, Hal
Foster relates this critical approach to the consequences of the flattening of the mass/high
culture debate.
The first method is sited primarily in the Greenbergian division between high and low culture,
which was first queried by the first generation of Pop Artists, who appropriated mass-cultural
iconography as subject matter. The first Pop Movement arose as a protest against the
dominant Abstract Expressionist movement and its Formalist programme. Arthur Danto
describes the intentions of the first generation of Pop Artists thus: they wanted „to blur, if not
to obliterate, the boundaries between high and low art, challenging, with commercial logos or
panels from comic strips or advertisements from newspapers and magazines, distinctions
assumed and reinforced by the institutions of the art worlds – the gallery, particularly with its
decor and the affected styles of its personnel; the collection; the carved and gilded frame; the
romanticised myth of the artist.“24 Pop Art of the Sixties therefore presented a (successful)
challenge to the practices of high art, as it questioned the cultural, institutional and discursive
frameworks which determined the production and reception of artworks.
One of the pioneers of this practice was Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg equated art with
bourgeois culture (“The enemy is bourgeois culture. If only I could forget the notion of art
entirely…”25), and as such attempted to formulate a notion of art that broke with this
paradigm. Oldenburg, in his project “The Store” utilised commonly available commercial
products and advertising imagery, its components being largely constructed from burlap,
cardboard and plaster. “These things (art objects) are displayed in art galleries, but that is not
the place for them. A store would be better (Store – place full of objects). Museum in
24 Arthur C. Danto, Aesthetics of Andy Warhol in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 4 ed. Michael Kelly, New York,
Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 43.
25 Claes Oldenburg, Documents from The Store, cited in Art in Theory 1900-2000, eds. Charles Harrison and
Paul Wood, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003, p.744

b(ourgeois) concept equals store in mine.”26 The store was conceived as duplicate of
neighbourhood shops in or around 107 East Second Street, which sold cheap or secondhand
goods. Oldenburg’s pieces were “often oversized, clumsily painted in broad-brush strokes in
an overt parody of Abstract Expressionism.”27 Subjects included baked potatoes, ice-cream
cones, tennis shoes, sausages or shirts. Their purpose was to demonstrate that since there
was no fundamental difference between the rarified commerce of art and the trade of a thrift
store, as both art works and bibelots were nothing but commodities, one might as well lose
28
the pretence and drop the fig-leaf. However, while the subject matter may have been
commerce and commercial objects (“I am for Kool Art, 7 Up art, Pepsi art, 39 cents art, L&M
art….”29 He declared.), Oldenburg’s aim was the retrieval of art from the bourgeois cultural
sphere by the use of everyday objects, the reconciliation of art with everyday life. 30 Art should
be “political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” 31
Retro-sensational artists retained the iconography of Pop Art while rejecting the ideology.
The current appropriation of mass-cultural icons served to enhance the recognisability and
thus accessibility and brand-value of the art under consideration. The “romanticised myth of
the artist” was recycled via spectacle and celebrity culture to become a brand which
underpinned and ennobled the autonomous nature of the serially produced artwork.
Koons’ stated goal was “for art to have as much political impact as the entertainment
industry, the film, the pop music and the advertising industries.” Achieving the desired
political impact required a change in the position of the artist: “At one time, artists had only to
whisper into the ear of the King or Pope to have political effect. Now, they must whisper into
the ears of millions of people.” This insight led to Koons’ desire “to communicate with as wide
an audience as possible.”32 For this, Koons needed to make art that appealed to a wide a
range of people as possible. The unstated side-effect is that Retro-sensational art is
therefore subsumed into the culture industry.
Koons is paraphrasing his acknowledged mentor, Warhol: “I don’t think art should be for the
select few, I think it should be for the mass of American people.”33 The critic Hal Foster
identifies the appeal to the constituting elements of the “American people” as undertaken
through the objects of their consumption (in this case, Campbell’s Soup Cans, Coca-Cola
26 Ibid.
27 Yve-Alain Bois, in ibid. 17, p. 455
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. 25, p.746
30 Michael Lüthy, Das Konsumgut in der Kunstwelt – Zur Para-Ökonomie der amerikanischen Pop-Art, in Exhib.
Catalogue, Shopping, 100 Jahre Kunst und Konsum, eds. Max Hollein and Christoph Grunenberg, Ostfildern-
Ruit, Hatje Kantz Verlag, 2002
31 Ibid.25, p.744
32 Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York: Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 33, 37, 12.
33 As cited in Hal Foster in ibid. 17, p. 490.

bottles, Brillo boxes) and through its objects of taste (the kitschy flower paintings of 1964, the
Marilyns and the “folksy” cow wall paper of 1966). Koons follows a similar trope, of siting the
appeal to a mass-subject in a notion of Universalist taste. Koons wrote about his work in a
text accompanying the catalogue to the 1992 San Francisco Banality exhibition that: “I was
telling the bourgeois to respond to the thing that it likes. Embrace it, don’t try to erase it
because you’re in some social standing now and you’re ambitious and you’re trying to
become upper class.”34 The presupposition governing this statement is that a preference for
“high art” is a preference forced onto people by snobs or elitists, and that ordinary people
cannot like high art.
The critic Arthur Danto acknowledges that Jeff Koons is thought to be one of the most
important artists of the last decades of the 20th Century, but that it is difficult to identify the
basis on which his importance rests. While he owes his heritage to the Conceptual
development of art from Duchamp to Warhol, since they made possible the preconditions
under which Koons’ aluminium or porcelain bric-a-brac figurines, or “items of manufactured
ornament”, as Danto refers to the Banality series (1988), could be accepted as art. Critics,
who, according to Danto, are in a position to clarify this matter, are “to a person, hostile to the
work and to Koons himself” as Koon’s statements challenge “the commonplaces through
which the critical establishment likes to answer questions of this sort.”35 – unfortunately,
Danto does not spell out those “commonplaces”. So Koons’ market complicit statements and
populist pronouncements which are presented with an apparently genuine naïve enthusiasm,
for these preconditions successfully challenge Postmodern and contemporary critical
practices.36 Unfortunately, too, Danto does not examine the ultimate consequence that Koons
Universalist practice has for the autonomy of art: since Koons is rejecting the notion of
criticality in his production, there is very little to support the existence of an autonomous
artwork, as distinct from a “mere” commodity, aside from the attribution of the artwork to
Koons himself. This appeal to the “romanticised notion of the artist” is firmly grounded in
Modern and pre-Modern artistic practice, both of which were sited, in Greenberg’s and
Adorno’s readings, in high culture.
Danto is hostile to Clement Greenberg’s Universalist taste claims in his article, but not to
Koons’. The appeal to popular mass culture in this case is seen as legitimising: Koons aims
for hedonistic enjoyment, for immediate impact, not for second order contemplation. The
hostility is also social: Greenberg’s appeals to high culture also encapsulated a resistance to
34 Arthur Danto, Banality and Celebration: The art of Jeff Koons, in Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders, Essays
from the Gap between Art and Life, New York, Columbia Press, 2005, p. 290.
35 Ibid. 34, p. 286.
36 Here I am referring to Buchloh’s and Foster’s post-structural and neo-marxists analyses. Koons also does not
fare any better when written about by Modernist critics such as Hilton Kramer.

mass culture and its fallen idols. Koons support of the mass cultural phenomenon is an
37
“alliance with forces vastly more powerful than anything Greenberg ever contrived.” Danto
has a complex reaction to the Banality works, but as we have seen, describing these as
“aesthetic hell” merely panders to the reactive, provocative stance Koons invokes vis-à-vis
critical exposition of his work. Koons validates kitsch as a true representation of mass taste.
Danto, true to his claim that all practices are equally valid after the end of art, and that
therefore the existence of a separate field of avant-garde practice cannot be justified,38
explicates Koons’ work but does not render judgement, leaving the viewer on his own.
Isabelle Graw writes that the Banality series “ushered in the last death throes of the notion of
high art,” 39 but that in later works (such as the Celebration series), which Koons reproduces
in ever larger and more elaborate variations, Koons is still mining the symbolic value of
earlier works, while failing to instantiate it in his contemporary production. Koons achieved an
auction record for contemporary art with the work “Hanging Heart, Magenta Gold (1994 –
2006)”, which was sold through Sotheby’s in 2007 for $23.6 million. 40 While Koons’ earlier
work continued the baiting of the defenders of avant-garde and high art practice, his later
works have become ready-made repetitions of earlier concepts, much as late-period Warhol
is seen as a mere repetition of his earlier genuinely innovative serial production of screen-
prints. Graw, in her explication of symbolic value, takes on an essentialist stance: while
earlier works were validated and valued both art-historically and economically through the
immanence of critique, later works merely cashed in on the critical promissory note, and thus
have only economic and not intellectual value.41 As Koons equates market valuation with the
significance of his practice, this critique, under his terms, is also rendered invalid.
Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster site their critique of the neo-geo group42 in Baudrillard’s
analysis of contemporary art. Modern art is described as being both critical in appearance
and yet in collusion with the contemporary world. “It plays with it, and is included in the game.
It can parody this world, illustrate it, simulate it, alter it; it never disturbs the order, which is
37 Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (review) by George Gessert
Leonardo, Volume 41, Number 4, August 2008, pp. 402-403.
38 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art, Princeton University Press 1997, p. 28.
39 Isabelle Graw, Der Große Preis, Kunst zwischen Markt und Celebrity Kultur, DuMont, Köln, 2008, p. 55.
40 http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/21/collecting-art-auctions-forbeslife-cx_nw_1121koons.html, retrieved 30th
November 2010.
41 Ibid. 39, p. 26.
42 Neo-Geo. Term (short for Neo-Geometric Conceptualism) applied to the work of a group of American artists
active in New York in the mid-1980s who employed a variety of styles and media but were linked by the fact
that their paintings, sculpture, or other products were predominantly cool and impersonal, in reaction from the
emotionalism of Neo-Expressionism. Jeff Koons, who exhibited consumer products such as vacuum cleaners
in a reworking of Dada ready-mades, is the best-known figure of the group. Others include Haim Steinbach
(1944– ), who creates kitsch-like still-lifes, and Philip Taaffe (1955– ), who paints geometrically-patterned
pictures parodying earlier styles such as Op art. Source: Ian Chilvers. "Neo-Geo." A Dictionary of Twentieth-
Century Art. 1999. Retrieved December 18, 2010 from Encyclopedia.com:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-NeoGeo.html.

also its own”.43 Rather than maintaining avant-garde notions of disruptions and criticality in
artistic practice, the neo-geo artists (and, indeed, this analysis can be expanded to the
modus operandi of the YBAs) only give the appearance of disruption, all the while shoring up
the very structures they pretend to challenge.
“If aesthetic practice claims to be a negation against the very act and condition of the
fetishisation of needs, the mere application of the traditional readymade strategy (by neo-geo
practitioners) fails (in this context). The purported aesthetic radicalisation conceals the
profoundly conservative attitude of these strategies with regard to the inherent dialectics of
the high art system and its ideological functions. Right from its inception, the shock value of
these current objects was tailored to slide right into the stable conventions of the institution
and the discursive order of art – the museum, the collection, the market. They (Koons and
Steinbach) pretend to engage in a critical annihilation of mass-cultural fetishisation,” but in
doing so ”...they reinforce the fetishisation of the high-cultural object even more: not a single
discursive frame is undone, not a single aspect of support systems is reflected, not one
institutional device is touched upon.”44
Hal Foster supports Buchloh’s view: he makes the point that there is a difference between a
post-historical manipulation of conventions whose value is regarded as given or fixed and a
historical transformation of practices whose value is elaborated or contested. Unlike most
avant-garde apocalypses of art, the former practice renders traditional categories more
stable and artistic discourse more hermetic. The practice of the retro-sensationalists is
business as usual for the art world, only more so, and it was mostly as a business that
commodity sculpture was reported in the media. 45
The artist Ashley Bickerton (also a member of the neo-geo group) stated that institutional
critique had come to a dead end: it had become an “absurd, pompous, saturated and
46
elaborate system, of cul-de-sac meanings,” Hal Foster queries whether these artists
received institutional critique as reified, or whether they had rendered it thus. He concludes
that the negativity inherent in neo-geo was defeatist rather than dialectical, a closure of
dialogues rather than an opening of critical spaces.
Despite retro-sensationalist claims that their practice, through its use of mass-cultural icons,
emancipates the taste of the “consumer of culture”, and thus, mass-culture itself, from the
43 See Jean Baudrillard For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, translated by Charles Levin, St.
Louis, 1981, p. 202.
44 Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2000, p. 293.
45 Hal Foster, Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p. 109.
46 Ashley Bickerton, Exhibition Statement, New York, Cable Art Gallery, 1986, cited in ibid., p. 103.

subordinate position they were placed in by the critical practitioners of modernism and post-
modernism, this promissory note is not fulfilled. Instead, the reification of the commodity as
an artwork ultimately reinforces the fetishisation of the object of mass taste. This enables the
retro-sensationalist artwork to fulfil the role of the high-cultural artwork, while
instrumentalising an appeal to mass taste as lip-service to institutional critique. While the
closed networks of art criticism are critiqued, no alternative interpretations are offered.
Buchloh’s and Fosters neo-Marxist approach critiques neo-geo practice on the basis of a
failed complicity with an earlier system of institutional critique. This approach however
implicitly maintains the claim to an avant-gardistic model of artistic practice, and thus the
criticism falls prey to Koons’ move which declares such viewpoints as invalid due to their
invocation of precisely this trope. Buchloh/Fosters analysis of the “failed project” of the neo-
geo group implicitly restitutes the object of art as an object of high culture, as no alternative
methodology is suggested.
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction
between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and
the truly new is criticized with aversion. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting
changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is
characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment….. 47” Thus
wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936.
The YBA movement positioned art within the midst of popular culture, with the explicit aim of
fusing the traditional notion of high art with the direct fusion of visual and emotional
enjoyment, much in the way that Koons’ Banality series aimed for direct, hedonist enjoyment.
The critic John Roberts emphasises the alliance between the YBAs and the “subordinate
consumer of popular culture”. 48 This parallels the Koonsian attitude; the YBAs are equally
dismissive of postmodernism, with its academic critique of entrenched hierarchies within the
museum and art world positioning the artist or spectator as critic of popular culture, rather
than as an advocate of such suspect pleasures. The YBAs also took on an overt complicity
with populist culture, eroding any notion of avant-gardism and avant-garde practice.
However, this breakdown remains incomplete, the artists’ claims are at best situated in an
incoherent position. They negate the claims to avant-garde practices while simultaneously
using methods of the avant-garde to carve out a niche which still corresponds to high
modernist definitions of art. The style of the popular and the vernacular is quoted but only in
order to be converted via pastiche to rejuvenate a moribund high culture. The popular is now
47 Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag 1966,
p. 15.
48 ibid. 2

backdrop against which art conducts its own self-definition.49 As Michael Archer states in
Etats specifiques (1992): “The artists, though, are never in any doubt that what they are
doing is making art.”50 This high culture depends on its difference from popular culture to
justify its existence. While the erosion of the boundaries between mass and high culture
defines the practice of the retro-sensationalists, the notion of artistic autonomy and the
autonomy of the artwork is difficult to sustain once an “artwork” is subsumed into the
production of the culture industry. Retrosensational practice does not examine the
implications of the full erosion of boundaries, instead relying on a high modernist notion of
the autonomous artist to shore up works that otherwise would slip into being identical with
mass-cultural products. A reversal, one could argue, of Duchampian practice. Thus the
Foster/Buchloh critique of the neo-geo artists, outlined above, can be expanded to include
the practices of the YBAs, and further, to govern retro-sensationalist practices in general.
2.3 Serialism
“For Baudrillard, the structural chiasmus has become actual: we have entered a political
economy of the commodity sign, with epochal ramifications for political economy, art
practice and cultural criticism alike.”51
The second possible avenue for critique in the face of the retrosensationalist attack of the
boundaries between high and low culture lies in the subsumption of serial production of
artworks, and its concomitant differential consumption into art.52 A defining characteristic of
Minimalism was the practice of using industrial materials and production processes to
contest the notion of originality and the original or skilled artist.53 This was claimed by
contemporary “branded artists” such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst to serially reproduce
concepts on a large scale in order to satisfy market demand for their works.54 While Seriality
for Minimal artists was grounded in a questioning of the fetishisation of the unique, original
artwork, and its concomitant (market) valuation55, the serial techniques employed by
49 Robert Garnett, Britpopism and the Populist Gesture, in ibid. 2, p. 23.
50 Simon Ford, The Myth of the Young British Artist, in in ibid. 2 p. 135.
51 Ibid. 45, p. 92.
52 Hal Foster, in „The crux of minimalism“ in Individuals, A Selected History of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986.
53 Rosalind Krauss, „The cultural logic of the late capitalist museum“ in R.Krauss, ed. October, the Second
Decade, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press 1997, p. 432.
54 Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, Aurum Press, London, 2008.
55 „But even if Minimalism seems to have been conceived in specific resistance to the fallen world of mass
culture – with its disembodied media images – and consumer culture – with its banalised, commodified objects
– in an attempt to restore the immediacy of experience, the door it opened onto „refabrication“ nonethless was
one that had the potential to let that whole world of late capitalist production right back in.“ Rosalind Krauss ,
„The cultural logic of the late capitalist museum“ in ibid. 53.

contemporary artists have arguably shifted in their intent. As Rosalind Krauss notes, „... the
turn towards industrial fabrication of the works was consciously connected to Minimalism's
logic, namely, the desire to erode the old idealist notions about creative authority.“ 56
Contemporary serial fabrication no longer subscribes to this ideology.
Hal Foster, citing Jean Baudrillard expands on the argument: (The industrial materials used
in serial artworks) “…were the operators of those rationalised forms susceptible to mass
reproduction and the general ones adaptable as corporate logos. The Minimalist resistance
to traditional composition which meant the adoption of repetitive, additive aggregation of form
partakes very deeply of that formal condition that can be seen to structure consumer
capitalism: the condition, that is, of seriality. For the serial principle seals the object away
from any condition that could possibly be thought to be original and consigns it to a world of
simulacra, of multiples without originals, just as the serial form also structures the object
within a system in which it makes sense only in relation to other objects, objects which are
themselves structured by relations of artificially produced difference. Indeed, in the world of
commodities it is this difference that is consumed.“57
This serial ordering also oriented Pop and Minimalism to the everyday world of serial
commodities more systematically than any previous art. Foster here highlights some of the
contradictions inherent in Minimal practice, and brings it to bear on current, common artistic
practice: the exploitation of the artificially produced, in many cases, negligible differences
between serially produced artworks, which in apposition to Minimal practice, nevertheless
are denoted and valued as individual, original pieces rather than simulacra. Indeed, part of
the allure of such pieces is their instant recognisability and subsequent conferral of status
upon their owners, i.e. their status as branded objects. Examples include Anselm Reyle's
Stripe Paintings, Damien Hirst's Spot/Butterfly paintings (and also his embalming of animals,
this is a form of serial application of a concept) and Takashi Murakami's Manga-influenced
figurines. Hirst has made a name for serially producing “Spot”, “Spin” and “Butterfly”
58
paintings. When the critic Jerry Saltz writes “Hirst is basically making Damien Hirst logos”
he is referring to this production. There are an estimated 1000 spot paintings in existence.59
Furthermore (and in keeping with the sensationalist, controversial stance Hirst likes to
perpetrate), the critic Sarah Thornton reports that Hirst painted the first five spot himself, and
then said: “f… this,”60 delegating production to assistants. Hirst can therefore be said to be
instrumenting a self-parody, appropriating his own artwork, but without the anti-modernist
56 Ibid. 53, p. 432.

