Notes on the Demise and Persistence of Judgment (William Wood)

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Fillip Folio A

Notes on the Demise andPersistence of Judgment

Some commentators have locatedthe demise of judgment within themassive proliferation of art stylesin the closing decades of thetwentieth century. Others havelaid the blame at the feet of suchculprits as the recently inflated artmarket and the legacy of

institutional critique.

I want to discuss the frameworkfor the Judgment andContemporary Art Criticism forumas spelled out in the organizersprinted Supplement and throughtexts selected and reprintedthere. Through these texts, I

would like to bring in historicaland contemporary references tothe conditions leading to our oldfriend, the putative, recurringcrisis in art criticism. With thatcrisis in mind, and beforeaddressing the impact ofproliferating art styles, theinflated art market, and thelegacy of institutional critique, I

want to touch on a quote whichhas strong implications for thematter of judgment and art.

Art, considered in its highest

Notes

1. Supplement for

Judgment and

Contemporary Art

Criticism(Vancouver:

Artspeak and Fillip,

2009), 5. This booklet

included reprints of

texts by Lucy Lippard,

Sven Ltticken,

Christopher Bedford,

and James Elkins, as

well as Round Table:

The PresentConditions of Art

Criticism, October

no. 100 (spring

2002).

2. The Judgment and

Contemporary Art

Criticismforum was

accompanied by a

reading room/ gallery

installation and a

brochure publication,

both put together by

Fillip and Artspeak.

Besides mapping the

overlapping territory

that prompted the

collaboration leading

to the forum, these

coordinated

opportunities to readthe texts and handle

the products of

criticism also offered

the speakers and the
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vocation is and remains, for us, athing of the past. Thereby it haslost for us genuine truth and life,and has rather been transferred toour ideas instead of maintainingits earlier necessity in reality andoccupying its higher place. What

is now aroused in us by works ofart is not just immediateenjoyment, but our judgment also,since we subject to our intellectualconsideration (i) the content of art,and (ii) the work of arts means ofpresentation, and theappropriateness orinappropriateness of both to one

another.The quote is from GeorgWilhelm Friedrich HegelsLectures on Aesthetics, lastdelivered in 1828. I raise Hegelsreconsideration of art because,on the one hand, we can say thatit engages a massiveWincklemann-like fantasy: thefantasy of citizens of ancientAthens walking familiarly amongpolychrome statues, or theequally erroneous vision of theGothic cathedral as decoratedwith the bibles of the illiterate,both of which represent ideals ofpast art emphasized in forms ofRomanticism contemporary toHegel. Yet, in this fantasy, I want

to note how Hegels emphasis onarts belatedness encourages usto underline separation from artin our consideration of it.Meanwhile, the equally powerfuldesire to overcome that sense ofbeing separate persists, whetherin the revered spontaneity ofAbstract Expressionist brushwork

or the immediacy stressed insome accounts of conceptual artor behind a more currentinvestment in the simulacra of

audience selected

writings and provided

the hint of a history

to consider prior to

and following the two

days of papers and

discussion. For a list

of texts included in

the Supplement, seeBibliography, page

169.

3. G. W. F. Hegel,

Hegels Aesthetics:

Lectures on Fine Art,

trans. T. M. Knox

(Oxford: Clarendon,

1975), 11.

4. Arthur C. Danto,

Three Decades After

the End of Art,After

the End of Art:

Contemporary Art and

the Pale of History

(Princeton: Princeton

University Press,

1997), 35.

5. Michael Fried, Art

and Objecthood,Artforum5, no. 10

(summer 1967), 12

23, as reprinted inArt

and Objecthood:

Essays and Reviews

(Chicago: University

of Chicago Press,

1998), 163.

