A widely held prejudice in art is that interactivity in art is by-and-large a good thing. The implication here is that art that involves people is necessarily more desirable than art that doesn’t because it seeks to bridge the art-life divide. But this is perhaps a false assumption that's built on several myths. And has art criticism succumbed to the same myths? While art is meant to be user-friendly, art criticism is easy to digest and with nothing that will bring offense.

Performance Art and Participation

Suppose we choose to reflect on the difference between performance art when it arrived in the late 1960s and performance art today. In that case, it exists along a relatively clear line of demarcation when it became corralled into the institution in the late 1990s. With such a movement came a growing taxonomy and subdivision of terms, from 'live art' to 'participatory art' and 'relationality'.

With its institutionalisation also came its definition, and we know that once a term can be comfortably and consensually summarised, it has all but lost its transgressive gloss.

Performance art is just another art form, not just the purview of free-love hippies and antidisestablishmentarians. It is perhaps through this lens that we can also begin to identify the slow ebb in critical consciousness in art over the same period.

As art has become friendlier, so too has art criticism, such that it has all but becoming a series of studied appreciations. And it appears that a recent favourite is the obituary, which has become a critical genre unto itself; a homily to what has once been and will be no more. Ironically so since the obituary that has yet to be written is to art criticism itself.

Participatory art is the branch of performance art that enlists the viewers to interact and find their elective bodily relations with the art object. This is just a fancy way of saying that people can do stuff with the work of art.

Participation and Popularization

The popularization of this has less to do with artists, except if one counts the gullibility of artists to follow trends. For it essentially resides in the rationalization of society in the late 1980s. This occurs together with the global flourishing of the mass art biennale bonanza.

Art, delivered increasingly as spectacle, was also shouldered with the need to justify itself. Visitation numbers lend creditability, but also the kind of art that affords greater visitation numbers. By the '90s, accessible art had diversified well beyond references to popular culture into the realms of what laypeople could physically engage with.

The act of engagement with a work of art was dubious if only safely legitimate maneuver that safeguarded against audience alienation. If audience alienation has been one of the strategic mainstays of modernism—taking dialectical control over the aesthetic in order then to transform it into something that would be more authentic and ethically apposite to both art and society, thereby rendering it 'truly' accessible—then it was, with few exceptions jettisoned.

With the big push for participation, modernism's utopianism collapsed into a diluted and fraudulent form of utopia. The pregnant and potent narrative of communality was introduced by treating direct action as superior to concentration and reflection, states of mental interactivity.

In other words, standing before a work of art and reflecting on it deeply is now considered the inferior relation to getting your hands grubby with the work of art.

These are, of course, fundamental to the apprehension and experience of the art object (or event) but are of no interest to the forces of rationalization which weighs up value according to tangible relationships, among them for art the 'relationality', to use Nicolas Bourriaud’s now over-used word, of the art object. Here art is no longer a neutral zone but is subject to the behest and manipulations of the public.

Observer becomes user; the work of art is something to be acted upon.

There are two further reasons why participation is made attractive by institutions, both of which also shed light on the crisis of art criticism: one is the unstable criticality of the staged event, the other the issue of faith and law in art.

Drawn to the Beat. By Naomi Kendrick. Participedia.net

Art is an Event

As outlandish as the pairing of these points may first appear, they are arguably intimately connected, as I will be shown presently. The event: all art is an event, a special form of aesthetic, intellectual, and historical happening.

At best, a work of contemporary art restages the historical, reformulates it, or expresses it in a more poignant way to the present. As well as a grand cultural event, such as the outbreak of an insurrection, the riot that causes the end of a political regime and so on, an aesthetic event can be the proverbial contemplation of a sunset.

What makes the contemplation of a work of art more ‘evental’—relating to the event—than the latter is that it involves the viewer's reflective interaction with the artist's intention. This is not a literal intent but rather the intent of producing something different from ‘natural’ production. By contrast, Nature is without the same kind of intent.

In this regard, the experience of the work of art is like deciphering a puzzle for which you cannot find the answer but with the net effect is not of frustration. Still, pleasure is brought about by a harmonious (or delightfully dissonant) combination of thought and sense.

But with participatory art, this experience is violated in favour of the literal eventfulness precipitated by the viewer who effectively consummates the work of art. The 'virgin' work of art requires that it be altered in some way by a participant, where the alteration a such is part of the work.