57 Ibid. 52, p. 45
58 Jerry Saltz, On Being on the Artreview Power 100, Artreview November 2008.
59 Sarah Thornton, In and Out of Love with Damien Hirst, The Art Newspaper, Issue 195, October 2008,
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/In-and-out-of-love-with-Damien-Hirst/16269, retrieved 20.11.2010.
60 Ibid. 59

stance with which appropriation art (Sherry Levine, Sturtevant) worked to question the idea
of the original. Hirst’s wholesale embrace of serial production, market complicity and
publicity, while disregarding the social and artistic questions originally raised during the
1980’s, make him a difficult target for critics. The reception value of serially produced art is
fundamental to the collapse of an older set of values.
Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction saw the
reproducibility of art, or the questioning of the original, as a fundamentally democratic
process. The masses wanted to wrest the power of the original from its shell, to shatter its
auratic presence. Reproducibility ensures the direct, unfettered access to the object that the
masses desire. “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a
perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree
that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.” 61 However, now that
serialisation and concomitantly, commoditisation, is playing an increasing role in art
production, originality must be simulated in order to maintain the illusion of the original within
a system of mass production. Boris Groys has characterised this as the “serial exploitation of
a small variance (“serielle Ausbeutung des kleinen Unterschieds”).62 The fetish element of
the original that is superimposed on serial commodity production thus effects to maintain
exchange value in the system. It is also an appeal to the notion of originality that was
vehemently attacked through various artistic streams in postmodernism: Minimal and
appropriation art.
Hal Foster describes Jeff Koons as “appearing to delight, nihilistically in the commodity fetish
and media celebrity as the historical replacement of the auratic artwork and the inspired
63
artist.” Benjamin claims that the loss of contact between the screen actor and audience
results in a concomitant shrivelling of the aura, which has to be compensated by the artificial
build up of the “personality”, which is not itself a preservation of the unique aura of a person,
but “the spell of personality” the phony spell of a commodity. 64 Ipso facto, all commodities are
by definition incapable of possessing an aura, but instead display a “phony spell” to enchant
the masses. Koons, claims Foster, not only redefined the concept of aura as “phony spell”
but also presented commercial hype as the contemporary substitute for artistic aura.
Foster centres his critique of the neo-geo appropriation of serialism on Baudrillard’s theory of
the differential consumption of simulacra, as opposed to commodities, transmuted into the
concept of the “art brand”.65 The art brand is denoted by a specific personal style
61 Ibid. 47 p. 15.
62 Boris Groys, Die Kunst des Denkens, Hamburg, Philo Fine Arts, 2008, p. 133.
63 Hal Foster, in ibid. 17, p. 600.
64 Ibid. 47 p. 28.

promulgated prolifically in a serial manner through attendant workshop assistants, and little
self-involvement in the creative process – the brand manager selects and approves the final
product, and may have sketched the initial idea, but has little involvement in the process.
However, the “auratic artwork” and the “inspired artist” are both firmly Modernist terms, and
Minimal art aims to deny precisely these ideas, revealing them to be constructs. Foster, in his
Koons critique, falls into the trap of using terms declared to be invalid by both the artist
himself (the auratic artwork is a product of high culture) and preceding artistic practices.
The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote that

“…it is often this “factitious, differential, encoded, systematised aspect of the object” that we
consume more than the object as such, it is the brand name that triggers our desire, the
commodity-as-sign that becomes our fetish66, rather than the commodity itself.”67 In our world
of consumer capitalism, the primary term of consumption is not necessarily the use of a
given product so much as its difference as a sign from other signs.
In order to critically site the shift in recodings that were characteristic of the 1980’s Hal Foster
coined the term “conventionalist”. For Foster, this was an instantiation of the Poststructuralist
analysis of the commodity sign as defined by Baudrillard: according to Baudrillard, just as the
commodity is divided into use and exchange value, so is the sign divided into signified and
signifier. Structurally, then, just as the commodity can assume the effects of signification, so
can the sign assume the functions of exchange value. Indeed, on the basis of this structural
chiasmus between commodity and sign he recasts structuralism as a secret ideological code
of capitalism.68
The process of fetishisation no longer occurs primarily in human relationships with actual
objects (as traditional Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism claims69), but rather in the
ideological containment of individual desire within the sign itself. Therefore, possession of a
66 The fetish is „an object of irrational fascination, something whose power, desirability, or significance a person
passionately overvalues, even though that same person may well know intellectually that such feelings are
unjustifiably excessive.“ William Pietz, Fetish, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and
Richard Shiff, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1996, p. 197.
67 Cf Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, New York, Verso, 2006
68 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, Saint Louis, Telos
Press, 1981, cited in ibid. 45, p. 92.
69 Marx wrote of the commodity fetish: There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value
relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection
with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social
relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order,
therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In
that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering
into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products
of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are
produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This
Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social
character of the labour that produces them." - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1 section 4 [1].

work of a “branded artist”70 to use Sotheby’s terms becomes more desirable in late-capitalist
society than the possession of a work of a non-branded artist. As name-value has eclipsed
content value, a branded artist can therefore be in a position to sell work that is essentially
immune to criticism. And as the serial manufacturing of art objects has become
commonplace as a production method, art production has become more aligned with the
everyday methods of serial production than in any period before. This constitutes an attack
on older notions of artistic originality and the auratic, or fetishistic properties of artworks.
"Jeff recognizes that works of art in a capitalist culture inevitably are reduced to the condition
of commodity. What Jeff did was say, 'Let's short-circuit the process. Let's begin with the
commodity.' "71 In the post-commodity sculpture/YBA readymade, we can inflect Hal Foster’s
dictum that, in contemplating Haim Steinbach’s piece related and different (1985) (a pair of
Air Jordans set on a formica shelf next to five plastic goblets like kitsch grails) or Koons’ New
Shelton Wet/Dry Double Decker (1981), two vacuum cleaners encased one above the other
in Plexigas and bathed in fluorescent light like mock relics, the connoisseur of the art work is
positioned as a fetishist of the commodity sign.72 Here, art and commodity are made one, and
they are consumed as such. In terms of later Koons’ works, and Hirst’s Readymades
(whether modified or not), there is no explicit reference to a commodity sign, however, we
can draw on the auratic properties of the commodity sign, and the (self) representation of the
artist as celebrity (Isabelle Graw) to postulate that in this case, the artist’s signature (whether
explicit or not) acts as the commodity sign.
Foster would seem to suggest that this interpretation is possible: (Koons and Steinbach)
intimate that that all values (inherent in a commodity sculpture) - aesthetic, use, and
exchange/exhibition – are now subsumed by sign exchange value. They thus suggest that
the fetishism of the signifier (i.e. the consumption of the brand over the commodity) governs
our reception of art as well, we covet and consume not the work of art per se so much as the
73
Koons or the Steinbach, i.e. the brand. The art world has rapidly capitalised on this
phenomenon: after all, it is co-extensional to other practices in the world of luxury goods
such as high fashion or expensive cars, as Isabelle Graw points out.74
70 Art Brand
The artist is reduced to a brand name, to a signifier. And here we are reduced to the strange circularity that
characterises such art: the brand is exalted because in part, it is expensive. The existence of the brand
permits the serial production of commodities due to its exalted status. Self-promotional activity on part of the
artist, much critically referenced in texts pertaining to Koons, Hirst or the YBAs hinges on a new form of media
complicity.
71 Christian Viveros-Fauné, Return of the Dick, The Village Voice, 13th October 2010,
http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201010/2174533251.html, retrieved 29th November 2010.
72 ibid. 45, p. 111.
73 ibid. 45, p. 112.
74 Ibid. 39, p.55

Foster’s analysis expresses some of the frustration of October art critics with Koonsian
sensationalist artists: October’s traditional opposition to spectacle culture75 and its “fallen
idols” is incommensurate with an artistic stratagem of financial exploitation of precisely this
phony spell. The terms of Foster’s critique highlight this frustration: in his appeal to the
“auratic artwork and the inspired artist” he is appealing to older, modernist terms of originality
and genius, which sit uneasily with his endorsement of post-structuralist theories which
dismantle the self-same. Foster is attempting to shore up a boundary which can no longer be
legitimately maintained: contemporary critics such as Pier Dominguez appear to relish in the
dissolution of high and low culture when they state that art criticism is alive and well “as, with
the X-Factor, everyone can become an art critic”.76
The post-structuralist model of sign/signifier separation can not just be applied to the
detachment of the artists’s name from their product and subsequent instrumentalisation as a
brand, but also to the class of artworks favoured by the retro-sensationalists: the readymade.
Koons describes his own work as ready-made, stating with reference to the Banality series
…this offered me the opportunity to go and create my own objects in such bodies of work as
“Banality” where I did not work with direct ready made objects but created objects with a
sense of readymade inherent about them.”77 Thus Foster’s critique can be expanded above
and beyond his early “typical” readymades.
The commodity sculpture of Koons and Steinbach assumes an ironic distance from its own
tradition, the ready made, treating the readymade as abstraction. According to Foster,
commodity sculpture substitutes design and kitsch for art.78 Foster emphasizes that the
underlying poststructuralist theoretical model (detachment of the sign from the signifier) was
not well understood by the practitioners of conventionalism (i.e. the art produced by the neo-
geo group). The conventionalist model of art treated “all practices (artistic, social, otherwise)
as detached signifiers to be manipulated, ahistorical conventions to be consumed. Not
restricted to one style, conventionalism tended to reduce these practices to abstractions,
indeed to simulacra. …Conventionalism has become a pervasive aesthetic of our new order
79
of capitalism.” Avant-garde artistic devices such as the Duchampian Ready-made were
emptied of their original significance and disruptive impulses. They were presented as mere
75 Here I mean populist, sensationalist culture, which is opposed on ideological grounds: mass culture is easily
exploited by the market, the individual instrumentalised. October was one of the first Journals to instantiate
serious critique of film through Annette Michelson’s work..
76 Pier Dominguez, Assessment, in The State of Art Criticism, eds. James Elkins and Michael Newman,
Routledge, London, 2008, p. 254.
77 Ibid. 34, p. 293. Holger Liebs also states that: „Künstlerisch lässt sich sein Werk als äußerst kostspiegelige
handwerkliche Reproduktion ausgesuchter Ready-mades beschreiben. So nah war nicht mal Warhol am
Verwertungsmechanismus der Kunst als Ware gewesen.“ Die Kunst und das Geld, in Holger Liebs: die Kunst,
das Geld, und die Krise, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König 2009, p. 24.
78 Ibid. 45, p. 107.
79 Ibid. 45, p. 92.

commodity objects, the Duchampian reference was used to validate the practice art-
historically. Foster here speaks of the Duchampian Readymade being reduced to vacuum
cleaners in Plexiglas displays. 80
While the neo-avant garde positions of artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Brodthaers and
Michael Asher used the device of the ready-made in order to reflect on the conditions of
presentation and auratic emphasis of artworks, artists such as Koons used the readymade to
strategically invert these positions, to return the ready-made into its status as product.
Indeed, it is often returned as a luxury commodity on display, in opposition to the traditional
Duchampian use of the ready-made as a generator of rupture in, and break with, aesthetic
tradition.
Fredric Jameson writes that “The erosion of the boundaries between high culture and so-
called mass or popular culture (…) is perhaps the most distressing development of all from
an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in firstly, preserving a
realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock
and kitsch, of TV series (…), and secondly, in transmitting difficult and complex skills of
reading, listing and seeing to its initiates.”81 This is reflected in the dearth of serious art
criticism surrounding Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami. Articles in October or
Texte zur Kunst focus on their adherence to market-compliant strategies of self-promotion
and populism, their exploitation of what Isabelle Graw has termed “Celebrity culture”, and
their success at auction. Academic critique of the retro-sensationalist movement is found in
the art-historical works by Hal Foster (Return of the Real) and Benjamin Buchloh (Neo-Avant
Garde and Culture Industry), as well as the volume edited by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain
Bois, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster, Art Since 1900. Art Since 1900 devotes a single
page (of 679) to examining neo-geo, and, related YBA practices. This quietism can be traced
to the disquiet experienced by practitioners of academic art criticism to the erosion of avant-
garde notions and values implicit in the breakdown of the boundary between high and mass
culture. A quote by Rosalind Krauss from a 1991 New York Times review is exemplary for
this stance: „Koons is not exploiting the media for avant-garde purposes. He’s in cahoots
with the media. He has no message. It’s self-advertisement and I find that repulsive.“82
The first difficulty presents itself in the avenue of the pure aesthetic reception of the pieces.
This view is represented by critics such as Joanna Burton, and Hilton Kramer describing the
80 Ibid. 45, p. 92, my emphasis. Foster is referring to the Koons work “New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton
Wet/Drys 5-Gallon, Double Decker, 1981-1986”. This recently sold for over $11 million,
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5074053, retrieved 02.12.2010.
81 Ibid. 7, p. 112.
82 Cited in Brian Wallis, „We don’t need another hero: Aspects of the Critical Reception of the Work of Jeff
Koons“ in Jeff Koons, exhib. Catalogue San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 28.

retro-sensationalist oeuvre as visually registering as “kitsch”, or in Dantos terms, “aesthetic
hell”. 83 This primary response is rendered invalid when examined through a Koonsian lense,
the critic outs herself as being incapable of enjoying the cultural experience a Koons offers,
and thus being dominated in her view by the high Modernist Greenbergian kitsch/high culture
critical paradigm, one which Koons seeks to invalidate with his appeal to a Universalist taste.
Burton rightly points out that the pieces must therefore be examined in terms other than that
which the direct reference implies. Arthur Danto attempts to do this by acknowledging that
the democratic approach inherent in, for example, the Banality series, that making art that
appeals to the masses, is inherently positive. This is consistent with his position that after the
end of art, all practices are equally valid – the notion of an avant-garde is therefore rendered
meaningless.84 However, beyond merely restating that Koons has mass appeal, Danto
provides no interpretative guidance, beyond stating that the iconography used places Koons
in the canon of the surrealists.85 This follows Danto’s policy of offering descriptive, not
evaluative criticism, as, firstly, he has claimed that the mere fact that he selects an artwork
for review implies that he is sympathetic to the piece in question, and secondly, as we have
seen, that he has a complex reaction to the works under consideration, torn between
approval for Koons’ claim to mass appeal and his own visceral “aesthetic hell” reaction. The
criticism fails because he fails to convincingly ground his assessment of Koons in a frame of
reference, and to provide a textual environment for his implicitly positive assessment of the
pieces.
Hal Foster critiques the substitution of auratic artwork and the inspired artist by the
commodity fetish and the media celebrity in Koons’ practice. However, as we have seen, the
notions of the auratic artwork and the inspired artwork are both concepts inherent in high
Modernism, and are tied to the existence of a high culture. Both Minimal and Retro-
sensationalist practice hinged on the collapse of these constructs, and therefore, referring to
them in a critique renders the critique problematic, as we have seen.
Probably the most effective method of critique lies in the Foster/Buchloh deconstruction of
the neo-geo claim to emancipate the masses from the fetish of the artistic object, i.e. the
commodity sculpture as an object through which one can read institutional critique. This
approach fails, as the object is constructed to slide back into the market and the museum,
83„ an artist whose work registers visually as kitsch. I’m thinking here of artists like Takashi Murakami, Jeff
Koons, and Richard Phillips, but not only them and not necessarily as straw men. Johanna Burton, in ibid. 1, p.
23, and Hilton Kramer "Nothing but a recycling of kitsch taste for jaded sophisticates." Cited in Richard Lacayo,
Artist Jeff Koons Makes, and Earns, Giant Figures, People Magazine, May 08, 1989,
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20120233,00.html, retrieved 19th December 2010. Danto is
describing his reaction to the Banality show of 1988, in ibid. 34, p. 298.
84 Ibid. 38, p. 28.
85 ibid.34, p. 298.
leaving institutions and discourses untouched. Of course, if the neo-geos were to succeed in
their programme, and the commodity sculpture were to collapse into true commodity rather
than remaining a reified object, they would cease to be able to justify their existence as
artists; for an artist separates himself from a manufacturer by virtue of producing art objects.
Foster and Buchloh imply in their criticism, but don’t state, that the autonomy of the art object
is contingent on the continuing existence of some notion of distinction between high and low
culture, of the possibility of avant-garde spaces and practices. Any argument which attempts
to conflate mass culture with high culture is structurally incoherent as it relies on the
continued existence of some notion of “the artist” as self-validating entity. James Elkins
raises the point that appealing to the avant-garde, to alternate spaces, to buttress the art
world against Koonsian Banalities is an appeal to high modernism, which was blocked by the
artistic and critical practices from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. The privileging of one work over
another cannot be justified by appealing to these normative values in a relativised field of
art.86 This points to the danger of wanting to imbue artistic practice with argumentative
internal coherence, a notion which will be examined in the subsequent chapter.
The subject of retro-sensationalist artistic practices therefore eludes the critic: serious
academic criticism falls back onto the notion of avant-garde practices. It seems that Koons is
one of the rare topics which unites neo-conservatives such as Hilton Kramer with neo-
Marxists such as Buchloh. While one may disagree with Koons on grounds of personal taste
(despite his claims that this is illegitimate due to the recourse to a high/mass culture
dialectic), advanced art criticism fails to render alternative terms from which to construct a
critique. The ultimate result is that the critic is either forced into incoherence or quietism.
The combination of the fetishised commodity object as described in the preceding passage
and the spectacle results in what Isabelle Graw terms “celebrity culture”. In the closing round
table to the book Art Since 1900, Yve-Alain Bois remarks that kitsch has been replaced by
spectacle.87 This is touched upon in Isabelle Graw’s critique of Koons: when writing about
Magenta Heart and the Celebration series, she states that Koons is currently merely
producing “ever larger and more elaborate versions of the series” 88 – imputing that spectacle
has taken the place of previous critiques of the pieces as aesthetic objects. The spectacle
also took over art world gallery openings and media reception, as we shall see later.
The phenomenon was first described by Guy Debord in the book the Society of the
Spectacle. With the term spectacle, Debord defines the system that is a confluence of
advanced capitalism, the mass media, and the types of governments who favour those
86 James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 148.
87 Ibid. 17 p. 672.
88 Ibid. 39, p. 55.