6. Christopher

Bedford, Art WithoutCriticism,X-tra10,

no. 2 (winter 2008). I

could add that one

can say that

Greenberg had a

clearly explicated

system of value only

if you forget about

the various and often

conflicting attempts

to sort out his

position by critics

and historians such

as T. J. Clark, Thierry

de Duve, Charles


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community achieved throughsocial practice or relationalaesthetics. The pain ofseparation and distance,encapsulated in the notion of artbeing a thing of the past, whichdecisively divorces the present of

forlorn art from its integratedpast, is at least partially (maybesubstantively) compensated forby endorsing and exaltingjudgment. As Hegel has it, artprovides not just immediateenjoyment but calls us to judgeappropriateness as well.Acknowledging that dreams of

reconnection persist alongsidethe compensating reassurance ofjudgment, I wonder whether bothconstitute linked foundationalfantasies: that is, fantasies ofreconnection persist because wewant always to imagine not beingalienated from art, while,simultaneously, judgmentalthough promising finalityinsists that we are, at leastintellectually, constantly at adistance from art.

I came to Hegelsreconsideration of art throughthe end-of-art thesis propoundedby critic and philosopher ArthurDanto. In hisAfter the End of Art,the idea that the proliferation of

art styles in the closing decadesof the twentieth century hasimpact on judgment can be fairlyeasily associated with hisdiscussion of what he calls ademocracy of pluralism incontemporary art. Danto claimsthat there is now no special waya work of art must be, tracing

this condition back to AndyWarhols Brillo Box of 1964, whichpossesses no significantdistinguishing visual differencefrom the Brillo box found in the

Harrison, Caroline

Jones, Rosalind

Krauss, and Barbara

Reise.

7. Fried, Art and

Objecthood, 167.

8. Michael Fried, Why

Photography Mattersas Art as Never Before

(New Haven: Yale

University Press,

2008).

9. Lucy Lippard,

Change and

Criticism:

Consistency and

Small Minds, in

Changing: Essays inArt Criticism(New

York: E. P. Dutton,

1971), 24.

10. Benjamin

Buchloh, Hal Foster,

Andrea Fraser, David

Joselit, Rosalind

Krauss, et al, Round

Table: The Present

Conditions of ArtCriticism, October

no. 100 (spring

2002), 209.

11. Ibid., 217.

12. Sven Ltticken,

Secret Publicity:

Essays on

Contemporary Culture

(Rotterdam: NAi

Publishers, 2006), 8.

13. Ibid., 1415.

14. Ibid., 14.

15. Julian Stallabrass,

Art Incorporated: The

Story of

Contemporary Art

(Oxford: Oxford

University Press,

2004).

16. James Elkins and

Michael Newman,

eds., The State of Art


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supermarket. While Danto has

much more to say about thatexample, his point is thatWarhols box signals the end ofthat notion of the special way artmust be, which he attributes towhat he calls the Age of

Manifestoes. Broadly coincidentwith the period of post-Hegelianmodern art and culminating inthe rise of the avant garde andthe neo-avant garde, the Age ofManifestoes is marked bypractices of inclusion andexclusion which dictate thatcertain types of art work

exemplify the most significant artand that all other contemporaryart is inferior, perhaps not art atall. This declaration of inclusionand exclusion is an exceptionaltype of judgment wherediscrimination takes first place.One of the most often discussedexample of this sort of exclusivejudgment is Michael Frieds 1967Art and Objecthood (discussedmainly by Fried himself insubsequent writing). There,modernist painting and sculptureas distinct media and thetheatricality of minimal art areopposed in a manner whereby,combining aesthetic withtheological judgment, Fried could

emphatically declare thattheatre and theatricality are atwar today, not just withmodernist painting . . . but withart as such. Such exclusive

judgment is presumably whatcritic and curator ChristopherBedford wants when he calls fora return to Clement Greenberg-

style critical criteria, a well-organized, well-argued, andclearly explicated system ofvalue. Yet Frieds essay is

Criticism(New York:

Routledge, 2008),

7274.

17. Art and Its

Markets: A

Roundtable

Discussion,Artforum

46, no. 8 (April 2008),

300.

18. Round Table: The

Present Conditions of

Art Criticism, 220.

19. Along with the

Art and Its Markets

roundtable, the April

2008 issue of

Artforumhas a

discussion of how asizeable posthumous

market for the work

of Lee Lozano has

been generated

through a circle of

belief consisting of

fellow artists, critics,

curators, dealers, and

collectors. See Katy

Siegel, Market Index:Lee Lozano,

Artforum46, no. 8

(April 2008), 330,

390.

