Opinion

Artist's Notebook Opinion

Jennifer Bartlett’s demons 

Contributed by Patrick Neal / During the late 1980s and ‘90s, the painter Jennifer Bartlett produced four major series examining the classical elements of fire, air, earth, and water. The first three bodies of work, Fire Paintings, Air: 24 Hours, and Earth Paintings and Drawings, were exhibited at Paula Cooper’s Soho gallery, and Water, the last, at Gagosian in Los Angeles in 1997. In perusing images, it’s easy to find straightforward examples of fire, air, and water, but earth proves more elusive. What emerge instead are compositions of domestic scenes with strange people centered around homes, vacations, and holidays suggesting an underlying storyline. In Bartlett’s work, human presence is usually manifested through symbolic motifs or psychological traces, which makes the figures and narratives in the Earth paintings all the more intriguing. 

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Opinion

Who’s afraid of the big bad idiot?

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “The Art Critics Who Don’t Want Good Art,” Anna Gregor describes a cultural hospice. The caretakers are a set of bad actors. They’re online critics who have replaced the labor of criticism with the catharsis of complaint, trading in “likes and clicks” for a smooth, sugary candy that requires only passivity and attention from its audience while it rots their teeth. This feedback loop, she argues, drowns true engagement and criticism in a “deluge of mediocre art.” It is a compelling diagnosis, but one delivered from the one place a critic cannot afford to be: behind a veil. Gregor deals exclusively in archetypes and generalizations while allowing the reader to “fill in the picture.” The playboi, the intellectualist, the yelper, and so on. She’s built a perfect haunted house and populated it with ghosts of her own making. 

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Opinion

The Art Critics Who Don’t Want Better Art

Contributed by Anna Gregor / If yesteryear the call for negative art criticism rang clear and true, today complaints about the state of art blur into an inarticulate whine. Be they artist or critic, Marxist or capitalist, academic or anti-intellectual: everyone is dissatisfied. Or so it seems. Despite their complaints, however, one starts to suspect that few of the YouTubers, Substackers, or Instagrammers who presume the title of critic want the circumstances they complain about to change, so lacking are they in convincing diagnoses of present problems and convinced visions of alternatives, not to mention actual critical engagement with artworks.

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Opinion

Art’s political economy: A response to Dean Kissick

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / In “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” in the December issue of Harper’s, Dean Kissick presents a provocative critique, arguing that since the 1990s art’s politicized expressions of discomfort have diminished its quality and impact. As a remedy, he calls for artists to return to romantic ideals of beauty, strangeness, and emotion. He contends that artists should prioritize innovation and aesthetic rigor while focusing on universal human experience rather than political correctness. While his case is compelling on the surface, Kissick overlooks crucial historical and economic factors that have affected the art world. The shift in art’s focus is a result of not only political engagement but also a complex interplay of post-industrial social, economic, and cultural forces that emerged in the 1960s and have led to changes in how art is created, valued, and consumed.

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Opinion

What the hell is water? How Instagram hurts art

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / For the past eight years, I’ve been merrily swimming along in the waters of Instagram without once stopping to ask what it is. My first post was on December 10, 2016 – five weeks and four days after Trump won his first presidential election, when, like many people, I was devastated. I thought Instagram might bring me out of my post-election torpor. Rapidly scrolling through my feed, posting images (especially of art), seeing what my artist friends were posting, and discovering new art and artists initially felt

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Opinion

Summer rant: The wrong show

Dedicated to Dr. Ruth (1928–2024)

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I used my fattest Sharpie to excise the summer group show “Self-Pleasure” at Thomas Erben Gallery – a gallery I have long admired – from my list of what to see. Although the mere idea seems to have sprung straight from the The Onion, holding forth about an exhibition I’ve not seen, as I’m doing here, will strike some as inappropriate or even unethical. Several years ago, in fact, a prominent New York art magazine editor was duly criticized for reviewing a show he hadn’t seen. But I am not writing a review or describing the art in the show, which may or may not be good. I’m commenting on the show’s jejune premise.

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Opinion

Canceling abstract art in Santa Barbara

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / While there have always been easily discreditable philistines who dismiss abstract art as a fraud, many leaders in today’s art world marginalize it for other reasons. They see it as anachronistic, irrelevant, boring, or, most unforgivably of all, shackled to its white European origins. It’s not far-fetched to think that th

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Opinion

IMHO: Arts and Minds

In the October issue of The American Prospect, you can find my essay on the new State Department/ American Association of Museums collaboration. “The United […]

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