phenomena. "... the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of "mass media" which are its most
glaring superficial manifestation...".89 The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which
relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive
identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". We look, but do not interact or
participate.
"The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes. "Rather, it is a social
relationship between people that is mediated by images."90 The spectator thus finds herself in
a position where “lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle” 91.
Media culture is a material part of spectacle culture and carries through to the contemporary
art world.
Bernard Gendron described how large exhibitions of the 1980’s, such as the 1981 New
York/New Wave at the P.S.1, increasingly became mass spectacles such as sporting events
or fashion shows92. The same phenomenon was apparent in 1990’s London, according to the
magazine to i-D: “Openings are full-on glam events, see and be seen affairs more popular in
many ways than even the most exclusive club nights.”93
In the phenomenon of retro-sensationalism, Isabelle Graw sees a transformation of the

society of the spectacle to celebrity culture. When the market determines all aspects of lived
existence, and life becomes an object of human intervention, then celebrity culture is the
social form that encultures this, as it rewards individuals for the successful marketing of their
lifestyles. Celebrity culture is parasitic on the personality cult of self-promotion now endemic
to certain sectors of the art world. The focus on market success as determinant for the
“quality” of works, first advocated by Warhol and then sharpened to a dominant driver by
Koons legitimises all practices necessary to further market valuations of works. Andy Warhol
first defined the notion of the commodification of an artist’s persona in his book The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again: “Some company recently was
interested in buying my "aura." They didn't want my product. They kept saying, "We want
your aura." I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So
then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for it, I should try to figure out
what it is.”94
Hirst decided he would be famous whatever he did. Julian Stallabrass quotes Hirst as saying
as early as 1990, before he had made his big breakthrough: “I can’t wait to get into a position
89 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York, Zone Books 1995, Thesis 24.
90 Ibid., Thesis 4.
91 Ibid, Thesis 8.
92 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmatre and the Mudd Club, Chicago 2002, p. 308.
93 Cited in Simon Ford, The Myth of the Young British Artist, ibid. 2 , p. 140.
94 ibid. 3, p. 77.

to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would
look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off’. But after a while you can get away with things.”95 For
Hirst, the attraction of celebrity and success is that the market can be, so to speak, “led by
the nose”. Thus he is not engaging in the self-promoting strategies that Koons engages in,
rather, he uses a simulacrum of provocation to garner media interest which is then translated
into sales figures. With Hirst and the other YBAs, provocation for the sake of appearing
provoking has displaced marketing of a commodity simulacrum. The brand name “Hirst” and
all it encapsulates suffices to guarantee sales: Hirst has no need to provoke the art
establishment, to side overtly with mass taste, as Koons and Warhol did, as a few well-
placed actions ensured that the name Hirst was associated with a certain type of
provocation.
The focus is no longer on artistic production, but on the economically successful individual
and their lifestyle, achieved through the production of a desirable brand. The museum, the
curator and the critic have been eclipsed in their function as determinants of the reception of
artistic production and valuation, the market appears to dance to the tune of the celebrity.
The autonomy of art is now upheld by reference to its “author”, who presents himself as
media “celebrity” construct, despite the sustained attacks of critical and artistic practice on
precisely this notion. In the light of the celebrity artist, the comment by Tobias Meyer, head of
Contemporary Sales at Sotheby’s – “The best art is the most expensive, because the market
is so smart.” appears somewhat hollow.96
Graw describes how, with the advent of the 90’s, colluding with the lifestyle and celebrity
press no longer necessarily implied that one had “sold out”, as had been the case in the
1980’s and earlier: one’s status as “artist” was not endangered, and it was seen as an
acceptable avenue through which to drive revenue and sales. 97 The character of the artist is
thus seen as co-extensional with their artworks, fulfilling the Baudrillardian dictum discussed
98
earlier. The celebrity is created as a tool to promote the art brand, and to ensure the
continuing autonomy of art, for as John Roberts pointed out, it is otherwise problematic for
the art of today to conceive of its autonomy after the postmodern erosion of formalist criteria
for the practice, and the levelling of high and mass cultural phenomena.99
95 Cited in Julian Spalding, Why it's OK not to like modern art, The Times, May 8th 2003,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article1098907.ece retrieved 20th November 2010.
96 See Artforum, Scene and Herd, 11th May 2006, http://artforum.com/diary/id=10968, accessed 18th December
2010.
97 Ibid. 39, p. 61.
98 John Roberts, Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s, in ibid. 2 p. 76.
99 For a discussion of this, see for example ibid. 86

2.4 Retrosensationalism, criticism and beyond
The subsumption of all aesthetic values and attitudes into a mass-market system, by the
artworks currently produced, leaves the critic without a territory to claim as their own.
Journalists quote high auction prices as supporting evidence for the importance of the artistic
practice in question, creating an economo-aesthetic equivalence relation. 100 Don Thompson
claims that Clement Greenberg was the last critic capable of influencing collectors and
curators101, and while this may be an exaggeration, it is true that the critic no longer holds any
sway over aesthetic valuation. The art being produced, sold, and consumed no longer makes
aesthetic claims, for they have become indefensible under the sway of a market that indulges
in value inflation. Traditionally, the role of the critic was to “scan the horizon for a new blip
appearing on it,”102 and draw attention to this blip, connecting avant-garde art with advanced
criticism, and popularising and drawing attention to it. This popularisation of previously avant-
garde practices ensured the establishment of their place in bourgeois art valuation. Rosalind
Krauss, a publisher at October sees this as a valued part of a critics’ role, and one which still
has traction. 103 Since Andy Warhol, and the establishment of celebrity culture self-publication
has eclipsed critical adulation as a means of achieving recognition. The celebrity artist uses
her celebrity to “ennoble” a serially produced product. The rejection of the critic by Koonsian
and Warholian practices has, among other factors, led to a wholesale rejection of the non-
compliant critic by the market. However, market art is also only a small pocket of the art
world, along with its concomitant phenomenon of celebrity culture. The market is what is
reported on, but represents only a very small slice of the actual art produced. Christopher
Knight, art critic at the LA Times, supports this view “The problem is that the market
represents a very narrow slice of a vast art-pie. Art commerce gets out-sized press because
the public, although generally unfamiliar with and incurious about art, is familiar with and
curious about money. In modern capitalism, art and popular culture intersect in the
market.”104
Like no previous practice, the Retrosensationalists exposed the divide between mainstream
art journalism and “academised” post-modern critical practice. While the latter was explicitly
rejected as being incapable of conveying the sensuous pleasure inherent in the viewing
100 Ibid. 39, p. 61

101 Ibid. 54, p73.
102 Rosalind Krauss, in “Round Table: The State of Art Criticism,” October 100, Fall 2002, p. 216.
103 Ibid.
104 Christopher Knight, Critic's Notebook: MOCA's complicated choice of a new director, LA Times, 11.01.2010,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/01/critics-notebook-mocas-new-director-its-
complicated.html, retrieved 02.10.2010.

experience, and treated all consumers of popular culture as subordinates, the former was,
thoroughly subverted into unquestioning compliance. The media played a “full supporting
role” in furthering the hype around the phenomenon of the YBA. Art was portrayed as
glamorous, sexy and entertaining, fully subscribing to Spectacle/Celebrity model of the art
world elucidated earlier.105 The outraged reaction of critics to retro-sensationalist artists in the
tradition of Hilton Kramer only plays into the hands of media artists, for this, writes Foster,
creates a “packaged simulacrum of artistic provocation,” 106 which can be used to further the
media exposure.
Postmodern critical practice, in the eyes of the Retro-sensationalists, is fixated on portraying

popular culture as a product of neo-liberal consumerist society, forced on the masses to
maintain the ideological status quo. The view is reliant on the existence of the remaining
vestiges of disruptive art practices and the “neo-avant garde”, to retain an ossified validating
dialectic. 107 This polarising position necessarily implied a distance between the hedonistic
enjoyment of populist pleasures of that group of artists (and the concomitant erosion of
critical distance) and an artistic practice which functioned mainly as social and institutional
critique. While Koons also appeals to hedonistic pleasures his artworks embody, his critique
does not highlight the “joylessness” of critique. However, it does parallel the distinction
between hedonistic enjoyment of mass-culture, and the academicism of Greenbergian high
culture. Kitsch, according to Koons, is good, because we all enjoy it, while much
contemporary art in the lineage of high art is bad, because we don’t enjoy it. “I’ve tried,”
Koons wrote, “to make work that any viewer, no matter where they came from, would have to
. . . say that on some level ‘Yes, I like it.’ If they couldn’t do that it would only be because they
108
had been told that they were not supposed to like it.” Koons was reacting to the
academicised criticism which dominated much of the discourse throughout the 1980’s, which
109
he saw as dead end. However, Koons is here protesting against critique but not
necessarily against art criticism. Indeed, in a 1984 interview, Koons states that “…by all
means I am not trying to exclude high-art vocabulary. The objects and other images that are
interconnected to the body of work have other contexts, and, depending how much the
viewer wants to enter it, they can try and get more out of it and start to deal with abstractions
of ideas and of context.”110 Koons is siting the reception of the work per se, the commodity,
before criticism: in the context of conceptual art and institutional critique, criticism and
artworks are developed in parallel, the text is a constitutive aspect of the artwork. Koons
makes a claim, in this quote, about the autonomy of the artwork, implicitly denying post-
105 Simon Ford, The Myth of the Young British Artist, in ibid. 2 , p. 140.
107 Simon Ford, The Myth of the Young British Artist, in ibid. 2, p. 135.
108 Ibid. 34, p. 296.
109 Ibid. 4 p. 25.
110 Jeff Koons, Artist Statement, Flash Art No.129, Summer 1986, 2nd May 1986, cited in ibid. 25 p. 1053.

modernist critique. So while apparently advocating ideas about abstraction and context of the
work, the implicit statement is that the fundamental reception value should be one
concomitant to modernist practice, centering reception on phenomenology. Criticality is
invited but ultimately denied.
If Koons presented commercial hype as the contemporary substitute to artistic aura, then
Damien Hirst, the best-known of the Young British Artists to emerge in the wake of the
Sensation exhibition of 1997, did much the same thing with media sensationalism.111 The
dilemma of the American critics faced with Koons was not echoed by the reactions of the
British press when faced with the Sensation artists. The popular press, in contrast to their
usually hostile approach to contemporary art, embraced these artists with verve, resulting in
the artists’ primary source of socialisation taking place through the media, as opposed to
gallery catalogues or exhibitions.112 The new art was taken to be identifiable with popular
culture itself, echoing Koon’s claims to represent mass-cultural taste. Questions regarding
the traditional role of the critic were taken to be part of an elitist, out-of-date avant-garde
discourse. This represented a paradoxical development for the role of the critic: while
newspaper art criticism rose to new prominence in terms of providing a platform of self-
promotion for self-styled celebrity artists, the accompanying discourse was largely uncritical
and adulatory. The few critical voices were “…a mere spectacle of opposition, ineffectual
against the YBAs’ powerful media supporters”. 113
This stands in contrast to the self-promotional efforts of Jeff Koons: while he paid to take out
adverts in Artforum114 (captioned „To be forever free in the power, glory, spirituality and
romance, liberated in the mainstream, criticality gone,” Artforum 1987), the hype directed and
driven by the YBAs resulted in free media coverage. The increased media coverage led to
increased prominence of artists, resulting in a celebrity cult. Roberts states that the
consequences of the media socialisation of artists results in a reciprocal fascination between
the media and the artist with his or her own celebrity. 115 All that can be achieved by a critic in
such a context is either quietism – October barely published on contemporary art for a
period116 – or an acceptance of the subjugation to the system. Neither solution seems likely
to further a rejuvenation of a moribund critical practice.

112 “There is still some derisory comment from the tabloids, but generally the media are playing a full supporting
role in sustaining the general euphoria surrounding the yBa. This partial, and possibly temporary, cessation of
hostilities between the art world and media is the result of the realisation that art can be newsworthy in forms
beyond the usual “waste of taxpayers’ money” headlines. Art is now glamorous, sexy, and entertaining. Simon
Ford, The Myth of the Young British Artist, in ibid. 2, p. 140
113 Simon Ford, The Myth of the Young British Artist, in ibid. 2, p. 135.
114 Catherine Wood, Kapitalistische Echtheit in, ibid. 4 p. 55.
115 John Roberts, Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s, in ibid. 2, p. 76.
116 Matthew Bowman, The New Historians of Art, in ibid. 76, p. 289.

The criticism levelled by the Retrosensationalist artists, amongst others, at the practitioners
central to the “textual turn” has led to a cautious re-evaluation of contemporary critical
practice. Central to the Retro-sensationalists’ rejection of postmodern critique was the feeling
that critics too often rejected the enjoyment derived from the art in favour of critiquing the
conditions of production and commodification. Art critics themselves are examining the
implications of institutional critique, resulting in a lessening of the polarisation that
characterised earlier debates. The previous binary coding of critique/rejection of
commodification left little room in which the critic could operate. This is expressed in the
Round Table discussion “On the predicament of contemporary art” which closes the book Art
Since 1900. Buchloh, Krauss, Foster and Bois all express varying degrees of agreement with
Buchloh’s statement that his own own work is situated between the Dialectic of the
Enlightenment (Horkheimer/Adorno) and Guy Debord’s the Society of the Spectacle. Buchloh
delineates the postwar “dismantling of autonomous practices, spaces, and spheres of
culture, and a perpetual intensification of assimilation and homogenisation, to the point today
where we witness what Debord called “the integrated spectacle”. Where does that leave
contemporary artistic practices, and how can we, as art historians and critics, address them?
Are there still spaces outside the homogenizing apparatus? Or do we have to recognise that
many artists themselves do not want to be situated outside it?” Yve-Alain Bois notes that
“(This) is a dire diagnostic (after all, Debord committed suicide) but one I think we all agree
with to a certain extent.” 117
Too often, as Joanna Burton asserts, critique of Hirst and his contemporaries consists of the
“overarching condemnations of the market, mass culture, and the like that take the place of
any deliberate, critical consideration of objects and practices within complicated contexts and
historical trajectories. 118 Hal Foster concurs with the paradigm outlined, stating that “If you
agree with Adorno and/or Debord, there is little more that can be said.” He goes on to
examine some critical alternatives, citing the neo-avantgardist work of the neo-Concretists in
Brazil and the Guatai artists in Japan. This position ties in with Okwui Enzewor’s and Nicolas
Bourriaud’s viewpoints that globalisation complicates the old avant-garde/culture industry
opposition by introducing fields of artistic activity that do not conform to this binary coding.119
There are other possible perspectives, particularly in the wake of the 2009 market crash, and
the subsequent revaluations of a great number of the Retro-Sensationalists.120 The art
market is now, having championed the “enlightened market complicity” (Jack Bankowsky) of
117 Ibid. 17, p. 600.

118 Johanna Burton, ibid. 1, p. 23
119 Ibid.17 , p. 600.
120 Matthias Thibaut, Die Rezession entzaubert die PR-Künstler, Handelsblatt, 21.02.2010.

these artists, dubbing them “PR-artists”, and calling for a return to Modern criteria such as
durability and “presence”. 121
The next chapter will outline the options for criticism after the rejection of the textual turn.
121 Tom McDonough, in ibid. 1, p. 122.

3 Part II: Concepts of criticism
Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric battlefield, on which a
list of interpretative options are either openly or implicitly in conflict. …Only another,
stronger, interpretation can overthrow and practically refute an interpretation already in
place.1
Fredric Jameson
1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, Cornell University
Press, 1982, p.13

3.1 Introduction
The current crisis in criticism is often attributed to the collapse of its theoretical foundations.
Explanatory models such as Greenbergian Formalism and the critical discourses associated
with Postmodernism have apparently been invalidated and no workable alternatives have

arisen. This has led to a situation where the poet critic, a critic seemingly free of the baggage
of theoretical models, has again risen to dominance, much in the way that this figure
dominated the critical field in the 1940s and 1950s. Academic art criticism may have been
diminished, but it survives as methodology as opposed to ontology, as I will show. The
impressionistic practice of the poet-critic does not pose a serious challenge to academic art
criticism: theory remains an important foundation for art criticism. Art criticism’s most serious
challenge arises through external factors, when quietism reigns in response to the ever-
increasing role of the market.