20. For a study of at

least one aspect of

this complex and

contradictory

diffidence, the

pricing of works ofcontemporary art,

see Olav Velthius,

Talking Prices

(Princeton: Princeton

University Press,

2005).

21. Pierre Bourdieu,

The Field of Cultural

Production, or: The

Economic FieldReversed, The Field

of Cultural Production,

ed. Randal Johnson

(New York: Columbia


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remembered and expresslyrecalled as a bellicose swansongfor a type of critical diktatwhichpurported to offer exclusivejudgment while actually beingspecial pleading based on anattack on certain artists (and

critics) and a defence ofothers. Bedford may point

favourably to the richness of thedebates that ensued, but I havedoubts that anyone today couldfind in medium specificitysufficient grounds, or ferventfaith in certain artists asrighteous proof, truly to emulate

Frieds 1960s exampleexceptFried himself in his 2008monographic paean disguised asan explanation of WhyPhotography Matters as Art asNever Before.

In her essay Change andCriticism: Consistency and SmallMinds, also from 1967, Lucy

Lippard is already preparingground for moving away from theexcluding mode when she arguesthat a judgment oncontemporary art is tentativelytrue, like a scientists law andunlike a legal law. This

comparison of types of lawsindicates something whichFrieds call for medium specificitycannot tolerate, for she isencouraging looking not to acanon but to experimentation forcriteria in engaging art andcriticism. When Lippard goes onto say that the critics role isdescriptive rather thanprescriptive, combined with herallusion to the scientist, she

points towards the oft-forgottenattraction of technocraticadventures such ascommunications and systems

University Press,

1993), 2973, 27379.

22. Art and Its

Markets, 300.

23. Round Table:

The Present

Conditions of Art

Criticism, 213.

24. Ibid., 205.

25. Ibid., 214.

26. Ibid., 223.

27. Ltticken, 16.

28. Boris Groys, Art

in the Age of

Biopolitics: From

Artwork to Art

Documentation,Art

Power(Cambridge,

Mass.: The MIT Press,

2008), 53. On the

subject of Flavins

certificates, see

James Meyer, The

Minimalist

Unconscious,

Octoberno. 130 (fall

2009), 14376.

29. Andrea Fraser,

Performance

Anxiety,Artforum14,

no. 6 (February

2003), 103.

About the Author

William Wood is anart historian and

critic. Since 1984, he

has published on

recent art in journals,

anthologies, and

exhibition

catalogues, as well as

held editorial

positions with C

Magazine, Public, Van

guard, and Parachute.

Recent catalogue

essays and articles

have dealt with

artists such as Stan


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theory and the philosophy ofscienceas elaborated in bookssuch as Thomas Kuhns 1962book The Structure of ScientificRevolutionson contemporarythinking about the arts andculture in the 1960s. Besides

indicating an expanded fieldbeyond media specificity, oneoutcome of this attraction whichLippard seems to be anticipatingwas her own subsequent practiceas a descriptive critic of theconceptual art that overtly triedto avoid or render useless thecategories of painting and

sculpturenot to mentionaesthetic conviction and culturalprivilegewhich upheld theexclusionary judgment of criticslike Fried, as well as her laterinclusive approach to feministand activist art projects and herconcern with aspects of locale inher writing.

We can see the legacy of thismove from prescriptive judgmentto tentative description operatingin the Octoberround table whenDavid Joselit speaks of judgingwhat constitutes an object . . . anobject of history and object ofaesthetic interpretation or

speaks of judging theboundaries of a field in the

context of engaging both art andvisual culture. Joselit is making adouble move. On the one hand,we need to judge what is anappropriate object for criticism,as when a critic passes over thephantom of the thing in itself todetermine how the work of art isarticulated and refracted through

institutional framing, curatorialcontext, and the histories,conventions, and subjects itemerges through and calls upon.

