Art criticism in the 20th century

Starting more or less in the 1960s a new generation of critics was influenced by Greenberg’s ideas and developed a secondary, more “conceptual” or intellectualized approach to formalism, often in an attempt to acknowledge the challenges of critics such as Rosenberg and Alloway. American critic Michael Fried, in the essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967), apotheosized “art” in contrast to “theatricality”—another version of Greenberg’s elevation of formal art over literary art, more particularly of Cubism over Dadaism—arguing that “it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theater.” Fried’s dismissal of Minimalism as “ingratiating theater”—in effect what Greenberg called “novelty art”—and as such not true art, extends Greenberg’s dismissal of “literary” art as beside the aesthetic point. (For Fried, the audience is implicated in theater, while pure art rises above the audience to assert its own hermetic integrity.) For Fried, the only works that counted in the 1960s were the paintings of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella and the sculptures of David Smith and Anthony Caro (many of Greenberg’s preferences at the time). Presumably these works alone seemed formally self-sufficient—aesthetically pure. The irreconcilability of art and theater was the mainstay of Fried’s thought until, rebounding into the 19th century (thinking about the work of such artists as Courbet and Thomas Eakins) and as though searching for a way out of what looked like an increasingly inhibiting formalism, Fried expanded his evaluative criteria and perhaps even emotional responsiveness to art by including psychoanalytic ideas in his formal assessments.

Starting in the 1970s another one-time Greenberg devotee, American critic Rosalind Krauss, also looked for a way to move formalism forward. In Terminal Iron Works (1971), she wrote about sculptor David Smith in broadly formalist terms, getting “beyond an historical context,” as she said, and attempting to offer what New [literary] Criticism and theorist Roland Barthes called an “immanent analysis,” which focused on the structure and themes of Smith’s sculpture and, to some extent, explicated them. But she also had a certain interest in psychoanalysis, if initially only a scholarly interest, as her brief mention of Sigmund Freud in her discussion of the totemic aspect of Smith’s works indicates. Later in her career she used Lacanian psychoanalysis to explicate “the counterhistory” of Modernism. She wrote that it was the “optical unconscious” that mattered, not the self-conscious “opticality”—emphasis on pure aesthetic perception—that Greenberg and Fried celebrated in Modernist painting. Despite her adoption of Greenberg’s focus on the object and its material qualities, she repudiated Greenberg’s formalism for its lack of “method,” in contrast to her own use of theoretical models such as that of Jacques Lacan.

The irony of the avant-garde

Krauss’s kind of tendentious theoretical analysis, often strongly tinged with an ideological bias, tended to replace strictly aesthetic formal analyses as the century progressed. Her appropriation of the ideas and terminology of various French theorists—Jacques Derrida as well as Barthes and Lacan—became fashionable among postmodern artists and critics from the 1970s onward. In particular, such French cultural theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard were used by artists to rationalize and justify—and give an intellectual mystique and cachet to—their art, and by critics to explicate art in terms of the post-structuralist understanding of contemporary culture. Why the French theorists should have the monopoly on the understanding of contemporary culture is not clear, although their presumed leftism was appealing to would-be “advanced” critics and artists—that is, aspirants to the mantle of avant-gardism, which still claimed for itself “resistance,” the catchword from the 1970s on, if no longer “revolution.”

Despite such aspirations, at the end of the 20th century, avant-gardism in many ways became academic, routine, and repetitive. No matter how much critical writing by artists—perhaps most noteworthily, from the 1960s on, by Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson—staked out subtle avant-garde positions, their art and ideas were quickly assimilated, becoming trendy, marketable, and reputable. To some critics, this turn of events was not surprising. As Daniel Bell pointed out in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1979), the avant-garde artist “swiftly shapes the audience and the market.” As Bell believes, the surprise and shock of the new dwindles into fashionable novelty, fueled by capitalist momentum rather than profound concern for the artistic and human truth, which in turn leads to innovative ways of articulating it. The irony of avant-garde art, therefore, is that its professed leftism and ostensibly radical difference made it highly marketable as a capitalist trophy, Picasso’s ever-changing art being the example par excellence. Avant-garde art, which once seemed illegitimate, became as legitimate as gold in the bank. In this way, the stakes for art criticism—once a force that sought to gain acceptance for avant-garde art—radically changed. Indeed, in From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (1992), journalist Peter Watson points out that art criticism, however high-minded, serves the art market, which is part of the prevailing consumer society (a reality especially prevalent after the art boom of the 1980s). Watson suggests that, in a capitalist society, art is above all a luxury commodity, and art criticism is the packaging designed to create a taste for it.