In many ways, the crises in criticism, which appear in the 1950’s, 1970’s and 1990’s to
present, are simply cyclical debates between conflicting methods. Clement Greenberg first
commented in 1962: “Contemporary art criticism is absurd not only because of its rhetoric,
its language, and its solecisms of logic. It is also absurd because of its repetitiousness.”2 Hal
Foster wrote that in the 1970’s “a crisis in criticism, ensuant upon the breakdown of American
formalism, occurred. In its wake we have had much advocacy, but no theory with any
collective consent.”3 And the British critic Robert Garnett writes about the 1990’s London arts
scene that a “crisis in criticism”, concomitant with the “disappearance of any coherent
paradigms” has led to scene art, with artists being dominantly part of a “scene economy.”4
Foster makes the same point: “The pluralist position plays right into the ideology of the free
market.” 5 In a recursive move, he blames criticism itself for not constituting new paradigms:
however, in the latest chapter of the „crisis in criticism” critics have become more wary: no
longer is the practice self-reflexively blamed. The grand narrative is itself recognised as a
Greenbergian, totalitarian problem.6 The current formulation is more cautious: “The category
of “contemporary art” is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very
heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination,
conceptual definition, and critical judgment. Such paradigms as “the neo-avant-garde” and
“postmodernism,” which once oriented some art and theory, have run into the sand, and,
arguably, no models of much explanatory reach or intellectual force have risen in their
stead.”7 There is no call for a grand narrative to ground contemporary practice, merely the
observation that existing narratives have stalled. As James Elkins writes: “Why hasn’t the
animus provoked by Clement Greenberg’s version of high Modernism and later by
postmodern writing in and around the journal October given rise to more workable
alternatives?”8
We take for granted that art criticism is a serious academic enterprise, but this was not
always the case. The serious art critic, whose judgements are sited in a structured system,
arose from Clement Greenberg’s reflections on Abstract Expressionism, and was
subsequently developed by the critics writing for Artforum in the magazines’magazine’s early
days, as I shall show. I will examine the rise of academic art criticism and the concomitant
2 Clement Greenberg, "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," in John O'Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, London, University of Chicago Press,
1993, p. 143.
3 Hal Foster, Against Pluralism, in Recodings, Washington, Bay Press, 1985, p.15
4 Robert Garnett, Britpopism and the Populist Gesture, in Occupational Hazard, Critical Writing on Recent
British Art, Eds. Duncan McCorquodale, Naomi Siderfin and Julian Stallabrass, Black Dog Publishing, London
1998, p. 18
5 Ibid. 3, p.15
6 Daniel A. Siedell, Contemporary Art Criticism and the Legacy of Clement Greenberg, Or How Artwriting
Earned its Good Name, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 36 No. 4, Winter, 2002
7 Hal Foster, Questionnaire on the Contemporary, October 130, Fall 2009, p. 3
8 James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 31

rejection of the “poet-critic” model to understand how art criticism was was constituted as an
academic, self-reflexive practice. At its most serious, art criticism aims to examine the
foundations of art and constitute a model for novel art practices: this is what Clement
Greenberg (through the Formalist model of painting) and Rosalind Krauss (through the
Structuralist model of Minimal sculpture) achieved, although of course these two positions
are entirely antithetical..
“No word in postwar criticism in more disputed than the term postmodernism” writes Hal
Foster in Art Since 1900. 9 Postmodernism, like Modernism before it, does not designate one
style of art, but a cultural epoch. However, unlike the rigidity of the formalist Modernist critical
paradigm, postmodernism is widely used as an umbrella term for a variety of critical
practices. There are at least two concepts of postmodernism in use. The first definition,
Octobrist postmodernism, sites postmodernism as a critical paradigm in opposition to
Greenberg’s modernism - postmodernism is not tied to any definite period, but is rather a
deconstruction of the concepts employed in modernism. Here, the founding tenets
(formalism, medium-specificity, verticality, the “original” artwork and so on) of Greenbergian
modernism are deconstructed, exemplified in such texts as Rosalind Krauss’ The Originality
of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths.10 This is probably the more commonly used
definition of postmodernism. I shall term this first definition of postmodernism “Octobrism”
after the magazine October, which was the primary site for this investigation, arguably the
most influential art critical venue in the 1980s. Prima facie, the project of anti-modernism has
run aground on both methodological and ontological grounds: the methodology was
perceived as overly academic and thus enfeebled, the ontological foundations, as I will show,
are in themselves problematic. I shall examine two analyses of Krauss’ use of Greimas
squares to constitute the anti-essentialist definition of sculpture (a core tenet of
postmodernism), and the methods employed by Krauss and Bois when theorising Formless,
the primaryprimaryprimaryprimary text of anti-modernism, in order to demonstrate that the
use of these explanatory paradigms is ontologically unjustifiable., in order to demonstrate
that the use of these explanatory paradigms is ontologically unjustifiable
The second account defines postmodernism as a temporal period: art under the conditions of
late capitalism, or, art after modernism – when modernism and its attendant structures – the
avant-garde, the privileging of practices on formal grounds, the understanding that art had a
definite teleology - had ended. I shall refer to this as DantoistDantoist postmodernism, after
the critic and philosopher who wrote extensively on the phenomenon. Danto propagated an
9 Hal Foster in Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster, eds, Art Since 1900.
Thames and Hudson 2004, p.547
10 Ibid. 8, p. 87

explanatory model that is now seen as constitutive for the current paradigm of no paradigm,
and the ensuing pluralism of practices, which render the critic’s centrality to constituting art
obsolete: by proclaiming the end of art (alternatively, the end of grand narratives), he
succeeded in showing that there is no ontological foundation for art, and that no art practice
can be privileged over another. The equivocation of all practices, however, leads to
appropriation of Modernist styles (Pop, the ready-made) without a concomitant questioning of
their foundational tenets, as Hal Foster argues.11 It also leads to the current pluralism of
practices, where the market acts as dominant determinant of the type of art being made. In
the second account, the market emerges as a shadow master narrative, as I explored in Part
I, with the attendant challenges this poses for art criticism.
The two accounts can be, but aren’t necessarily, mutually antagonistic. I will examine each of
these accounts in turn, in order to question whether they are indeed over, by virtue of
ontological or historical factors, or whether they continue, despite the opposition from such
writers as Dave Hickey, to determine the current field of art criticism.
While Octobrism has generated much resistance, its success lies in constituting the
contemporary awareness for the conditions under which art is made. No longer is an art seen
as an object independent of its surroundings, rather it is reflective of its social and cultural
conditions. Academic art criticism continues to review art in contexts of post-colonialism,
social theory, and psychoanalysis. Latterly, even the “pluralism” and “multiplicity of
discourses” invoked by curators such as the curator Okwui Enwezor, and Chika Okeke-
Agulu, Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture at Princeton, seems to invoke a post-
modernist methodology. Art practices are now seen as widely dispersed and operating in
their own idioms, a result of the global expansion of the artworld. The artworld is now
supposed to be in a state of “Altermodernism” (Nicholas Bourriaud), where the experience of
the transitory and migratory has replaced postcolonial theory. It is still possible to theorise
disparate movements in “situated stories”, which can make forceful, historically informed
claims on contemporary practice.12
Academic art criticism in toto is now seen as privileging “theory over text” and incapable of
encapsulating the sensuous experience of looking at art. However, theoryTheory is not,
however, dismissed due to any real argumentative invalidation, but rather via the more
superficial argument that it is “overly complex” and specialised, or does not reflect the art
being made. There are grounds for concern regarding the theoretical tenets of
postmodernism, as we shall see, but these are not invoked.
11 See, for instance, Hal Foster, Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996
12 Hal Foster, “The Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime, New York: Verso, 2002, pp. 128–29

A consequence of the rejection of the postmodernist project in toto is that it has led to a
resurgence of phenomenology in both art criticism and practice. Both the textual heaviness
and the ironic Appropriation art of the Neo-Geo group13 fostered a situation where artistic
practice aimed to retrieve something more immediate to sensation. This has resulted in the
return to Idealist notions of art and the return to Idealist notions of art and the return to
Idealist notions of art and the resurgence of the “poet-critic” model as I will show. Here
Greenberg’s dictum that “feeling is all (albeit grounded in art-historical justification)” is simply
returned as feeling. The critic Peter Schjeldahl stated that beauty "suppresses intellect
altogether, to the understandable horror of theorists and scholars."14 However, the rejection
of the achievements of postmodernism results in the resurgence of Modernist ideals: in
privileging sensual experience, one reconstitutes artworks as objects operating in a vacuum,
devoid of social or critical context. This rejection of academic art criticism by such
practitioners as Jerry Saltz, Raphael Rubinstein and Dave Hickey does not constitute a
serious methodological challenge to postmodern methods: the entire concept of
postmodernism is rejected out of hand, due to the presumptive privileging of, and the hostility
of much current artistic practice towards explanatory models. The rejection also rests on
nominalist interpretation of Postmodernism - Hal Foster describes the poet-critical
understanding of these practices as reified, complete projects, i.e. “readymades” rather than
as ongoing debates. Postmodernism is no longer no longer a concept, it is a methodology,
so rejecting postmodernism on nominalist grounds is non-defendable, as I will seek to
elucidate in the course of this section.
The rejection of theory in favour of “feeling” has led to a resurgence of the poet-critic, and it is
the academic art critic that most feels the loss of criticism’s retreat from theory.
The critic Ben Davis states bluntly “I do not personally feel in crisis” 15. And Siona Wilson,
professor of art history at the City University of New York refines this: “The loss of the
diagnostic power of the (theoretically savvy) art critic (is said to lie at the root of the crisis).
This figure is rather different from the run-of-the-mill professional art critic; she or he is a
historically informed cultural theorist. …this may also be a particular loss felt by October. I
wonder if the journal feels a loss of relevance to the theorization of contemporary art today.”16
What we have here, as I will explore, are questions regarding methodology as opposed to
ontology. While the poet-critic in the tradition of Baudelaire seemingly “floats free” of theory,
they themselves are products of an Enlightenment view of art, as Victor Burgin convincingly
13 These were discussed in Part I
14 Peter Schjeldahl, Beauty Contest, The New Yorker vol. 75, no. 32, November 1, 1999, p. 108.
15 Ben Davis, Crisis and Criticism, Artnet Magazine, 29th January 2009, http://www.artnet.de/magazine/crisis-
and-criticism/ retrieved 2nd February 2010
16 Siona Wilson, in ibid. 7, p. 108

argues, one which postmodernism strove to oppose. The poet critic invokes a view of art as
merely “expressive”, free of social determination. But as Burgin argued: “No art activity
therefore is to be understood apart from the codes and practices of the society which
contains it; art in use is bracketed ineluctably within ideology…” 17 Any rejection of theory
therefore pretends that art is not a social function: clearly, this position is not tenable.
Critical judgment, as Barthes remarked, “is always determined by the whole of which it is a
part, and the very absence of a system – especially when it becomes a profession of faith –
stems from a very definite system …it is when man proclaims his primal liberty that his
subordination is least disputable”.18 This should serve as a warning for those promoting the
paradigm of no paradigm. As Siona Wilson states “When the critic loses diagnostic power,
careful attention needs to be paid to the institutions that take her or his place and the kinds of
ideological agendas they set. The market, of course, is a ready and willing surrogate for the
19
intellectual influence of the art critic…” This is the same danger that Hal Foster points to. I
have examined the relationship between critics and markets in the first chapter, and it is
telling that even such poet-critics as Jerry Saltz bemoan the power of the ranking and the
loss of influence of the critic to an overheated contemporary art market. Art criticism is now
too academic to be genuinely experimental, yet too impressionistic to be sufficiently
rigorous.20
3.2 How art criticism earned its good name – Greenberg and
Artforum
Historically, art criticism since Baudelaire was a “writerly” rather than analytical practice, with
writerly style considered as important as validating the judgements and pronouncements. In
order to render art criticism more academically rigorous, Clement Greenberg created a
model of art criticism that was serious, systemic and analytical. While Greenberg is above all
remembered for his emphasis on personal judgement when evaluating art, his real legacy, I
will argue, is precisely the rigorous approach to art criticism he instantiated, and consciously
or unconsciously continues to inform art critical practice in such venues as Artforum. Indeed,
it was his influence that led to the creation of the art critical model practiced at Artforum
magazine, and made a lasting influence on such contributors as Rosalind Krauss and
Annette Michelson, who later went on to found the journal October.
17 Victor Burgin, In Reply. In: Art-Language: The journal of of conceptual art, 1972. 2, cited in ibid. 9, p.590
18 Roland Barthes, Neither Nor Criticism, in Mythologies, Paladin, 1973, p.82, as cited in Burgin, 1986, p. 158
19 Siona Wilson, in ibid. 7, p. 108
20 Matthew Jesse Jackson, Conversations with God in The State of Art Criticism, eds. James Elkins and
Michael Newman, London, Routledge 2008, p. 330

Greenberg succeeded in promoting the self-reflexivity of art criticism: rather than just simply
writing art criticism, he provided a “strong object-oriented position that could bring analytical
rigour and historicity to tame the vagaries of art criticism and bring “passion” and “aesthetic
21
experience” as well as contemporary art to art history.” The authority of Greenberg’s
position was not created exclusively through the content of his art criticism, but through his
theoretical positions about what art criticism should be. In short, Greenberg opened the door
to the inclusion of philosophical positions and recursions in art criticism that went far beyond
his siting of aesthetic judgement in Kant. The publication of Art and Culture22 in 1962
delineated Greenberg’s critical position. The reviewer Priscilla Colt notes of Art and Culture
that “One should be able to understand the individual aesthetic judgements as growing out of
a coherent if not explicitly systematized view. …He is refreshingly free from the
embarrassing subjectivity of the impressionistic literary critic who is so much with us in minor
versions today. …He gives us renewed faith in the indispensability of serious criticism. The
immediacy of his contact with art, his freedom from stereotyped academic thought
processes, the urgency of his convictions…”23
Greenberg wrote about the best American painters of the 40’s and 50’s, separating the
central from the peripheral, the good versus the bad, the major versus the minor, with
intellectual clarity and conviction.24 Barbara Rose, formerly of Artforum, expands this: “We
(Rose, Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss) saw that (Greenberg), uniquely in the world of art
criticism, had a philosophical grounding to his theories. Greenberg would explain,, in
medium-specific terms, the structure and content of an art piece, so that the viewer was able
to understand, from the description and evaluation, why the piece did or didn’t work. 25
Greenberg’s art historical approach sought to ground the evaluation in a defensible scheme
of art historical practice. The art critic needed to be an art historian able to support his or her
judgment with historical reference and precedence. Greenberg attempted to show that
abstract expressionism was a continuation of the concerns of French modernism, which itself
works out the concerns of old masters. "Pollock's art turns out at the same time to rely far
less on the accidental than had been thought. It turns out in fact, to have an almost
completely Cubist basis, and to be the fruit of much learning and much discipline... “26
21 Ibid. 6
22 Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture, Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 1961
23 Priscilla Colt, Review of Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, in Art Journal, volume 22, issue
2, Winter 1962/1963 p.122
24 Robert Rosenblum, in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, New York, Soho Press, p163
25 Michael Fried, in ibid. 24, p165
26 Ibid.2, p. 143.

Greenberg established the notion of an autonomous artwork: the self referential autonomy of
Modernist art is achieved by scrupulous attention to all that is specific to the practice: its own
traditions and materials, its difference from other art practices.27 “Purity in art,” he writes,
“consists in the acceptance . . . of the limitations of the medium of the specific art. . . . The
arts . . . have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated,
concentrated, and defined.”28 Greenberg’s Modernism was rigorously abstract, stating in
Avant-garde and Kitsch that “content was to be avoided like the plague”. In Modernist
Painting he claimed that “visual art should confine itself to what is given in visual experience
and make no reference to other orders of experience”.29 Modernism is defined as “... the use
of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert
it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.30”
Greenberg later expanded his criteria of medium-specificity and formalism as criteria of

quality to ponder what constitutes a generic notion of artistic quality. In After Abstract
Expression he stated “the question now asked… is no longer what constitutes art or the art of
painting, but what irreducibly constitutes good art as such.”31
I am not interested here in critiquing Greenberg himself, this has been done elsewhere, both
in terms of his judgement and his misreading of Kant. Of greater interest is his lasting
influence on art criticism. His siting the development of the art field in the avant-garde and its
apposition to mass culture, of defining art practice as “alternate space”, and art historical
grounding of contemporary practices continue to determine the notions of how the art field is
apprised. Despite the dismantling of many of Greenberg’s tenets of “quality” in artistic
production such as originality, the privileging of painting as a medium and appellations to
formal definitions of art in the 1960’s, and later, the discourse continues to affect
contemporary art writing. While his claims regarding the universal validity of taste can be
disregarded due to their inherently problematic character, his legacy as a serious art writer
cannot. Despite the majority of contemporary critics and painters disagreeing with
Greenberg’s theorising, his ideas are still very much at work. His account of modernist
painting remains the most powerful model, and ideals such as medium-reflexivity and the
generative importance of an avant-garde are insinuated in contemporary criticism, even
32
when the subject is video, installation or performance art. Daniel Siedell puts it thus:
“Greenberg succeeded… in defining what constitutes art criticism and how it should function
28 Clement Greenberg, Towards a Newer Laocoon, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1, Perceptions and
Judgements, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, p.24
29 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, in ibid. 2, p.83
30 ibid. p. 85.
31 Clement Greenberg, After Abstract Expressionism, in ibid. 2, p. 122
32 Ibid. 8, p. 31