Douglas, Brian

Jungen, Mike Kelley,

Becky Singleton, and

the entity known as

the Vancouver

School. He has

taught art history and

critical theory at

universities inCanada and the

United Kingdom.

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On the other, where do thebounds of aestheticinterpretation lie? Are art critics(or art historians who act ascritics sometimes, like Joselit)and their competencies able toreach meaningfully to other

areas? Are we (since I occupy thesame field) in possession ofspecially pertinent tools andanalyses which might be fruitfullyapplied to a broader range ofimages and objects, from popularculture, non-elite spectacle, andsubcultural practices? I do notwant to get caught up in this

question, but want to argue thatthis double move means that weneed to come closer toconsidering not the proliferationof styles but the proliferation ofobjectsand the proliferation ofaspectsin the field ofcontemporary art and criticism.For Sven Ltticken, the issuepivots on the distinction JosephKosuth is credited withelaborating between specificand generic art, with generic orart-in-general being a situationwhere objects nowadaysexhibited as art no longer derivetheir legitimacy from a traditionor an artistic medium but fromthe very fact that their artistic

status is initially dubious.Such a proliferation of objects forcontemporary art has aconsequence that, to Ltticken,differently politicizes the sort ofpluralism Danto cheers on asdemocratic. Since art can includemost anything, it is then open ina new way to the commodity

relations of spectacular society,and so the artist has become anexemplary consumer. Meanwhile,the sort of criticism which


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stresses arts potential fordissent and difference risksbeing merely the marketingslogans for art that hassabotaged such a project,promoting its consumption in adeceptive, probably repressive,

but incrementally different typeof pitch.

In response to this potentialsabotage, Ltticken (with a nodto Boris Groys), discusses MarcelBroodthaers, seeing him as afigure whose acts ofconsumption amounted to notmerely a reflection of spectacle

but a reflection on it and furtherclaims that this sort of meta-consumption can result indecoding, deviant commoditieswhich are more thought-provoking and productivecompounds of the irrationalrationality of the spectacle.

Though he appears to laud thistendencyand to link it to otherscripto-visual artists like DanGraham and Robert SmithsonLtticken is also concerned withthe way in which the ideology ofart stipulates that the cultureindustry represents the big BadCop while the art businessrepresents the Good Coptheone who is good for people,

refined, complexand critical.Aware that critical writingwhether or not it is exclusivelyjudgmentalis part and parcel ofarts privileged position assomething somehow regarded asnot entirely instrumentalized,Ltticken writes of theuninflected importation of

contemporary cultural theory intoartistic and critical discourse asoften constituting unreflectiveconsumption, what he calls a


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pathetic, pathological tangle ofslogans and hype. Here we

might also consider JulianStallabrasss contention that agood deal of contemporary artscharm lies in the way it acts as acipher for notions of artistic and

creative freedom whilesimultaneously being nicelypositioned as spectacle in thestatus stakes played out bypowers who are bent onincreased capital accumulationthrough increasing inequity.

We are now up against thequestion of the recently inflated

market and its impact onjudgment. Is this really aproblem? Many commentatorson contemporary criticism,including Ltticken and JamesElkins, write of an imperative thatart must appear with some formof writing attached to it and,equally that there has recently

been more publishing ofcommentary, gossip, blogging,publicity, and art writing thanever before. In addition, Elkinsclaims that most of what isproduced is not read andcertainly not worthy of closereading. Meanwhile, in a 2008

discussion of Art and ItsMarkets, Tim Griffin, editor of

Artforum,said that theabundance of advertising in hismagazine had lead him awayfrom the market to areas wherehe could use the ad revenue todo something completelycounterintuitive: slow down, belate, even slightly out of sync.

Hence, the magazine had

recently featured articles andtributes to figures seeminglyextraneous to the fungibles of artdealing and collecting


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philosopher Jacques Rancire,dancer Michael Clark, novelistAlain Robbe-Grillet among them.In this example, the judgment ofan object of historywhichJoselit upheldsustains what HalFoster calls the archaeological

function of criticism,returning the forgotten orrevaluing the marginal thanks torevenue from a market whoseinterests it, nominally, does notrepresentthough here, we mustrecall that reviving marginalfigures extends the stockavailable for dealing. As well,

dealing, whether in words or ofworks, can come to havereciprocal effects by generatingsubsequent circulation of worksand in words.