Here the artist's intent becomes embroiled with the intention of the viewer-participant. But the purpose of the viewer-participant can never be on the same level as the artist who supplies the framework, the modus operandi. Nevertheless, if a work requires participation, then it becomes reducible to participation.

Thus, even if there are outcomes to the process, it is the eventual nature of participation that becomes the main element. The irreducibility of performance art to the commodity, which was its virtue in the protest era, has, with institutionalized performativity, transformed to irreducibility to itself. Priorities such visitation numbers and audience satisfaction underride this.

When the event in and for itself becomes the prime focus, it is pre-eminently attractive to curatorial priorities dominated by popularity over criticality—because it is self-referential. It is the event that matters. The outcomes always second, yet there is still the bogus whiff of yesteryear: performativity imparts the artistic flavour, like the sprinkling of a freeze-dried spice, of transgression.

The transgression exists in a very distant echo. Therefore the critical summary of the work need only be in historicized terms, according to a certain terminology and set of references whose real glory lies in the past.

The issue of law and faith in participatory art is less self-evident but perhaps more disturbing. In any civilization in which what we now call art was intertwined with the laws of religious belief, its spectators granted it a respectful distance. This applies to Greek drama as it does to medieval devotional altarpieces and the frescoes of the Renaissance.

Participation and Museums

A key watershed in the relationship between the art object and the viewer comes with the birth of the public museum at the end of the eighteenth century, where the art object is venerated as a cultural artifact whose cultural value becomes confounded with its value as a commodity as it enters the status as (quantifiable) public property.

Design for the Grand Gallery in the Louvre. By Hubert Robert. 1796. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The public museum was the first phase in the democratization of art, and its climax arrives with interactive and participatory art.

As I have already suggested, this is more due to an institutional mandate; artists mainly follow. But its seamless positioning into the academy is simply a decoy for how institutionalized and undemocratic art has become. The primacy given to viewer contact is also a symptom of the uncritical turn in both art and art criticism.

To undermine the unwritten law that creates the schism between artist and viewer is much like the postmodern new-age parent who wants to discuss instead of telling his or her children, or repositions injunctions as questions (‘don’t do that, ok?’).

Participation and the Demise of the Critical Stance

To pretend that there is no line of demarcation between viewer and art object runs in close parallel to the contemporary collapse of critical criteria, the critic who assumes moral authority is treated with the same contempt as the new age postmodern parent treats the parent who wishes to instil in his or her child old-fashioned manners.

But it is much easier to justify one's actions as a private citizen, far harder as a spokesman—it is a question that was already asked at the end of the twentieth century by philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, who saw the demise of the public intellectual.

In the wake of the (arguable) failure of the May 1968 revolution, and the splintering of ideological factions, intellectuals increasingly began to ask the question, 'for whom does one speak?'. In this sense, Lyotard's question of 'que peindre?’, ‘what to paint?’ works together with the more universalist question of ‘what to say? And for whom?’.[1] This is a subject I will return to later.

For with Pop and post-pop, from Warhol to Koons and beyond, one can still command a skeptically humanist position, should one choose to do so, as the New York critic Jed Perl did in his eloquent lambasting of Koons’ retrospective at the Whitney Museum.[2]

But with participatory art, the erosion of criticality is far more covert, and insidious, since the viewer, entering the artwork clad in the rhetoric of invitation and inclusion, becomes complicit in the work and thereby compromises—similar to ‘conflict of interest’ in professional judgment—the capacity for evaluation, that is, if there is something residually forthcoming outside the self-referentiality and ineffability of the event itself.

In effect, with participatory art, the viewer’s position as an objective observer outside the work is thrown away in favour of the work of art 'building in' the viewer, a strategy that has been a trusted marketing tool for a long time.

It is at this point that the participatory melds with contemporary Pop. As Perl presciently observes concerning Koons:

There is not a shred of doubt in Jeff Koons. And where there is no doubt, there is no art. Those who care to understand Duchamp's impact on contemporary art must look elsewhere—perhaps to the enigmas and paradoxes of Robert Gober and Vija Celmins, two artists who keep some of Duchamp’s quixotic elegance and eloquence alive. But Gober and Celmins are artists’ artists. That is what Marcel Duchamp and the rest of the Dadaists were, at least for most of their careers. Koons is a publicist’s artist.[3]

As Koons demonstrated, the sure-fire things are what the contemporary art world most celebrate and reward. The obverse is perhaps what looks and feels like Contemporary Art, such and Mark Leckey, who had his first major retrospective at the centre for contemporary art, Wils in Brussels at the end of 2014.