within the artworld. His philosophy on artwriting continues to dominate academic discourse
on artwriting.”33
Greenberg’s legacy was continued in the 1960’s and 1970’s through the medium of Artforum
magazine, at least on the view of the contributors and editors interviewed by Amy Newman in
the book Challenging Art: Artforum 1962 – 1974.34 Contributors agree that Clement
Greenberg redeemed art criticism from its intellectual disrepute in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and
that he had done so through the sheer cogency of his formalist articles, which focussed on
why the painting worked, and why it was necessary for the time. Early Artforum critics,
including Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, and Michael Fried rejected the “Fustian
writing” of Harold Rosenberg, a poet-critic. “The whole ArtNews crew, people like Harold
Rosenberg, we just loathed and despised from early on. What we cared about was what's
going on in a picture, how can you talk about it, what are the critical issues? The whole
emphasis was practical.”35
The intellectual foundations of the formalist followers of Greenberg during this period drew on
New Criticism in literary studies, and German art history as established in the American
university by such émigrés as Erwin Panofsky. The scientific approach to art history
supported the semi-subjective judgements of aesthetic quality, as Hal Foster points out in his
article Art Critics in Extremis. 36 Robert Rosenblum, former contributor and Professor of Fine
Arts at New York University captured the magazine’s high aims: “Artforum aimed at being the
kind of art magazine that seemed to be sustained, respectable, serious enough to gain
admission to academic territory.”37 In contrast, the poet-critics “only” had an attenuated
connection to the belle-lettristic reviews of the French Salons to draw from. 38 The “practical”
and “verifiable” criticism of Greenberg heavily influenced the young Rosalind Krauss and
Michael Fried. However, by the mid-60’s Greenberg was no longer picking winners, but
supporting minor painters (the usual example cited here is the painter Jules Olitski), and his
formalist system was seen as overly restrictive and inflexible. Crucial to the rejection of
Greenberg was his failure to account for Minimal Art, and the introduction, by Annette
Michelson, of French critical models from Andre Bazin to Roland Barthes as an alternative to
the Greenbergian Modernist model. Michelson was an early exponent of “French Theory”
and its implications for criticism (primarily structuralist and post-structuralist theory) and was
supported by Rosalind Krauss in this endeavour. There was an opening, amongst Artforum
contributors to other practices (Foster cites Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria) and this resulted
33 Ibid. 6
34 Ibid. 24
35 Michael Fried, cited in ibid. 6, p.22
36 Ibid. 12, p.108
37 Robert Rosenblum, in ibid. 24, p.160
38 Ibid. 12, p.108

in a dialogue between conceptual, body, performance, video, site-specific, earthwork and
installation artists. 39
Foster comments that the Artforum of the 1962-1974 period appears as “a way-station on the
passage between Partisan Review (the journal which published much of Greenberg’s art
criticism) and October.” 40 Phillip Leider, the former editor, marks a reverse in the practicing of
criticism which would come to characterise much of the Octobrist movement: “The verbal
part, the theoretical part, sustained me through my doubts. Every time I began to doubt the
way things looked, the value, the quality, the plain quality of the work as it looked to me, I
was able to fall back on this structure of thought.” 41 Here the primacy of the aesthetic has
ceded to the primacy of the text. It is thus a reverse of the Greenbergian paradigm: theory is
used to shore up the aesthetic evaluation.
The decline of the modernist art critic presaged, in the very pages of the magazine that stood
for late-modernist criticism, the figure of the October critic-theorist. However, this figure has
declined in turn. The Octobrist model, as Foster sees it (and as I have explored) was
displaced by a nexus of dealers, collectors and curators, for whom critical evaluation and
theoretical discourse was either of little use, or used as a readymade to differentiate
aesthetic practices based, ironically, on the aesthetic or the phenomenological enjoyment of
the artwork. The artwork no longer requires explanation clarifying its avant-garde nature (as
Greenberg sought to do) nor does the critique exist to subsume artistic practice as social
commentary (as the Octobrist model sought to do). The poet-critic utilises this void to return
with a vengeance. No practice can be privileged over another, no dialogue is more vital than
another.
Academic art criticism, up until the early 90’s, was an American phenomenon. David Carrier
notes that “the rise of Krauss and philosophical art criticism is a story about the American
artworld. In Europe, Greenberg and his followers are much less important.”42 Yve-Alain Bois
recalls that in 1979, Greenberg’s writing represented a serious blow to the extremely
mediocre practice of French art criticism, which was “at best, dominated by the specific
French phenomenon of the Writer’s or Philosopher’s essay on art, more often than not an
efflorescence of condescending words uttered by a complacent man of letters – the writer
often was not acquainted with the specific issues and historical problems pertaining to the
painting. …We resented the fact that this type of discourse on art was the only one worthy of
being read. …We felt that art criticism needed less “inspired” prose, more serious discussion.
We felt that sweeping measures had to be taken, and that the starting point was the
39 Ibid. 12, p.113

40 Ibid. 12, p.117
41 Phillip Leider, in ibid. 24, p.327
42 David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism, Praeger, 2002 p. 3

specificity of practices we wanted to analyse.”43 Thus Greenberg’s methodology constituted a
point of orientation for European art practice, while, at the same time (the late 1970’s) it was
being attacked by the contributors to Artforum. Bois acknowledges the difficulties inherent in
Greenberg’s essentialism and imperialism, but nevertheless states that his approach
constituted an ABC of criticism, without which nothing serious could be written about, for,
instance, Pollock. Greenberg’s approach, already considered reactionary and passé in the
States, could serve as model to revive the moribund critical scene in France.
The lack of texts on the history of German art criticism is reflective of the poor historisation of
art criticism in general.44 This is evident, for instance, in Klaus Honnef’s Kunstkritik heute:
Texte zwischen Wertung und Werbung.45 Honnef recalls that in the mid-late 60’s, art criticism
was based on articulation of “artistic quality”, but that it was neither systematised or
theorised, nor were the “quality criteria” elucidated. The models of Baudelaire and Greenberg
were cited as influences, and individual taste determined the contents of the criticism.
The artist Hans Haacke strongly criticised to Bois’ use of Greenberg’s work on Pollock for
Macula (the journal that Bois edited between 1976 and 1979): Haacke objected to
Greenberg’s role in the art world, and declared his system of criticism both obsolete and
reactionary.46 Haacke’s position is reflective of a more generic German suspicion towards
aesthetic evaluation (the cornerstone of Greenberg’s criticism) as a basis for art criticism. In
the words of Isabelle Graw, editor-in-chief of Texte zur Kunst: “Geschmack gilt in
progressiven Kreisen als Kategorie, von der sich Kunst und Kunstkritik gleichermaßen
abzugrenzen haben, scheint sie sich doch jeglicher argumentativen Begründbarkeit zu
entziehen, und nur Distinktionsfantasien und Elitismus Vorschub zu leisten”.47 Taste is here
constructed as social marker, serving to distinguish „high“ bourgeois taste from „low“ popular
taste on spurious grounds, precisely the criteria that Pop artists set out to attack. When
Texte zur Kunst was founded in 1990, it was received as the German version of October,
lending an academic context to art criticism.48 While October was critiqued for ignoring the
contemporary art scene of the early 90’s and condemning the art market and “spectacle
culture” in an overbearing, dogmatic manner, Texte zur Kunst sought to emulate its theory-
heavy model of art criticism.49
43 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1993, p.xvi

44 For an examination of this, see James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? Chicago, Prickly Paradigm
Press, 2003
45 Klaus Honnef, Kunstkritik heute: Texte zwischen Wertung und Werbung, Deiningen, Steinmeier, 2008
46 Cited in ibid. 43, p.xvii
47 Isabelle Graw, Le Gout, C’est Moi, Texte zur Kunst, September 2009, Heft 75, p.21
48 Philip Ursprung, Twen, Texte Zur Kunst Special Edition, December 2010
49 Tom Holert, Hausarbeit, Texte zur Kunst, January 1994

3.3 Octobrist Postmodernism
Octobrist postmodernism hinged on a “semiotic turn” in art which took place in the 1970’s.
This was “the time when theoretical production became as important as artistic production.”50
There was a sense that “artworks rely on chains of explanation residing outside themselves
and that they depend for their legibility and legitimacy on discourse. This did much to erode
conviction in the single, framed, all-there-at-once image. Meaning in art is contingent, it
comes after the fact and from outside in the form of a caption, a framing language, or a
framing institution and ideology”. 51 This has a great number of implications for art critics. If
the textual environment is seen as important as the art itself, the role of the critic in providing
that environment becomes constitutive for the art. Foster insists that critical theory is
immanent to innovative art, and that the relative autonomy of the aesthetic can be a critical
resource.
As David Joselit notes, Rosalind Krauss helped produce a definition of postmodernism: a

52
critic produces as well as reports. The status of an artwork as an independent, self-
contained object (the cornerstone of Greenberg’s criticism), and a criticism which sought only
to explore the artwork within its own limits was strongly contested. Through an introduction of
psychoanalysis, and French literary criticism, linguistics and social theory, artworks were
revealed as products of their contexts, expressive of social and political surroundings. While
this model of art criticism saw itself operating in clear opposition to the tenets of modernism
(the originality of an artwork, the teleological grand narrative, the idea of an “inspired artist”) it
retained a key aspect of Artforum’s criticism: rigorous analysis and an “academic” tone. So,
while the underlying art theoretical models had changed, the essential methodology
(academic art criticism) remained intact.
James Elkins describes factors enshrining the dialectical opposition to modernism as “the
anarchic informe – Bataille’s notion of an operation that wrecks sense and system; horizontal
works as opposed to conventional vertical paintings; bodily engagements as opposed to
Greenberg’s insistence on optical responses; outbreaks of irrationality as opposed to
modernist logic; the unconscious as opposed to modernism’s relentless analysis; the “base
materiality” of paintings as opposed to their use as vehicles of illusionism or covert idealism;
and formlessness as opposed to classical figuration. These all serve as devices to “wreck the
50 Hal Foster, Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p. xiv
51 Lane Relya, All over and at once , xtra contemporary art quarterly, Fall 2003, Volume 6, No.1
52 David Joselit, Round Table: The present conditions of art criticism, October 100, Spring 2002, p.217

modernist machine”. 53 This is evident in the treatment of painting, sculpture, as well as the
Greenbergian notions determining the modernist project itself.
In Octobrist postmodernism painting is in question, and only its most marginal and
philosophically sceptical moments are allowed. Douglas Crimp elaborated the discussion of
postmodern artistic strategies in an essay in October54. Although Crimp embraced a few
artists (Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, Phillip Smith, Troy Brauntuch, Cindy Sherman and
Robert Longo) working in painting, he argued that painting was an arena of practice that had
become outmoded, inbred, inward looking and incapable of functioning in the capacity of
critique. Crimp believed that painting was compromised by a relationship to museums;
institutions and the art form became co-dependent, reciprocally maintaining centrality, and
that therefore serious artistic discourse should examine the social and institutional limits of
the medium.
In Sculpture in the Expanded Field,55 Rosalind Krauss sought to show how medium terms,
such as “sculpture,” depend structurally not on an essentialist definition (or set of necessary
and sufficient conditions for any candidate object to count as sculpture) but on a network of
relations and differences to cognate terms. Krauss sought to articulate a definition of Minimal
sculpture which was not identifiable as traditional sculpture (as it made little use of traditional
or modern techniques associated with sculpture, operated in locations or scales outside our
customary grasp of the medium and refuses notions of unity or relationship to a beholder that
usually seem integral to our grasp of the concept), such as the work of Robert Smithson
(Spiral Jetty, Cayuga Salt Mine Project).
Greenberg’s art historical approach has the consequence that Greenberg’s theory of art
subscribes to Hegelian, essentialist notions of art. “Profoundly historicist, Greenberg’s
method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux…. Certain things,
like art itself, or painting or sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal, transhistorical
forms….. the life of these forms is dependent upon constant renewal, not unlike that of a
living organism.56” Essentialism was generally rejected by the French philosophers –
Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault – discussed in October.57,58 Krauss, using Structuralist terms,
argues that sculpture is located at the intersection of “not-landscape” and “not-architecture”
(thereby bringing it into relation to an “expanded field” of other forms related to landscape
53 Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, ed., Formless: A User’s Guide, NewYork: Zone Books,1997, as cited in
ibid. 8, p.90
54 Douglas Crimp, Pictures, October, No.8, Spring 1979, reprinted in Art After Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis, New
York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984 p.175
55 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1986.
56 Ibid. p.1
57 David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism, Praeger, 2002 p. 57
58 Ibid. 42 p. 57

and architecture). The essay therefore contests the notion of Modernist medium specificity,
and contradicted Greenberg’s essentialism.
Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois raised this anti-modernism to a methodological principle in the
exhibition Informe that they co-curated Pompidou Centre in 1996. In the exhibition catalogue,
Krauss and Bois oppose various operations that reveal an impulse toward the “formless” in
art to what they describe as being the “foundational myths” of Greenbergian modernism. 59
Krauss and Bois emphasize the importance of the InformeInforme, which is used to ground
several of the most important concepts of postmodernism, including the central role of illogic
and the necessity of absence of systematic theory. Formless focuses on a Lacanian60 subject
which is fragmented and dispersed, caught up in a system of displacements. A central role is
given to the part objects which constitute the postmodern self. 61
The philosopher Diarmuid Costello accuses October art critics “of excerpting (the technically
more obscure discourses such as psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralism) from their
theoretical contexts and objects of enquiry, and applied ready-made to works of art with
scant acknowledgement of contentious issues within the fields borrowed from….”62 The
controversy surrounding the notion of post-structuralism is an example of this. There is an
argument that the term "post-structuralism" arose in Anglo-American academia as a means
of grouping together continental philosophers who, in broad terms, rejected the methods and
assumptions of analytical philosophy. Jacques Derrida notes that “…(D)econstruction is
neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would have to take that into
consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a
regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values, like that of
analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction.”63 Poststructuralism
denoted a “conglomerate of highly complex and often antagonistic works”, and “theoreticism”
treats theory as something purely as a set of ready-made tools to handle a problem, no
59 Ibid. 53, p.26

60 Lacan states that humans are born undifferentiated from the world. We are not a subject because we know
no Other to be in relation to. At first, when the child sees an image in the mirror, it still replaces this image of
the Other with some sense of the self. Gradually, though, the mirror image becomes an image outside of the
self: we become both subject and object. The image becomes a sign for a self. Once we get to this stage of
the symbolic (the mirror image is a symbol for the self), we can never go back to the state where we were a
unified self, where there was no symbol separate from the self. The mirror stage creates the division between
the whole person who we see in the mirror and the fractured person we are. This gap between a person
"broken up into little pieces" and our united Ego-Ideal is a gap of uncertainty and displeasure where we are
both subject and object. So we are constantly on a search to fill this gap to find the delight of being whole.
Images of the Other are important because our fractured identity made through difference also seeks the
unification that is perceived in that difference (the Other is seen as whole and different from us with our
fragmented egos and therefore must not have a fragmented ego). Our perception of the self depends on what
images we use to fill in this lack. Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I, in
Cultural theory and popular culture: a reader, eds. John Storey, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, p.267
61 Ibid. 53 p.92
62 Diarmuid Costello, Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 65, Issue 2, Spring 2007, p.217
63 Jacques Derrida, Letter to a Japanese Friend, in Jacques Derrida, and Peggy Kamuf, eds, A Derrida Reader:
Between the Blinds; Harverster Wheatsheaf; Hemel Hempstead, 1991, p.271-276

matter how complex. 64 Lyotard’s requirement that when theory is applied to art critical texts,
a “meshing of the language games” which results in a collectively productive text is often
ignored: instead, criticism here takes the form of an incantation/imposition of a “master
65
narrative” over the work in question, and the terms of the work are not engaged. I shall
examine the theoretical arguments underpinning the two cornerstones of the Octobrist
project described above: the Structuralist description of sculpture, and the Bataillean notion
of the Informe, in order to expose the Derridaen fallacy underlying both applications of the
concepts. Both texts apply a theoretical concept ready-made to make an art-critical point,
and in both cases there are serious doubts about the validity of the project.
Steven Melville and David Carrier make different but related points about Sculpture in the
Expanded Field. While Melville identifies the infinite regress involved,6667, Carrier points the
problem of the use of the choice of structuring concepts in a Greimas diagram. 68
Diagram 1: Rosalind Krauss’ Greimas square diagram of sculpture in the expanded field. First published in
October 8, Spring 1979, p.38, as cited in Melville, 2003
Greimas diagrams, according to Fredric Jameson, seek to “articulate any apparently static
free-standing concept or term into that binary opposition which it structurally presupposes
and which forms the very basis for its intelligibility.” 69 However, this is only the case when the
structuring terms (“landscape”, “architecture”) are seen as definite concepts. If the structuring
terms themselves are questioned, it seems likely that they themselves are relational, subject
to such structures as the one illustrated above. Melville points out that this will not be
64 Ibid. 43, p.xii

65 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differeand, The Referent and the Proper Name, Diacritics, Fall 1984, p.5, cited in
Burgin, 1986
66 Stephen Melville “WhatWas Postminimalism?” in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). P.161
67 Stephen Melville, What Was Postminimalism?, in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). P.161
68 Ibid. 42 p. 41
69 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972, p.164, as cited in Carrier, 2002, p.41

resolved by making the diagram larger or more multidimensional, but rather may show that
there is an infinite regress inherent in the concept, making it ontologically unsound.
Carrier makes the point that the attraction of artworld readers to Krauss’ Greimas diagrams
was the pseudotechnicality. He cites her explanation of Giacometti’s sculpture:
Figure Ground
Grid Gestalt
Krauss is only juxtaposing one of many possible ways for those concepts, as no logical
relationships underpin the terms. Therefore, nothing can be inferred from the diagram,
tempting as though it may be.70 A Greimas diagram can be constructed from any four
notionally related terms, revealing its essentially arbitrary nature.
The implications for discourse when contextual determinants are in turn revealed as
constructs to be deconstructed is that criticism and captions are rendered problematic and
lose all credibility. “The dissolution of these and every other frame has given rise to an
infinitely landscaped situation, an awareness of only pure flow,” as Lane Relya points out. 71
The Octobrist critic George Baker states that “this interdisciplinary opening of art criticism
became an opportunity for increasingly esoteric languages and for the abandonment of
stakes that art criticism had always claimed as its own….”72
Krauss and Bois, as David Carrier points out, give little constructive argument for their
development of the concept of the Informe. Their argument is dependent on the reader
accepting the Lacanian view about the scepticism concerning the unified self. What Formless
does not do is to show how the Lacanian and the commonsense, Freudian, viewpoints can
be reconciled.73
Aside from reliance on controversial notions of self-hood, Informe relies on a misreading of