I am not, like Dave Hickey, anapologist for the art market, butdiffidence about the art marketsrelationship to questions of

criticism and judgmentnecessitates neither an embraceof the ubiquity of marketpressures nor a disavowal ofthose pressures. Rather, we canlook to the art markets manycontradictory aspectsthe lackof a clear sense of what art isworth, what it can do, how it ispromoted simultaneously as

token of freedom and as ownedobject, as luxury goods and ascultural patrimony, as thingsuseless as instruments but viablefor all sorts of speculativepurposes. These questions are

grounded in matters of autonomyand heteronomy, the two poleswhich, according to Pierre

Bourdieu, structure the field ofcultural production, making itsnineteenth-century Frenchformation the economic world


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reversed. (To revise the terms

for the field of contemporary artin the recent past, we mightspeak of the art market asrepresenting the economic worldsynchronized.) It is not that themarket dictates criticismTim

Griffin wondered: Could apublication seriously damageanythinganymore? but to

recognize that inflation in abubble market and especially thecorrosive effects of presumingmarket relations to be theprevailing model for social lifehas taken on the character of a

neoliberal monolith, resulting inthe eradication of remainingvestiges of publicness whileendorsing weak citizenship.

In front of the Richard Serra-like monolith, we might turnaway from the art markettowards the question of fundingand governance of public

institutions like museums. AsAndrea Fraser points out in the2002 Octoberround table onThe Present Conditions of ArtCriticism, the privatization andcorporatization of museums andgalleries is the result of ahistorical shift since the 1970swhere: The progressive ambitionof building audiences for art

museums . . . [whereby] museumsbegan to recognize that they hadpublics and publicresponsibilities, as did artists andcritics and curators came to beseen through the prism ofprofessional and institutionalneeds. As she concludes: So

art for arts sake was replaced by

growth for arts sakewhich wasoften seems a thin cover forgrowth for growths sake. This issomewhat related to an


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argument brought forth byBenjamin Buchloh concerninghow one target of conceptualarts thorough criticism of thefield of contemporary art in the1960s and 1970s was thesecondary discursive text that

attached itself to artisticpractice. As he further states,readers competence andspectatorial competence hadreached a level where themeddling of the critic washistorically defied anddenounced. What interests

me here is the trend to revise the

relatively recent past regardingthe encouragement ofdemocratization anddecentralizationin theprogressive bureaucraticlanguage of the dayin postwarcultural organizations andindividual reception. That is, tosee how laudable aims thatpointed away, again, fromexclusive judgment and inheritedprivilege, need to be understoodas plays in a field where everypart is active and unforeseenconsequences need to beexposed and subject to analysis.If, in the museum, opening up theinstitution to more publicallysensitive accountability also

advanced administratorsadoption of corporate methodsand standards, so the redirectedenergies of the empoweredviewer/reader of conceptual artcould also be seen to contributeto the quelling of the exclusionistcritic as well as a harbinger ofintensified heteronymous,

inclusive forms of art writinglike gossip, blogging, andpublicity. A further implication isthat, just as the corporate


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methods of the museum stressattendance numbers andfundraising goals, so inclusivemodes of art writing removebarriers to publication along withthe residual conscientiousness ofthe professional critic.

