Current Art Market, Criticisms

Lisa Hunter, over at The Intrepid Art Collector, a while back had this post called Star Power:

... who determines whether art is good. Today, the market itself tends to make stars, giving top dealers and collectors (like Charles Saatchi) the role once reserved for curators and critics.

A museum director confided to me that the market has "pushed museums to the side as arbiters of taste." Nowadays, the public already has an opinion about which new artists are "important" before a museum exhibit can be organized. Only a few museums, like the Whitney, even dare try. It's a fool's errand: If they show artists who aren't the annointed stars, people think the curators are out of touch. If they show the reigning favorites, everyone snipes that the curators are in the pocket of the dealers.

A generation ago, high-brow critics like Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg wrote intelligent criticism that anyone could understand with a bit of effort. They provided a framework for asking questions, so a viewer could learn to evaluate art for himself. Today's scholarly criticism is often obtuse, theoretical, and unhelpful. (I was looking at an art history graduate program recently, and the Art History Department could have changed its name to the Michel Foucault Department without having to alter a single course description.) Newspaper critics may be excellent --especially Jerry Saltz and Tyler Green -- but reviews are case-by-case and don't provide an overall framework, so insecure collectors rely on a thumbs up/thumbs down for each individual show.

Or they rely on dealers, which takes us back to the market creating the stars.

Is there a better way? How should novices learn about contemporary art? Do we leave them, sink-or-swim, to figure it all out for themselves? Or is the art world failing them and, ultimately, itself?
Our previous discussion raised interesting questions about who determines whether art is good. Today, the market itself tends to make stars, giving top dealers and collectors (like Charles Saatchi) the role once reserved for curators and critics.

A museum director confided to me that the market has "pushed museums to the side as arbiters of taste." Nowadays, the public already has an opinion about which new artists are "important" before a museum exhibit can be organized. Only a few museums, like the Whitney, even dare try. It's a fool's errand: If they show artists who aren't the annointed stars, people think the curators are out of touch. If they show the reigning favorites, everyone snipes that the curators are in the pocket of the dealers.

A generation ago, high-brow critics like Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg wrote intelligent criticism that anyone could understand with a bit of effort. They provided a framework for asking questions, so a viewer could learn to evaluate art for himself. Today's scholarly criticism is often obtuse, theoretical, and unhelpful.
(I was looking at an art history graduate program recently, and the Art History Department could have changed its name to the Michel Foucault Department without having to alter a single course description.) Newspaper critics may be excellent --especially Jerry Saltz and Tyler Green -- but reviews are case-by-case and don't provide an overall framework, so insecure collectors rely on a thumbs up/thumbs down for each individual show.

Or they rely on dealers, which takes us back to the market creating the stars.

Is there a better way? How should novices learn about contemporary art? Do we leave them, sink-or-swim, to figure it all out for themselves? Or is the art world failing them and, ultimately, itself?

I like her overall thesis, about the failure of art criticism. If this is true-that the critical career is lacking in potency, then there is a vacuum for advice about art based on a theoretical structure. This set of values, or art critical theory, has been a service to art patronage who look for some sort of rational basis for which art should be considered good, and which should not.

I think, though, that one would have to effectively indict "the market" in order to fully prove this thesis. The free (art) market does respond to the forces of shared "taste". What is wrong with that? Doesn't the art critic serve a master, too? The university, or some periodical or news media, together with it's readership and advertisers, are the constituents of the professional art critic. You'll notice that I didn't say: "artists" there. Where do they fit in? I would say that the artist's interaction with his buying market should be valued as a viable critique of art. There are filters there, too.

What do you think?