Bataille. For Bataille, the Informe was the category that would allow all categories to be
unthought. Michael Richardson, in an essay on Georges Bataille, comments that in Informe,
Bataille’s anti-classificatory strategies were turned into an anti-modernist, anti-formalist
74
argument which sought to underpin that artworks refused the constrictions of form. For
Bataille, arguments for or against modernism were beside the point. In his study of Manet, he
70 Ibid. 42 p. 41
71 Ibid. 51
72 George Baker, in ibid.52, p.201
73 Ibid. 42, p. 99
74 Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, eds. Diarmuid Costello and
Jonathan Vickery, Oxford, Berg, 2007, p.155

argues that the movement of modern art merely reflects the social and political movement of
modern society. The true significance of art must be sought outside of the history of art in the
direct relation of the artwork to the heart of the human sensibility, an idealist reading that
most Octobrists would have been in disagreement with! The grounding of the anti-modernist
movement in Formless therefore rests on a misreading, and Krauss and Bois are guilty, in
this case, of the error that Lyotard cautioned against.
There is a further, structural difficulty inherent in Formless. It and affiliated texts can be read
as continuations of the modernist project, due to their opposition to Greenbergian ideals.
Thus, they can be trapped in a modernist dialectic, rather than function as a disruptive
process in the Barthesian sense. This fails to generate a truly alternative paradigm to
Greenbergian modernism, and remain trapped within the terms of Greenbergian theory. 75 As
Michael Fried has pointed out: “Her (Krauss’) real target is …modernism itself.” This means,
he notes “That she has as least as great… an investment in the globalist idea of modernist
opticality as any critic or historian before her.”76 The conceptual dependence of the theory of
the Informe on the very thing it sets out to negate constitutes an inherent weakness in the
position. The Formless depends on the form for meaning-determination.
Thus, the constitutional aspects of Octobrian postmodernism are open to question: the whole
anti-modernist project is thrown into question as questions regarding the theoretical basis of
the position cannot be resolved satisfactorily. Octobrist postmodernism has not successfully
challenged our perception of the status of the art object, no fundamental re-arranging of
categories has occurred. Octobrist postmodernism therefore is open to the same attack as
Greenberg’s modernism: unable to defend its status as a system, it must be reduced to a
methodology. If Greenberg’s legacy consists in the necessity of grounding subjective taste
judgements in reasoned argumentation, then the October legacy consists of raising an
awareness of the necessity of siting the art object in social, institutional, gender and so on
contexts. Hal Foster’s call for “sited stories” is a reflection of this.
The more generic weakness in the Octobrist position is its reliance on complex theory. The
textual turn placed a greater demand on the viewers, artists and critics alike: instead of
simply critiquing the formal aspects of a piece, the recipient must learn the discursive breadth
and the historical depth for each piece of consideration: this can prove to great a burden, and
the recipients may react by rejecting theory altogether. Anti-theoreticism arises when
complex and often contradictory texts are poorly understood, as the reader lacks the
necessary academic background, argues Yve-Alain Bois. The theoreticist first “gives into
“theory” as if it were a new faith, then becomes disenchanted because “theory” did not
75 Ibid. 62, p.217

76 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p.58

immediately perform the expected miracles. This disillusionment leads to resentment, and
the resentment leads to “the baby being thrown out with the bath water.” As a result “the old
guard positivists” (Bois is presumably referring to poet-critics) re-emerge, vindicated, and
77
more vociferously than before. Hal Foster succinctly states: “…As different interpretative
communities shout past each other or fall into silence, reactionary know-nothings can seize
the public forum on contemporary art.” 78
Octobrist postmodernism, can be charged with plotting and assuming a narrative trajectory
for art and history, and thus imputes a purpose for the art considered. Only the art which “fits”
into the theories and critical markers taken to be worthy of concern is considered, hence the
many charges of October’s narrow focus on a band of selected artists such as Sherry Levine,
Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger79. As Laura Owens put it in a 1996 issue of Artforum,
"The references became more interesting than the painting."80 This is reflected in the anti-
Octobrist arguments in the State of Art Criticism, where October is either disparaged or
ignored. Boris Groys describes October as “not sexy, just taxonomy.”81
One of the crisis for the post-modern paradigm is when the discourse within became ossified.
The journal October restricted itself to discussing the practices of a few, well-established
artists rather than surveying emergent art. Matthew Bowman examines this at length in the
State of Art Criticism, concluding that “a cursory glance over the last 20 issues of October
brings up movements and names which are often perceived as of mainly historical interest –
Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Carl Einstein, Barnett Newman. Living artists discussed
are mainly those with established practices – Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, James
Coleman, Barnett Newman.” 82 If the primary function of art criticism is exploring new spaces
and movements, October has failed on this count. However, recently October has focused
on examining the position of “the Contemporary” and its relations to the market, post-
colonialism and new critical paradigms, possibly re-asserting the centrality of meditations on
the part theory can play in art criticism.83
77 Ibid. 43, p.xiii

78 Ibid. 50, p. xxii
79 Scott Rothkopf , Other voices: four critical vignettes - Critical Essay, ArtForum 41, No 7, March 2003 p.240
80 Laura Owens, "A Thousand Words: Laura Owens Talks About Her New Work," Artforum 37, no. 10, Summer
1999
81 See the Cork Round Table in ibid. 20, p. 130-179, James Elkins states “Then, the reason I brought up
"October" is that in the first roundtable, I talked at some length about the "October" roundtable on criticism,
quite sympathetically. And yet no one wanted to talk about it. In regard to the lack of interest in responding to
"October": it seems to me it might be symptomatic of an interesting moment in current criticism, in which some
people who are committed to politics find their genealogies in "October" and others don't.” (State of Art
Criticism, p.338)
82 Matthew Bowman, Assessment in ibid. 20, p. 289-295
83 See, for instance, Questionnaire on the Contemporary, October 130, Fall 2009, p. 3 - 129

3.4 Dantoist Postmodernism and beyond
Arthur Danto locates the principal break between modernism and postmodernism in the
appearance of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in 1964. Danto contends that this removes the
possibility of the ontological definition of an artwork, as there are no longer any limitations on
what can be conceived of as artwork. Art began with an "era of imitation, followed by an era
of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes... In
our narrative, at first only mimesis was art, then several things were art but each tried to
extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or
philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the
present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the
story."84
After Pop, so it is claimed, art became eclectic or pluralist and began addressing the
conditions of late capitalism.85 Foster recasts Danto’s pluralism as the Jamesian cultural
epoch where postmodernism is the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. The spectacular images
associated with postmodern culture – images of advertisements, on the internet and
television – reflect the capitalistic and hedonistic desires of a culture driven by consumerism.
I have examined the impact of this on criticism and the art field in the previous chapter.
Elkins notes that the ontological reading of postmodernism is at least as opposed to
Greenbergian modernism as OctoberistOctobrist postmodernism, 86 although Foster, as I will
show, is radically opposed to this. The ontological reading of postmodernism results in the
fact that there can no longer be a historical argument which favours one artists practice over
another, no particular teleology can be justified. This is a worry for Octobrist critics, and
results in the hostility of the ensuing dialogue: firstly, there can no grounds for justifying a
particular judgement regarding a practice (and this is evident in the writings of Arthur Danto)
and secondly, it renders notions of the avant-garde illegitimate. Ultimately, though, there is a
danger of a loss of historical awareness. Dantoist postmodernism, with its discharging of
master narratives, can lead to anti-theorism, as there is no longer a contestatory space. The
concept of avant-garde, alternative spaces and practices is essential to Octoberist critique:
this can be seen in Hal Foster’s and Benjamin Buchloh’s attempts to justify its continued
existence and relevance to contemporary practice, and the worries expressed about the
eclipse of alternate spaces expressed in the round table The State of Contemporary Art in
Art Since 1900. 87
84 Arthur Danto, After the end of art: contemporary art and the pale of history. Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1998, p. 47
85 Ibid. 8, p. 87
86 Ibid.
87 Round Table, The Predicament of Contemporary Art in ibid. 9, p. 671-679

Elkins claims that the recasting of pop art practices by such artists as Komar and Melamid
and Damien Hirst – differ fundamentally from superficially modernist work through the
working through of pop gesture through pastiche. He cites Hirst’s spatter paintings as spoofs
88
of gestural abstraction and colour field painting. The mix of quotations, known as
“pastiche”, undermined all conceptions of style as understood as distinctive expression of an
individual or period, and “history” as the ability to place cultural references at all, reducing
these to signifiers. The Octobrist reading of Dantoism is more critical: citing the example of
Julian Schnabel, Hal Foster makes the point that the artist used the clash between high art
allusions (such as to Caravaggio in Exile) with low-culture materials (such as velvet and deer
antlers) as artistic device, but without questioning either set of terms. 89 As has been explored
in the first chapter, Jeff Koons similarly used the device of the ready-made.
Art-historical devices were used as stylistic ones – figuration in art, narrative in fiction and
ornament in architecture, as a reaction against Modernism. This was reduced to s a series of
stylistic tropes: the glass-and-steel international style in architecture, to abstract painting in
art, and to linguistic experimentation in fiction. The advocators of Dantoist postmodernism
(which Foster terms “neo-conservative”) justified this in terms of a recovery of artistic
individuality in opposition to the supposed anonymity of mass culture.90 However, as I
examined in Part I, this rests on an incoherent position: if the existence of high culture is
denied (a premise inherent in the position of neo-conservative artists), it is difficult to
constitute a valid notion of the artist as cultural producer. The artists producing art … tended
to use art-historical references as many clichéd quotations to decorate the usual modern
quotation.” Hal Foster asks: “In what way was such work postmodernist? It did not argue with
91
modernism seriously or challenge it formally.” Instead, it sought reconciliation with the
public (which Foster extends to include the marketplace) that was said to be alienated by the
overly conceptual art of the sixties and seventies. The authors argue that therefore such art
is less post-modernist than anti-modernist. Such “elitist” and “manipulative neo-conservative
postmodernism” was engaged in an anti-modernist attempt to shut down the “critical aspects”
of modernism.92 The citing of historical styles (as can currently be seen in the works of
Yuskavage, Currin and Koons, for instance) deprived these styles not only of context but also
of sense.93 The Dantoist programme stood in opposition to the Octobrist take on
postmodernism. As I have outlined above, Octobrists identified the citations and reworkings
of Modernism employed by the Dantoists as empty, market-oriented gestures.
88 Ibid. 8, p. 87
89 Hal Foster, in ibid. 9, p.596
90 Hal Foster, in ibid. 9. Thames and Hudson 2004, p.596
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Cf my discussion of Koons use of the ready-made in the chapter “Art criticism in and on the market”

However, the Dantoist position was that Octobrism treated artworks “as nothing but a blank
slate upon which critical discourse may be inscribed,” as Victor Burgin notes,9495, and many
artists rejected this approach. Richard Prince commented on Douglas Crimp’s Pictures essay
“Those shows and essays were for other critics”.96 Howard Singerman, in his essay on The
Myth of Criticism in the 1980’s97 points out that the views of Prince and Ashley Bickerton (he
quotes Bickerton: “Whatever Doug Crimp was saying, I didn’t understand a word of it”) were
part of the backlash against theory. Although there were a group of artists (principally the
neo-geos) who explicitly rejected theory in the 1980’s, by the 1990’s this had gathered
momentum. There was a move to “unseat the dour hegemony of the critic in the name of
beauty or freedom or art” 98, of the unrestrained aesthetic response. “This might be described
as the experience, shared by many young artists, of a palpable sense of contradiction
between the kinds of experiences, practices and pleasures that, if one were a critical,
deconstructing postmodernist artist, one was supposed to keep an ironic or otherwise,
distance from, and those spaces and sensations that were constitutive of one’s sense of
identity. This was a contradiction that had become far more difficult to repress in this new
99
situation.” The artist Jeff Wall states that “meaning is almost completely unimportant” for
hishis work and that “we don’t need to understand art, we need only to fully experience it.” 100
Affect and experience are valued over interpretation and meaning.
Thus the pure, unmediated, aesthetic response to an artwork, so central to Greenberg’s

criticism, regained ascendency on the back of an an anti-theorist position. However, a great
deal stood to be lost with this move: the poststructuralist awareness of the dangers of
spectacle culture, the awareness of the constitutive elements of the viewer’s gaze and other
important achievements of postmodernism. The shift from the cognitive to the affective
negates some of the most productive intellectual achievements of twentieth-century critical
theory, which had attempted to reveal the social construction of subjectivity, even if it was
understood as always already provisionally configured. It also tthrewhrew hermeneutically
based disciplines such as art history into crisis. 101
The artwork is once again treated as Modernist isolated object, “floating free” of
determination. The necessity of contextually grounding and understanding the work, of
95 Ibid. 27, p.200
96 "Richard Prince talks to Steve Lafreniere," Artforum 41, no. 7, March 2003, p. 70.
97 Howard Singerman, The Myth of Criticism in the 1980s, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Volume 8 No. 1,
Fall 2005, http://x-traonline.org/past_articles.php?articleID=143 retrieved 24th November 2010
98 Ibid.
99 Robert Garnett, Britpopism and the Populist Gesture, in ibid.4, p. 18
100 Jeff Wall, “Jeff Wall: Artist’s Talk”,October 25, 2005, Tate London Online Events, Archive, at
(//www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/jeff_wall_artists_talk, retrieved 2nd January 2011.
101 Alexander Alberro, in ibid. 7, p. 58

102
determining its conditions of possibility vanishes. The significance of an artwork to a
particular mode of practice is not reflected: the only way of ranking art is by the “100 most
important artists of the year” methods. The “return to feeling”” relies on a poorly described
phenomenological individualism.
While Greenberg had attempted to objectively justify his personal judgements by recourse to
the Kantian theory of judgement, this is rejected in turn in turn by the above artists. One is no
longer part of a Master Narrative in the modernist sense, or ascribing to a critical position in
the postmodern sense, but an individual operating in a space. There is no longer a paradigm
artistic or otherwise, to respond to, only ones’ sense of “self” and of “feelings” and this
translates to “modish wannabe art”. 103 The retreat to subjectivism also seems to assume that
the self is somehow not socially constructed, not informed by history. Extreme subjectivity
was critical once, as Hal Foster points out, within surrealism or abstract expressionism, but
this no longer seems to be the case. This results, he remarks somewhat dourly, in a freedom
of art that is forced, characterised by naivetynaivety masquerading as jouissance, a
promiscuity misconceived as pleasure.104 Foster’s position tends to extreme pessimism in
theFoster’s position tends to extreme pessimism in the pronouncements in this 1985 essay,
arguably the same conditions hold today.
3.5 Poetic art criticism
The retreat into subjectivism and the rejection of theory results in a resurgence of the post
critic.105 This is reflected in the written practice of art criticism: the results of the Visual Art
Critic survey reveal that only 27% of critics surveyed view “rendering a personal judgment or
opinion about the works being reviewed” as the aspect of criticism they place most emphasis
on, while 48% regard “creating a piece of writing with literary value” (i.e. focussing on the
stylistic aspects of a written piece) as central to their critique.106
Critics such as Saltz, Knight, Schjeldahl and Rubinstein insist that their approach is
"humanist," their point of departure always individual experience, and that they still write for
102 Alexander Alberro, in ibid. 7, p. 60

103 Robert Garnett, Britpopism and the Populist Gesture, in ibid.4, p. 18
104 Ibid. 3, p.17
105 Ibid. 97
106 The Visual Art Critic, A survey of Art Critics at general-interest news publications in America, National Arts
Journalism Program, Columbia University 2002

general interest publications. 107 Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times has denounced
the postmodern theorist-educator's "Puritan exhortations about the value of learning over
sensuous experience and unruly imagination," 108 and Peter Schjeldahl's has similarly stated
that beauty "suppresses intellect altogether, to the understandable horror of theorists and
scholars."109
Returning to the remark by Victor Burgin cited in the introduction - Theory is (generally) a
critical practice, and criticism (necessarily) involves theoretical presuppositions – Burgin goes
on to show that “theory is openly and self-consciously theoretical, whereas criticism
conceals, or is blind to, its’ theoretical basis”.110 Burgin identifies the most commonly
operating as common-sense criticism, i.e. the type disparaged by Greenberg as “poetic”.
Burgin states that common sense criticism is blind to its theoretical origins – “it is made up of
111
the congealed residues of the intellectualisations of past ages.” It is therefore false to
speak of an opposition between “theory” (by which Burgin is referring to academic art
criticism) and “criticism”, for criticism is itself dependent on theory, but lacks the self-
reflexivity of theory. Burgin traces the origins of poetic criticism from the notion of artist
expression inherent in Romanticism. Monroe Beardsley summarises it thus: “Artistic
production comes to be conceived essentially (in Modernism) as an act of self-expression,
and the critic, as the century moves on, feels a growing concern with the artist’s sincerity,
with the details of his biography, with his inner spiritual life”.112 Burgin compresses this to
formulate a theory of poetic criticism: he uses the concept “expressive formalism” where the
Romantic thought that art expresses feelings is added to Lessing’s (essentially formalist)
definition of the essence of art consisting of “beautiful shapes in beautiful attitudes”. Thus the
common-sense approach of criticism (seemingly shared by most art journalists, as Burgin
remarks in a caustic aside) – that artists “express themselves” by means of beautiful shapes
and colours. The theory has now been generalised where the beautiful shapes and colours
107 Ibid. 50
108 Raphael Rubinstein, A quiet crisis: is there a serious breakdown in the dialogue around contemporary
painting? In Art in America, March, 2003
109 Ibid. 14, p. 108.
110 Ibid. 27, p.141
111 Ibid. 27, p.141
112 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, University of Alabama, 1966, p.247,
cited in Burgin (1986) p. 148

can be claimed to express virtually anything the artist or critic chooses – “higher realities”, the
“human essence”. “What began as an emphasis of imagination – a creative faculty which
seeks to transgress the given orders of representation – by degrees became a form of self-
hypnosis in the service of the status quo. “Criticism” is no longer concerned with what is
critical in society.113 Thus, this form of weak criticism can be pressed into service by any
outside influencing factor.
The debate between poetic and academic art criticism has a long history, reaching as far
back as a debate between Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. In an essay entitled
How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name114, Greenberg attacked what he believed to be the
uninformed and poetic nature of most art criticism of his time. “Contemporary art criticism is
absurd not only because of its rhetoric, its language, and its solecisms of logic. It is also
absurd because of its repetitiousness”. In particular, he focused his attack on Harold
Rosenberg's The American Action Painters for its lack of art historical grounding and reliance
on existential philosophy. Greenberg critiques precisely the aspects of the writing Burgin
refers to: “(The American Action Painters) sought to discover their own identities by the
acts… by which they put paint on canvas. Essence, or the identity of the painter could only
be recognised by the painter himself in the very act of painting…” 115 Poet critics, like
Rosenberg, “would invent a private history, a personal history, in relationship to the history of
modern life, and write out of that.”116 Poet critics, like Rosenberg, “would invent a private
history, a personal history, in relationship to the history of modern life, and write out of
that.”117 “It all sounded… so dramatically modernistic and opaquely profound - like Rimbaud
and Sartre and Camus rolled into one - and avant-garde art critics have a special weakness
for the opaquely profound."118 Greenberg's main point was that without art historical context
113 Ibid. 27, p. 141

