The contemporary art critic is a masochistic Wunderkammer-shaman. Positioned somewhere between the untranslatable and the uninterested, the art and its public, this self-elected inhabitant of the fringe goes where nobody wants to go anymore. With the possible exception of the artist who, by his instinct for survival, became an invader of even the most uninviting spaces.
The writer on art claims that to look at the whole you need to step outside. You need to objectify the viewing relationship and create freedom and space for reflection. Quite a safe, well thought through position, apart from the fact that it’s nonsense. Outside personal likes and dislikes there is nothing. To deny this is conceptual suicide.
Reading the visual is an internal affair. But too often the art critic uses art to deny himself and hide what shouldn’t be hidden. The critic has been suspended in an embryonic state for to long, lulled into auto-submission by the fact that in writing about artists he sometimes feels like one. The time has come to crawl from the egg and realize he could be one.
The critic must become a poet. Only this ridiculous and narcistic move might present a chance at change. Art criticism needs to take a risk, or destruct itself in trying. To be a good art critic, don’t just express yourself, expose yourself. When it comes to suffering, especially the silent kind, the critic knows a thing or two. Now is the time to take it to the next level.
Until then, artists being of a more cunning disposition, will increasingly infiltrate the structure of art criticism, exploit its weaknesses, ridicule the lingo and play God with greater cynical detachment and sense for decorum.
If the art writer is not willing to sacrifice his safe but impotent position, the secondary text for which legions of his fellow sufferers have slaved in the past, will disappear. The critic, living on the all too symbolic edge, could easily be pushed of. And that would be a sad end. Nothing is worse then letting someone else do the failing for you.
Arne Hendriks
