So, this morning, I had a little bit of antsy feeling and needed to shake things up a little bit. So, while I was applying myself to the process of improving my social media presence on the interwobble, I came across a nifty little discussion called #ArtHour. This was hosted by the Art Gallery of Ontario on twitter.
The first question reminded me of a discussion which was held here in NYC at ThisRedDoor, last fall. Although my write up of that discussion left the criticism angle out. But there was some serious exploration then and today of what the purpose of a critic is in the Art World. Today, we also covered the purposes of social media and how that affects criticism. Which, I of course, believe that the easy availability of publishing tools offered by the web gives anyone with the inclination to become a critic a viable path to start.
I would argue that a critic can serve a purpose to provide a touchstone opinion, one that is informed by spending a great deal of time looking at, experiencing and thinking about art, to those people who are interested in art yet don’t have the time to invest in becoming more knowledgeable. A critic can identify similarities and differences between artists, or thematic evolutions of an artist over time. This is because of their investment of time and organized energies acquiring that information and analysis.
I believe it would be a mistake of mythic proportions to allow a critic to be perceived as a tastemaker. This could be catastrophic for a local, regional or international artmarket; depending upon the size of the critic’s ego and audience, as talented and challenging new artists go ignored,under reported or publicly humiliated because their work, the result of their processes, does not match that super critic’s tastes.
Perhaps it is the rise of social media which solves this problem. It disperses the formalized response to a work of art to becoming the responsibility of many more people. There was a great deal of emphasis in today’s discussion on the necessity of viewers and readers of critics to exercise their own critical thinking process and critique the critics. This, I believe, becomes much more possible as the result of social media’s explosion.
Where’s the sink?
I’ve been playing the social media game for quite a few years. Mostly as an additional means of communicating with open source developers while I was in university. But in the past year, I have been paying some attention to a little site called Klout. It supposedly measures your influence across the social media spectrum; or at least along the accounts which you plug into it. I’ve put some accounts in, taken them out, switched my focus, changed my practices and tried other such experiments in order to see if I can find any correlation between actions and the production of the Klout score which is assigned to these actions. As you can see from the graph on the left, my activity in the past five days has resulted in a significant change in direction.
What the hell does a tangent about some social media influence score have to do with art criticism? Everything. There are a number of detractors of the Klout score but it does serve the purpose of assigning some arbitrary value to a Social Mediazen’s influence on the information economy. This is the same as being criticized. Someone works themselves into the position of some authority about art an declares that this is good or bad or progressive or whatever they say it is. Then everyone can offer their criticism of the criticism, if they are so inclined. They can also just accept that critic’s word as the standard and only go to shows that the critic says are worth seeing, only buying the works that the critic says are worth buying and thus subverting their own emotional connections with the works.
An important thing here that needs to be mentioned, is the necessity of having multiple active critical voices in a market. This will serve only to strengthen the discussion of art by providing more perspectives and more channels for the discussion to grow around. It will keep artists of differing manner of work, results from vastly different processes, covering myriads of themes and working at differing evolutionary paces under the big umbrella of Art. For good criticism; not necessarily criticism which is a positive review for the Artist; offers the Artist new avenues to explore and grow. Poor criticism on the other hand, only shuts down the artist, the viewer or both.
A final note. I would be personally aghast if a big time critic showed up at my Open Studio/Birthday Party and used their full platform to rebuke my work. I would also be beside myself with joy if my work were well received in that article. But mostly I would be a bit ashamed for that is not the intention of the Open Studio, to be fully thrust onto the main stage when my art is just beginning to emerge. However, if a Big Name Critic did show up, express some interest, ask some questions and carry on a conversation with me about what I am doing in my studio, that, that would be a good moment. Even if they did not like my work, they would at least be able to tell me why in terms that would not be offensive because no matter how many times you hear it, “My five year could have painted that” is not criticism, it is an insult.