114 Ibid. 2, p. 138
115 Ibid., p. 136
116 Ratcliff, in ibid. 24, p162
117 Ratcliff, in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, p162
118 Ibid. 2, p. 138

and reference, abstract painting became some "freakish, new-fangled way of applying paint
to canvas... or non art."119 Greenberg perceived Rosenberg to be catering to popular taste, in
opposition to his own support for avant-garde positions., in opposition to his own support for
avant-garde positions. . Robert Garnett contrasts the “healthy” critical scene of 1980’s
London (ArtScribe magazine, Goldsmith’s art MA programme), when “criticism had some
power, perhaps more validatory power than it had had for over a quarter century…” with the
situation in the 1990’s, when Frieze magazine replaced Artscribe. Frieze focussed on
“production values over content, and there was a notable diminuation of the level of debate”.
120
This resulted in validatory power being once again subject to the market. This is mirrored
by the positioning of Artforum under the editor Jack Bankowsky in the 1990’s when
production values eclipsed content, where production values eclipsed content. James Meyer,
a contributor to Artforum contends that art critics working for “glossy magazines” (here he is
referring to Artforum) are required to write belletristic art criticism. This criticism is
characterised by “sensibility and the capacity to seduce”, includes the author’s feelings or
personality and stems from the mould of ArtNews in the 1950’s, and the writings of Schuyler
and O’Hara. Sustained reflection on art is avoided. The October authors, mirroring
Greenberg’s reaction to Rosenberg’s writing, state that this type of writing is not art criticism,
and that these journalists are not art critics: there is no sense of Barthesian disruption in their
critical practice. 121 The poet critics reject the modernist project: instead of struggling to keep
united thought and feeling, intuition and understanding, as modernists attempted, they
abandon thinking, denounce any tie between what they feel and the larger world, and judge
art on the basis of taste, and taste alone.
3.6 Where now for criticism?

The academic notion of postmodernism lost to the Dantoist theorisation: it was treated as a
style, as something that became démodé. Younger British artists treated a particular kind of
theory as “institutionalised” and it was now easy to “read first order critical content” off the
surface of the art, as Robert Garnett contends.122 Octobrist postmodernism was emptied by
the journalistic art criticism: to reiterate Foster’s critique of the neo-geo group who treated
institutional critique as something reified, described in the last chapter, a certain notion of
postmodernism also was treated as a completed position to adopt and quote, no longer a
series of disputes within modernism. One can recast the Greenbergian position regarding
late phase abstract expression: postmodernism had become Mannerist in the artistic
119 Ibid.2, p. 139

120 Robert Garnett, Britpopism and the Populist Gesture, in ibid. 4, p. 20
121 James Meyer, in ibid. 52, p.216
122 Robert Garnett, in ibid. 4, p. 18

strategies of the early 90’s. (Greenberg said about late period abstract expressionism that it
“turned into a school, then into a manner, and finally into a set of mannerisms. Its leaders
attracted imitators, many of them, and then some of these leaders took to imitating
themselves.”123)
Postmodernist tenets are now viewed as “academised and enfeebled” much in the way that
the Modernist notion of high and mass culture was treated in the 1980’s. Hal Foster
acknowledges the difficulty inherent in complex theorising and concludes that precisely this
difficulty may lead to problems with consensus about the necessity of art, along with
accompanying questions concerning the criteria of significant art. He concedes that placing
this burden on progressive art and criticism is difficult when the situation in art and academy
is unsupportive, as currently seems to be the case.124
Many younger artists had become disillusioned by the assumption and tone of criticism that
dominated the seventies, eighties and the early 90’s. This led to a change in artistic practice:
James Meyer points out that much artistic practice no longer engages with critical issues, in
particular, the type of critical debate generated by the participants of the Round Table The
Present State of Art Criticism – which featured many of October’s regular contributors.125 He
interprets this as a loss of belief in criticism as something necessary and valuable for its own
sake. He sees a continuation into the area of criticality, pointing out that there is a disinterest
in artistic method which engages with critical thought and issues. Much work at present, he
contends, does not bother to speak back to critics and to criticism.126
After the collapse of the paradigms of the neo (“neo-minimalism”, “neo-avant-garde”), no

explanatory paradigm has risen to take their place. For many commentators and artists
described, this is a welcome development, as it permits artistic diversity, “weak” theory is
better than strong, no one artistic form or explanatory model can dominate chauvinistically.
Ideological approaches to art criticism have diminished to mere methodologies. Art criticism
is no longer seen to have a history or theory, although it may use both. It takes place within a
dynamic system that resists codification or classification, an impressionist collection of
practices.
The Dantoist version of postmodernism was considered too totalising, not sensitive enough
to cultural differences of many sorts, and the Octobrist version, despite its abrogation of
master narratives, is seen, particularly by commentators such as Okwui Enwezor and Katy
123 Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction, in ibid. 2, p.193

124 Ibid. 50, p. xiv
125 This Round Table was held on 14th December 2001, and published in the 100th issue of October, Spring 2002.
The participants included George Baker, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Robert Storr, David Joselit,
Andrea Fraser, James Meyer, Hal Foster, John Miller and Helen Molesworth,
126 James Meyer, in ibid. 52, p.203

Siegel, as being too specific to a particular type of western art, which, in a globalised
artworld, no longer seems relevant.127 A loose reference to pluralism seems to have arisen as
the default paradigm, as the critic Katy Siegel writes, "The world is too big, there are too
many artists and too many interests for us to believe in a single progressive mainstream
whose identity we can debate."128
The problem of this pluralism, as I have shown, is that it leads to art criticism which relies on
“feelings” rather than reasoned judgement, an art criticism whose expertise “has dwindled to
129
a mute albeit heartfelt and supposedly authentic thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture,”
relying on old idealist or positivist paradigms. If we can’t find some terms in common for
contemporary art, it is hard to see what is at stake and of value in it. 130 This is an inflection of
Adorno’s statement that “it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any
longer, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist… In many
ways, expansion appears as contraction… In many ways, expansion appears as
contraction.”131
Ralph Rubinstein, the senior editor of Art In America expresses the dangers inherent in
pluralism, which can also result in a loss of historical awareness: ”Too few painters seem
willing to get into the ring with great artists of the past, to really grapple with their strong
predecessors. Instead, we have a lot of shadow boxing and influence without anxiety. It
almost seems as if such ambitions have become inappropriate or irrelevant, a kind of
unnecessary encumbrance in an art world that tends to value speedy apprehension and the
glamour of new technologies.” Rubinstein points towards the consequence of this “festivalist
pluralism”: “As a result, new artists emerge, new bodies of work are shown, countless group
exhibitions are touted as revelatory, to strangely little consequence. Styles change with
seasonal predictability. No one articulates the grounds on which certain artists become
famous and others are marginalized.” Rubinstein is clear that he in part blames art critics for
this situation “…there is so little interest in making these kinds of qualitative,
transgenerational matchups among observers, critics and artists alike.”132
The paradigm of no paradigm, as Foster notes, can also result in a flat indifference, a
stagnant incommensurability, a new Alexandrianism (where there is no development of
artistic practice). This posthistorical default of art is no improvement on the historicist
determination of modern art. Artists, critics, curators, historians and viewers need some
127 Ibid. 50, p. 206
128 Katy Siegel, "Everyone's a Critic," in Raphael Rubinstein, ed., Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their
Practice (Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2006), p. 48.
129 Ibid. 51
130Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain, An interview with Hal Foster, Platypus Magazine, 8th April 2010,
http://platypus1917.org/2010/04/08/an-interview-with-hal-foster/, retrieved 29th December 2010
131 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, Continuum, 1997, p.1
132 Ibid. 108

narrative to focus present practices – situated stories, not grands recits, but without the
inclusion of e.g. “institution-critiques” that were sometimes to difficult to decipher even for
initiates.
Without this theoretical guide, he cautions, we remain swamped in the double wake of
post/modernism and the neo/avant-garde.133 How the microalternative, the situated story, is
made articulate in art criticism or history seems is an important project. Art criticism must
assess how an art object manifests aesthetic, social or cultural issues. To do that in the
space of the contemporary, “which is more and more vast every day, or so it seems”, is very
difficult to do.134 The question remains how this is to be done in the context of an ever more
dominant art market, where criticism is viewed as having no inherent value aside from
intellectually legitimising artistic practices in gallery catalogues. There is no new paradigm,
rather therethere is only only a minor inflection in the dominant ideology.135
133 Ibid. 12, p.128

134 Ibid. 130
135 Ben Davis, The Age of Semi-Post-Post-Modernism, Artnet, 15th May 2010,
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/davis/semi-post-postmodernism5-15-10.asp, retrieved 15th
October 2010

4 Conclusion
The failure of the postmodernist programme to firstly, unseat Modernism, and secondly, to
entrench the value of independent critical practice in the art field led to the abandonment of
stakes which criticism held as its own and defended, to twist George Baker’s words.
Economic criteria have replaced aesthetic or postmodern criteria in the evaluation of art, as I
have shown. Recently, however, there is an apparent resurgence of critical practice, a view
defended by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Tim Currin among others. As the art
market alone cannot imbue an artwork with “symbolic value” some other method of
conferring distinction must be found. They contend that criticism can fill this role, by
theoretically and art-historically underpinning artist practices, and promoting certain actors in
a multifarious and rapidly growing artworld. In this concluding section, I question whether this
can indeed be viewed as critical resurgence, or whether the victory is at best Pyrrhic, given
that the market seems to then constitute the new master narrative. Criticism, critique and

criticality are abandoned as independent practices. What is more, it is only a restricted group
of critics imbued with this gate-keeping power: the notion of the critic as public citizen is
abandoned. Criticism is therefore indeed in a crisis.
Tobias Meyer, Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, declared in 2008 that “the best art is
the most expensive, because the market is so smart.”1 This has turned out to be, at best, a
short-term strategy to determine artistic value. Now that even blue-chip artists such as
Damien Hirst are seeing the prices commanded for their works fall, another method of value
2
creation must be found. Meyer has now announced that, after the dip in the market for
contemporary art, “there is a return to …provenance and presence”.3 This restitutes a further
Modernist myth, that of provenance: provenance transcribes symbolic capital into economic
capital by virtue of the artist’s “originality and genius”, as evinced by art-historical, institutional
or critical practice.4
1 See http://artforum.com/diary/id=10968, retrieved November 23rd, 2010

2 See, Mathias Thibaut, Die Rezession entzaubert die PR-Künstler, Handelsblatt, 21st August 2010. Thibaut
states that Damien Hirst’s prices have halved since 2008
3 Ben Lewis, Private View, Prospect Magazine, 28th February 2009,
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/02/10604-privateview/ retrieved 24th January 2011
4 The other “modernist myths” that the market seemingly cannot give up are those of the autonomous artwork
and “original” artist, as I discussed in Part I.

Meyer, by far, is not the only scion of the contemporary art market to return to Idealist notions
of “auratic artwork” and “the inspired artist”. “Artists who became famous due to their PR-
skills rather than their talent are finding it hard to maintain their profile during the recession,“
states one investment fund adviser.5 Christie’s Contemporary art strategist Francis Outred
declares that “there is a difference between producing art and feeding a product line” and
that an art work must fulfil certain criteria in order to retain its value and remain significant,
these included “beauty”, a “convincing idea”, and “historical relevance and determination”.6
The notion of historical relevance hinges on the artwork accruing the appropriate symbolic
value. The gallerist Larry Gagosian also sees symbolic value as a determinant for artistic
success: “A place in history is the bottom line for my artists” 7. The gallerist Harry Lybke, goes
as far as denying that value accrual is important to his artists, restituting the avant-garde
notion of historicity over monetary success. He highlights the importance of art-historical
foundations and “being part of the discourse”. His artists want a place in the established
artistic canon.8 Hedonism and populism have been replaced by “significance” and
“relevance”, in a move against the notion of artistry constituted by the artists discussed in
Part 1, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, who positioned the artist as commodity
fetishist and media celebrity. By Meyer’s and others arguments therefore, a product of the
culture industry lacks cultural capital: in order to attain this, it must have the status of a “high-
cultural” object. Adorno/Horkheimer and Greenberg’s worries about the fragile status of art
are therefore unfounded: the market has rediscovered the autonomy of art as a method of
constituting value.
Artworks which are not sited in theory now occupy a fairly low profile except at auction. The
old “art as device of enculturalisation” (Veblen9/Bourdieu10) trope has returned (if it ever went
away); anyone buying young art now is buying culture capital and networks. The real product
now is culture and intelligence. The only way to build equity is to add value by wrapping
intelligence and culture around the product. The apparent product, the object attached to the
transaction, is not an actual product at all.11 The post-structuralist notion of the separation of
signifier and signified has shifted: instead of embodying the spectacular images of late
capitalism, the prestige of an object as signifier of knowledge has come to fore. While
5 Constanze Kubern, art buyer for the Castlestone Art Fund, cited in Mathias Thibaut, Die Rezession
entzaubert die PR-Künstler, Handelsblatt, 21st August 2010
6 Francis Outred, cited in ibid. 2
7 Larry Gagosian, quoted in Round Table: The present conditions of art criticism, October 100, Spring 2002. p.
204
8 Catherine Hoffmann, Investieren in Kunst ist vollkommener Unsinn, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
29.8.2006, Nr.24 S.33,
http://www.faz.net/s/RubEC1ACFE1EE274C81BCD3621EF555C83C/Doc~E0F4D6BD2EC4147ACA81397AA
0DD4E8EB~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html retrieved 24th January 2011
9 Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the leisure class, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009
10 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London, Routledge 2010
11 Bruce Mau, cited in Hal Foster, Design and Crime, New York, Verso, 2002, p. 23

collectors may not consult critical articles about Damien Hirst or Neo Rauch before making a
buying decision, the prominence of an artist featured in Texte zur Kunst or Artforum rises,
and hence their position with regard to curators, the other “gatekeepers” of the contemporary
art fold.
Art-historical validation takes place through the instrumentalisation of intellectual capital and
the institutions of the art world which are pressed into service to provide symbolic value. This
of course has consequences for art criticism and the art critic. Art critics and art historians on
this account, can, through the formation of a provisional canon, contribute significantly to
artwork value accumulation. Criticism here has an inherent value, not as promotional tool in
the Greenbergian sense that critical advocacy will raise an artist’s sale prices, but as a
device which underpins the art-historical significance of an artwork. In this sense, it is more
powerful than ever.
This is the argument proposed by Isabelle Graw in both High Price: Art Between the Market
and Celebrity Culture12 and Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and Its Markets13 in
which the major contention is that art criticism can only play a significant role today if it is also
instrumentalised as “intellectual capital”. Graw, reading Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital
through Virno’s theory of communication, constitutes art criticism as a tool for the creation of
symbolic capital, in Boltanski/Chiapellos “network society”. Criticism as symbolic capital is
seen as essential for constituting “surplus capital”, which cannot be realised independently in
the market, but nevertheless contributes to the value of the artwork under consideration.
The notion of symbolic capital identified by Graw et al hinges on Bourdieu’s notion of “culture
capital”. Bourdieu’s Distinction characterised “good” or distinguished, educated taste as
“cultural capital”, a sociological status marker. For Bourdieu, capital acts as a social relation
within a system of exchange, and the term is extended “to all the goods material and
symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought
after in a particular social formation.” Cultural capital acts as a social relation within a system
of exchange that includes the accumulated cultural knowledge which confers power and
status on the person who holds it. Bourdieu makes “consumption” of cultural goods
contingent on possessing the appropriate embodied cultural capital, or on acquiring that
capital through explication by an intermediary such as an art critic. However, “good” or
distinguished taste no longer demarcates itself within the embodied cultural capital of the
consumer of the artwork, but through the purchase of work of art with concomitant “external
cultural pedigree”. This can be seen as the work’s symbolic value, which is conferred by an
12 Isabelle Graw, Der Große Preis, Kunst zwischen Markt und Celebrity Kultur, DuMont, Köln, 2008, S. 58
13 Canvases and Careers Today, eds. Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2008

independent agent. In short, one no longer needs the appropriate embodied cultural capital
to fully consume an artwork, it suffices that the artwork should come with external cultural
validation (catalogue texts, essays by art historians etc.). The buyer is seemingly exonerated
from knowledge acquisition.
Graw theorises the symbolic value of art criticism (as an agent of cultural validation) with
reference to the philosophers Paolo Virno, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello theses on value
creation in contemporary society. After late capitalism, we have the era of post-Fordist
“semio-capitalism” where the knowledge-industry reigns triumphant. Knowledge here plays a
determining role for value creation in identified Paolo Virno. Virno wrote that “in the post-Ford
era, human communication is also an essential ingredient of productive cooperation in
general; thus, it is the reigning productive force… The most relevant productive forces of
society, those productive forces on which every contemporary work process must draw:
linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc.”14 Art criticism as communication of
knowledge, then, with its inherent value.
The art-critical turn to legitimation practices is defended as part of the “cooperation