This brings me to the legacy ofinstitutional critique inasmuch asBuchloh is credited with its initialanalysis and Fraser is surely oneof its most articulatepractitioners. Indeed, Fraseroffers perhaps one usabledefinition of criticism: I definecriticism as an ethical practice of

self-reflective evaluation of theways in which we participate inthe reproduction of relations ofdomination, which include for methe exploitation of competenceand other forms of institutionalauthority. It is through self-

reflective evaluation thatinstitutional critique causesproblems for judgment sincecritique and reflective thoughtdemand questioning of theauthority of those who presentthemselves fit to judge. Takingthis definition into considerationleads Fraser to recommend asite-specific type of artcriticism that means notmisrecognising your readership

as the other of your discourse butas the actual people who areprobably going to be picking upthe magazine and lookingthrough its pages. Sven

Ltticken comes to a similarconclusion when he writes of thepossibility that the ideology ofart which sponsors Good Cop/

Bad Cop notions can also permitfragile alliances betweeninstitutions and individuals in theart world. This, to me, is a


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large part of the legacy ofinstitutional critique becauseLtticken and Fraser not onlyrecognize the importance ofcritique and contextualization butthey also display an abidinginvolvement in the institutions

they subject to critique. Suchinvestment has always markedthe strongest manifestations ofthe critique of institutionstheethically sound conviction thatHans Haacke held that his 1971real time social system,Shapolsky et al. Manhattan RealEstate Holdings, would be shown

at the Guggenheim Museumbecause officials wouldrecognize its public importance.In the end, of course, they didnot: Director Thomas Messerenacted and excited subsequentcritique by cancelling theexhibition, proving the limits oftolerance within the notionallyliberal establishment. In thisexample, the legacy ofinstitutional critique promptsjudgment of matters of exclusionand inclusion in cultural life andquestions those relations ofdomination we all participate inby venturing that the descriptionor re-description of institutionalconditions leads towards

attempts to fulfill repressed andlatent potentials otherwise notconsidered.

Having discussed the threefactors leads me to proposesome tentative conclusions:

1. If we move from regardingthe proliferation of styles toconsidering the proliferation of

objects or the proliferation ofaspects in the field ofcontemporary art, we realize thatthe actual difference is that weno longer judge works but assess


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or analyze projects or practices.Partly this is an effect of a shift inthe way artists produce work;artists no longer make works butprepare exhibitionsthey makeshows. Again, although one cantrace this back to the decline of

state and private commissionsand the ascendance of thecommercial gallery in the late-nineteenth century, the mostobvious example is the post-studio condition of the 1960swhen artists like Carl Andre orDan Flavin had component partsdelivered to the gallery and

assembled the show there. Onemight go further and, recallingthat a Flavin requires a certificateto distinguish it from directlystore-bought fluorescentfixtures, agree with Boris Groyswhen he argues that much ofwhat we approach ascontemporary art in galleries andmuseums is not art work but artdocumentation that depends onart being no longer present andimmediately visible but ratherabsent and hidden. This

means that we may personallyprefercertain examples but wecan no longer faithfully arguethat this video is better than thatphotograph on secure, pseudo-

connoisseurial grounds.2. The recently inflated market

is an aspect, maybe an extremelyvolatile aspect, of the relations ofdomination whereby art andculture are part of thedominated dominant portion ofsocial life. The feints and movesof all the agents in the field affect

judgment not by dominating it inthe literal sense of dictation, butby inciting all manner of playbetween autonomous and


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heteronomous positions anddispositions. This is not meant tobe comforting but it does offer,though critique and analysis, thepossibility of plotting the playersand comprehending their movesin relation to each other. Once we

cease judging by appeal to animpossible autonomy andrecognize the inevitability ofheteronomy, we see that it takesingenuity rather than faith tomanoeuvre in the field.

3. The legacy of institutionalcritique is best understood as anunrelenting ethical imperative, as

Fraser put it, speaking of her ownpractice, to perform theinseparability of freedom anddetermination; to perform thatcontradiction without distancingit in facile irony or collapsing it incynicism. With talk of

freedom and determination, wecan return back to the quotefrom Hegel and note somethinglatent in his writing which mightbe more explicit in mydescription of the replacement ofexclusive judgment with thejudgment of objects ofinterpretation and of aspects ofthe field of contemporary art.Namely, that art is not now inpursuit of its highest vocation but

the memory of that vocation andthe idealism it entails persists inrumours and fantasies that arthas become alive again undernew circumstances. Though theidea is tantalizing in many ways, Ihope we can also see that it istremendously unlikely to be so.

Documents

Notes on the Demise and Persistence of Judgment (William Wood)