An elaborate and arbitrary pastiche of Steinbach and Nauman and much more besides, Leckey’s work is so cryptic and so playing at being clever that it meets back to the same place: exhausted and bewildered, one is left ‘sure’ that this ‘Contemporary Art’ and nothing else.

The Precariousness of Art Criticism

The purpose here is to situate the precariousness of art criticism not only in terms of art's hyper-commercialization but also in medias res with contemporary art itself. For both art and criticism have, at least at the institutional level, unbearably friendly, of a piece with the unbearably morbid ‘have-a-nice-day’ ethos of American consumerism prophesied in Evelyn Waugh’s satire The Loved One.

Art criticism's purported objective distance is a necessary illusion, much as the psychic phantasy of human autonomy. However, it is needed to gather arguments for other possibilities for the work of art. But critical differencing can only be carried out with art that seeks to do the same.

Criticism is left marooned—conceptually, ethically, and verbally—with art that is either an activity (participation, interactivity, etc.), a sure-fire shot (Popish work and punchline art), or whose ambiguity is so intense that boredom takes over from wonder (contemporary art that plays at being ‘Contemporary Art’).

For with such art, the critic is placed in the position either to dissent or to describe and repeat in words what the work of art does. Description is an inevitable necessity within art criticism, but best within the motor of why something is good, bad, or indifferent. But criticism is easy when there is no compulsion to commit and when read by an audience who treat criticism as curmudgeonly.

Dissenting has become increasingly problematic as it presumes a hypothetical alternative. If that the case, this is discouraged by contemporary art institutions—governed by sponsors whose sole wish is to see large numbers who then bear witness to their sponsorship—who drive content that is marketable, plausible, and eminently digestible.

But this is a determinable endpoint, the collapse into verbal noise, the beginnings of which were already in evidence in the 1980s, notably in Robert Hughes's campaign against Julian Schnabel.

Hughes, a highly respected if conservative critic writing in TIME magazine, was scathing of Schnabel's work, but this did nothing to dent the artist's success; if anything, it contributed to his rise and lasting success. In this respect, Hughes’s diatribes were precursors of online trolling, of negative ‘bites’ and ‘hits’ today: what matters is not how you are noticed, only that you are noticed.

While it is something of a given that the most damning condemnation is to be ignored, art criticism is at stake is how critical debate is the baby thrown away with the bathwater.

Who do You Speak for?

To return to the question of 'for whom one speaks' is complicated by the onset of globalization and so-called global art.

On a domestic level, since the 1980s, Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and commentators have struggled with the entitlements of art criticism: cultural difference and the secret/sacred nature of traditional art meant that it could, possibly, bask comfortably in a critical vacuum, insulated from the critics who didn't know what they were talking about, and certainly has no right to comment on a race that their race had spent years in subjugating and oppressing.

But significant figures in Australia such as Djon Mundine have laboured to readdress this balance, lending credence to the commonsense argument that to want to participate on the international stage is also subject to the same criticisms.

Predictably, however, Aboriginal art, both traditional and urban, remains one of the darlings of the international stage, where its 'primitive' status is affirmatively greeted by curators who see this as relieving them of the need to comment in any engaging way, free from too heavy intellectual activity, lest they offend.

Global Shifts

On a global level, the supposed shift from the Euro-American frame of reference means that the critic’s zone of authority, from the point of view of language, tradition, and cultural inheritance, is also precarious.

The word 'supposed' is used advisedly, for it appears that while there has been much comment by art historians, critics, and curators of this shift, the main centres of art, New York and London, remains as such. It would appear that this shift, whatever form it may take, and its indeterminate nature, is indeed very convenient for these centres as it allows a softening of standards of measure.

It is a cultural relativism that defies any unity or consensus other than that of taste and whim, two instincts that have always been congenial to art when it shies away from challenging ideas.

This condition is yet more acute in the case of indigenous artists, whose postcolonial legacy is mire in guilt: the culture of political correctness means that international curators shy from any form of criticism, comforted with the revisionist narrative that they are in no position to enter into discussion with cultures not their own.

Thus, curators and critics are effectively given a superficially creditable theoretical buttress for not making any commentary at all. By in large, in the postcolonial shadow, all one is left to do is to ‘accept’, for to enter into criticism is, it would seem, to enter into hazardous speculation.