imperative” which the Boltanski/Chiapello networking market places on its subjects, where
communication plays a central role. 15Agonistic movements (such as the anti-market rhetoric
of the neo-avantgarde) are no longer defensible, as the market has become highly
segmented and pluralised, and condemnations of “spectacle culture” and “the art market” in
toto risk sounding outmoded, and antagonistic towards a large sector of the art viewership.
Graw calls for a “realistic assessment of the conditions we are confronted with”, instead of
deploring the “effects of celebrity culture” on the art market. 16 This of course does involve
giving up all stakes that criticism claimed as its own and defended, namely the ability to take
on an oppositional stance and critically question the siting of art in a nexus of institutional, the
media and market interests.
Isabelle Graw cites the example of John Currin, who, while rising to the fore as an artist on
the wave of a painterly “anti-theorism” (critiques of Currin were either seen as beside the
point, as with Koons (discussed in Part I), or sour grapes) and an overheated market for
contemporary art. Graw points out that Currin was unable to generate controversy and
debate around his artworks (soft-pornographic cliché depictations of young women), nor has
he generated much of a movement. Currin’s gallerist Gagosian perceived his lack of
symbolic capital as problematic, and commissioned a monograph from the respected art
historian Norman Bryson. Bryson, in turn, declared Currin as an „artiste maudit“. 17 Clearly,
14 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2004, p.60
15 Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2005
16 Ibid. 13, p.9
17 Ibid. 12, p. 58

there is a point when the exchange value which is equated with success at auction must be
transformed into symbolic value which is contingent on cultural capital. Rudi Fuchs,
renowned art critic and curator has also written a monograph of Julian Schnabel18 – an artist
who, similar to Currin, is popular but critically disparaged. Gagosian also perceived art critical
validation as necessary in the case of Damien Hirst’s diamond-covered skull, For the Love of
God, and Fuchs again obliged. 19
While the tendency towards anti-theory (encapsulated by Currin and other artists discussed
in Part II) was encompassed by the Artforum editorship of Jack Bankowsky, the current
editor, Tim Currin, has effected an about turn20. Bankowsky instantiated an editorial policy of
“lite” theory, but his regime did not have the fundamental understanding of the increased
dominance of knowledge in relation to the neo-geo artists’ advocacy of personalities over
theory. The elevation of Texte zur Kunst to the mainstream market is a further indication of
the value of cultural capital. 21 With so many spectators looking in and artists clamouring to be
recognised, the person who selects is the person who dictates visibility. The critic, under this
argument, is more powerful than ever before in their function as a gatekeeper. The artist
Merlin Carpenter explicitly identifies Texte zur Kunst and Artforum and the associated writers
(he also names the galleries Reena Spauling and Greena Naftali) as the sites where the
“new power system” is delineated. 22 Matthew Jesse Jackson clarifies this: “There can be no
doubt that the most innovative thinking on and around “contemporary art” has been coming
not from North America but from a network of younger and older collaborative Europeans:
however, they might simply read as a list of the European contributors to Artforum with a
pinch of Texte zur Kunst for spice.” 23
This has two consequences: firstly, art criticism published in mass media, for a general
audience, is excluded from the revitalised role for criticism, and secondly, the market is
accepted as the new master narrative.
18 Rudi Fuchs, Exhibition Julian Schnabel: Versions of Chuck & Other Works, Köln, Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2007
19 Holger Liebs, Die Kunst und das Geld, in Holger Liebs (hrsg): die Kunst, das Geld, und die Krise, Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walter König, S.31
20 “…I believe that these poles have been mediated in a very productive fashion in the month-by-month
features, profiles, columns, and reviews of Artforum over the past few years. The impressive levels of
historical awareness, theoretical rigor, political concern, interdisciplinary expansiveness, and, to some extent,
geographical diversity evident in the magazine have at once reflected and helped to construct the
contemporary artistic field along the lines of a highly productive pluralism.” Terry Smith, Questionnaire on the
Contemporary – October 130, Fall 2009, p. 49
21 Merlin Carpenter, The Tail that Wags the Dog, in ibid. 13, p.80
22 Ibid. 13, p.78
23 Jackson cites Art & Language, Daniel Birnbaum, Nicolas Bourriaud, Catherine David, Ekaterina Degot,
Guillaume Désanges, Diedrich Diederichsen, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Isabelle Graw, Boris Groys, Sven
Lütticken, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle and Peter Weibel as leaders of the new art theorising, in Matthew
Jesse Jackson, Questionnaire on the Contemporary – October 130, Fall 2009, p. 86

Thus, it is only indirectly, through the intermediary the market (for record auction results
command press attention) that general audiences benefit from the resurgence of art criticism.
The mediating function between artist and audience, the constitution of a public sphere for
art, the traditional role of art criticism since Baudelaire: all these are invalidated. And while art
criticism in the era of culture capital resists, like Octobrism before it, a return to Idealism, this
is not due to a programmatic resistance to Modernist critical paradigms, but rather the result
of the accrual of knowledge won through postmodernist investigations. These are returned
as academic reputations – the critic John Miller describes writing criticism for publications
24
such as October as “symbolic capital, which can be transferred into real capital” – real
capital in this case referring to academic posts.
The view of criticism as symbolic capital shifts the critical paradigm from self-determination
by the critic (as with Clement Greenberg’s and Octoberist criticism) to heteronomous factors,
in this case, the market. The market therefore posits itself as a new master narrative. The
current lack of theoretical paradigms to site contemporary art criticism, described in Part II,
and the attendant “floating free” of contemporary theory proclaimed by both Hal Foster and
James Elkins, is rendered suspect. The market has silently emerged as new master
narrative. It seems that Jameson’s and Barthes’ warnings do hold: interpretation is not an
isolated act. “If the very absence of a system is proclaimed (this) stems from a very definite
system …it is when man proclaims his primal liberty that his subordination is least
disputable”.25
Against a background of the market as a master narrative, old battles have come to a
standstill. Criticism rises once again, but this victory is Pyrrhic, as it involves a loss of the
determining features that criticism claimed as its own and defended. Criticality, alternative
spaces, Greenberg’s understanding of the Modernist paradigm as something fragile in need
of defence against the constant threat of half-culture26 and the neo-avant-garde’s
continuation of this project are abandoned. The art critic, in this case, cannot afford to have
a political stance. While Greenberg and the October critics were sceptical about the market
and the relations between art and capital, if criticism is recast as legitimation device, the critic
cannot afford to stand in opposition to the artist or methods examined. Criticism here loses
its traditional functions, particularly if it is understood as critique, which informed and
propelled artistic practices since the 1960’s.
24 Ibid. 7. p. 206
25 Roland Barthes, Neither Nor Criticism, in Mythologies, Paladin, 1973, p.82, as cited in Burgin, 1986, p. 158
26 Max E. Katz, Two Ways of Avoiding Clement Greenberg, Chicago Art Criticism, 23rd June 2010,
http://chicagoartcriticism.com/2010/07/23/two-ways-of-avoiding-clement-greenberg-alice-goldfarb-marquis
%E2%80%99-%E2%80%9Cart-czar-the-rise-and-fall-of-clement-greenberg%E2%80%9D-and-robert-storr
%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cno-joy-in-mudville-gree/ retrieved 23rd December 2010

As Lane Relya notes: Discourse as criticism, as power, as value. If today discourse has
become disenchanted, belief has drained away only from the first two of the three levels;
what remains is discourse as the circulation and enactment of social status, prestige and
symbolic capital. The waning importance of October and the new priorities established at
Artforum indicate as much; if we no longer believe in discourse as criticism, we also can't
afford to believe in its policing of disciplinary borders.27 A pliant criticality may end up serving
the principles of neoliberalism, and in this case, an apparently high-minded, disinterested
criticism is of more use to the market than lower forts of publicity, as it sites the artwork
outside the market, thus strengthening its autonomy.28 Value can be eked out from the very
critique of capital itself.
Criticism is now either in the museum catalogue or the academic journal, it has been “hunted
back”. Catalogue texts treat criticism agonally to its traditional conception: here it is
monographic, close to a singular body of work, and cannot function as criticism, as the critic
is invited to write in support of an artist’s work. This is critical elucidation, not judgement. It
gives up the task of identifying shifts in generations of artists, in conceptualising movements
and influences. The task of criticism is taken to be the task of affirmation, and not of
judgement.
Criticism became entrenched in academia in the 1980’s – most “serious” critics hold tenured
positions, (Benjamin Buchloh asks: “Who is outside?” to which the answer is “no-one, even
Dave Hickey teaches”)29. If Graw and others’ theses regarding the value of criticism of
cultural capital are correct, then this implies that the critique, in order to embody academic
prestige, must be located within one of the organs of the art institution or the university. This
privileges criticism written by academics, or utilising the model of academic art criticism
described in Part II, due to the endemic credibility of the writing. While this point is not
explicitly made in Canvases and Careers, the contributors are mainly academics with
tenured positions, and it is possible to hypothesise that only the writing emanating from or
situated close to an academic background can add to cultural capital of artworks.30
Given that the subject matter is the contemporary art field, the foundations for art-historical
research are potentially problematic. Richard Meyer, Associate Professor of Art History and
27 Lane Relya, All over and at once , xtra contemporary art quarterly, Fall 2003, Volume 6, No.1
28 Julian Stallabrass, The ideal of Art Criticism in the State of Art Criticism, Routledge 2008, P. 334
29 The participants of the 2002 October Round Table included George Baker, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin
Buchloh, Robert Storr, David Joselit, Andrea Fraser, James Meyer, Hal Foster, John Miller and Helen
Molesworth, see ibid. 7, p.221.
30 Isabelle Graw teaches at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, George Baker is a Professor of Art History at the
University of California, Los Angeles, Johanna Burton is Associate Director and Senior Faculty Member of the
Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, NYC, Tom Holert founded the Institute for Studies in Visual
Culture (ISVC), and teaches at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, Daniel Birnbaum is the Vice-
Chancellor of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and so on.

Fine Arts at USC asks about the archival and research materials on which will be drawn on
for scholarship surrounding contemporary artists – “the files of a commercial gallery, in a
drawer in the artist’s studio, in the works of art themselves, in a series of interviews
conducted with the artist, in a theoretical paradigm applied to the work, or in an ideological
critique of the current moment?” In other words, there is no established academic canon to
draw research from, and there is little to differentiate art historical scholarship from art
criticism.31
US scholars tend to be critical of the “academic value” of the accrual of symbolic capital
through catalogue entries: the critic Joanna Burton points out that “expertise is often being
performed in an overcompensating manner for artists whose work visually registers as kitsch
(Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Richard Phillips). The ways that legitimizing discourse
around such practices (claiming them to be “critical,” say) may inadvertently disallow the
32
more urgent conversations to be had around them.” Furthermore, the more the market
seizes on intellectual production to bolster market value, the more the intellectual surplus
appears as mere publicity, and the more sceptically it is received.33 Art critics have followed
artists forced to exchange critical practice for economic survival, and this affects the
credibility of their output.34
Graw counters this argument by stating that the critic’s power lies in withholding exposure,
implementing Boris Groy’s notion of +/0 judgement – as all publicity is good publicity, the true
power lies in not publishing. “Criticism matters in the long run,” she argues, “and this is even
true for the collector who might ignore a well-argued review of Neo Rauch’s work, going
ahead to buy his paintings anyhow. But it is my firm belief – otherwise I would stop doing
what I do (writing art criticism, publishing an art magazine) that a critical assessment, while
not immediately influencing buying decisions, will unfold its potential in the long run. It will
spread doubt, which is usually the first step towards the change of opinion climate and can
lead to reconsideration of value. This is even more so because value is such a precarious
affair. There is no value per se; value is, as Marx relentlessly demonstrated, relational and
this to be re-negotiated permanently. That is why it is highly susceptible to those atmospheric
and conjunctural changes that can be initiated by a critic.” 35
If the market is rejected as a new master narrative, then other perspectives for art criticism
must be found. US critics such as Hal Foster, Joanna Burton and George Baker characterise
31 Richard Meyer, Questionnaire on the Contemporary – October 130, Fall 2009, p. 18

32 Johanna Burton, in ibid., p. 23
33 Julian Stallabrass, Brand Identity, Artforum, Vol. XLVIII, No.10, Summer 2010
34 Hal Foster, Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p.xvi
35 Isabelle Graw, Introduction, in ibid. 13, p.16

criticism as being in an aftermath or “late”. The dominant models of criticism -modernist or
postmodernist- exist as a shrivelled up versions of their former selves, as Hal Fosters’
“situated stories”. An example is Foster’s investigation of trauma to site current artistic
practice.36 There is, on the one hand, a piling up of discourses, where the remnants of former
paradigms (Modernism, the neo-avantgarde) accrue without dissolution, and the theoretical
foundations are taken as hypostatised.
The mode of “late criticism”, criticism after the end of theoretical paradigms, then, could be a
criticism of “wilfully anachronistic criteria” as George Baker describes it. 37 Late criticism is a
criticism of wilfully anachronistic criteria, showing more “traces of history than growth” 38, as
exemplified by Rosalind Krauss’ return to medium specificity in Voyage on the North Sea.39
There is a general tendency in art criticism, which Baker notes, of the critic to surpass the
limits of generational belonging. The critic is immobilised in the face of a practice they once
supported, but no longer remains contemporary. Baker extends this to govern criticism which
is rendered redundant by market functions: criticism is now shorn of its older and more
compromised functions (selection, evaluation) and can begin to invent new modes of
function. 40 Late criticism, which embodies the knowledge that art criticism as public discourse
is abandoned in theoretical and economic models, is no method of defence against the
idealism of the poet critic. It also seems to be an acknowledgement of the critics’
powerlessness and increasing irrelevance.
Andre Rottman, the former editor of Texte zur Kunst, sees the ubiquity of criticism – which
James Elkins also described in the State of Art Criticism – as possibility for investigating the
possible anachronisms and anomalies there might be in times of a rampant “criticality” in the
name of neo-liberal models of individual “autonomisation”. 41
The critic writing for the mass market is returned as John Kelsey’s hack – “The hack
operates and writes in the midst of the business transaction, under terrible deadlines”- and is
sited somewhere between entertainment writer and “shoot from the hip”. The critics who
claim that they haven’t “sold out” to academia, that are still publishing in mainstream
publications (aka. hacks), are now firmly entrenched in the “poet critic” mode of art criticism,
with all its attendant baggage of idealism. I have touched on the methodological problems
36 Ibid. 11, p.131 ff

37 George Baker, Late Criticism, in ibid.13, p.31
38 Theodor Adorno, Late Style in Beethoven, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 2002, p.564, cited in Graw/Birnbaum (2008) p. 29
39 Rosalind Krauss, A voyage on the North Sea : art in the age of the post-medium condition, London, Thames &
Hudson, 2000
40 George Baker, Late Criticism, in ibid. 13, p.31
41 Andre Rottmann, Response to George Baker, in ibid. 13 p.46

inherent in this poet-critical approach; it also implies that the debate to be had about the role
of art in society is no longer relevant.
The truly independent art critic seems lost to us, we must adjust to a new critical paradigm. If
postmodernism was our “first glimpse of the historical emergence of a field of post-Romantic
aesthetics,”42 with the cultural theory of the 1970’s demonstrating the impossibility of the
modernist ideal of art as a sphere of “higher” values, independent history, and the original
artist, then this is negated by the poet-critic, and by the market. The market instrumentalises
criticism as creator of “symbolic value” to revive an artistic practice implicated by its
closeness to the serial production and commodification of the culture industry. The notion of
art’s autonomy must somehow be rescued, and critique can fulfil this role. On this view too,
Modernist ideals are reconstituted.
In the end, the democratising notion of art (Beuys, and even the YBAs) is abandoned. Art is
returned to its age-old role of marker of cultural and social distinction. Populist projects
claiming to appeal to a Universalist notion of mass taste (Koons, Hirst) are revealed to be
constructs which “slide right back into the market, leaving no discourse unchanged” (Foster).
If the concept of an autonomous criticism is abandoned, as it is when discourse is drafted in
to legitimise artistic practices, critical projects such as Krauss’ examination of Modernism are
no longer viable. Criticism, bound as it is in academia or populism, cannot constitute its own
public field. The postmodern project failed to entrench its autonomy, and thus other
narratives could seize centre stage. Rather than there being an evolution in theory
concomitant with some new conception of art, however, old, questionable ideals have
returned.
42 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, Macmillan, London, 1986, p. 210

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Is Art Criticism in A Crisis Master Thes

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Is Art Criticism in a Crisis?

Jenifer Fulton Betreut von:

Masterthesis Jenifer Fulton 2

Masterthesis Jenifer Fulton 3

1 Introduction: The Crises of Art Criticism................................................................................5

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8 Harry Lehmann, Zehn Thesen zur Kunstkritik, Merkur 11 2008

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Descriptions of exhibitions and pieces cannot replace substantiated and well-founded

13 Margaret Hawkins, in ibid. 11, p. 295

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28 David Joselit, ibid. 27, p.209

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36 Michael Newman, Revising Modernism, Representing Postmodernism, in Postmodernism, ICA Documents,

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68 Benjamin Buchloh, ibid. 27, p.219

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Unbiased evaluation of an artist or exhibition decreases as a result of the disappearance of

77 Lane Relyea, Impure Thoughts in ibid. 11, p. 258

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The retro-sensationalists conceptually underpinned their practice by stating that artistic

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Foster and Buchloh implement a post-structuralist reading of the retro-sensationalists claims

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2.2 Kitsch, high and mass culture

In order to understand the recurrent appeals to the avant-garde or avant-garde practice9

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56 Ibid. 53, p. 432.

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The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote that

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In the phenomenon of retro-sensationalism, Isabelle Graw sees a transformation of the

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