The Four Strands of Art Exhibition

Another component in the lowering standards of art criticism, or the lack of courage, is the culture of encouragement. This is part of the same family of values as participatory art insofar as it pretends to partake in an easily understandable notion of community. In the contemporary art world, the exhibition of art has splintered into four identifiable strands.

The first is the artist-run-initiative, which are low or not-for-profit, mostly ad hoc and driven according to the agenda of those responsible for its maintenance/ The second is the Kunsthalle: these are venues for the insertion or hosting of contemporary art which may vary in size, and are funded by the state and perhaps donours and sponsors. The third is the commercial gallery.

The fourth is a large art festival from the Biennales to Art Basel. Biennales appear to operate according to curatorial disinterest, but its adventurousness must ultimately be tempered so as not to offend those who fund them.[4]

The latter are notoriously tricky to critique simply for the fact that they are almost invariably a massive pluralist hodge-podge flimsily stapled together with a theme that could be taken to mean almost anything.

The Insulation of Commercial Galleries

Several variables insulate exhibitions in commercial galleries; one is that a magazine will not run a nasty review based on a show from a gallery that purchases lucrative advertising space; it is also customary to sponsor critics on certain junkets.

These occur under a disingenuous appearance of full disclosure—where the magazine or newspaper declares that he or she was sent to a particular venue under specific auspices—however, it is a form of passing benefaction that acts as a guarantee that the critic will not be begrudging of anything associated with the gallery. There is an implicit loyalty purchased by supposed largesse.

Owners of rich and powerful galleries also make it their business to maintain ties to upper-level media people and politicians. They therefore can ultimately be an invisible hand in the fate of the lowly art critic, mainly working from article to article and without any formal long-term contract.

When it comes to contemporary art spaces and Kunsthalles—be it Mücsarnok in Budapest to PS1 in New York to Artspace in Sydney—the artists they exhibit are either associated with official dealers—so as to apply the criterion made above—or they are non-commercial and 'experimental' such that they are either of very little interest to the broader public or because non-commercial are presumably doing art for all the right reasons and worthy of encouragement.

This too applies to the (in comparison) lowly artist-run-initiatives who are commercial so small fry and proportionately so marginal that to hit at a soft target or to engage in a specialist debate arcane to the lay-reader and liable to earn the writer still more enemies in an already shrinking pool of colleagues.

Rounding all this off, the cherry on the cake, if you will, is the culture of craven editors who join hands with craven curators. A few years back, I was accused of making a ‘cheap shot’ about the choice of artists in Australian Biennales (according to type and taste over any real idea: Simryn Gill being the right choice after the machismo of Shaun Gladwell, etc.) by an editor who refused to print part of an article that eventually appeared in another publication.

The End of Courage, the End of Philosophy

With the end of courage also comes the end of philosophy. This essay's regnant leitmotif has been the various reasons by which art can continue kicking with few or just weak ideas, leaving art criticism to be a kind of service industry of the redundancies of description over reflection and provocation.

In a relatively recent essay entitled ‘Neo-Modern’, the New York critic David Geers proposes that there has been a turn to modernist styles by artists in recent years, but in a way that forgoes commentary self-reflexiveness, or contextualization. Geers explains that in

a perfect storm of timing and influence, this embrace of modernist styles is a convergence of several developments. In equal parts, it is generational fatigue with theory, a growing split between hand-made production and social practice; a  legitimate and thrifty attempt to ‘keep it real’ in the ever-expansive image culture and the slick ‘commodity art’ of Koons, Murakami, and others. But it also represents a nostalgic retrenchment on the part of an art world threatened by technological transformation and economic uncertainty that now undermine its hierarchies and claims of cultural precedence.[5]

The current new generation of artists is returning to tried and tested styles unencumbered by any conscience.

Where not so long ago, artists working with non-objective abstraction would have at least paid lip service to 'post-painting' and its litany of wobbly and puzzling definitions, the present order of artists proceed without looking sideways or back, the equivalent of born-again-Christians whose contentment with life comes from it being ruled by unquestioned irrational certainties.

To go blindly forth is the best way, or one way, of combating the age of uncertainty, as it is simply to deny it with, artistically speaking, with forms that are all too familiar and which have been absorbed into every level of culture, from furniture to wallpaper.

Art Criticism: Painted into a Corner

Art criticism is painted into a corner since it can do nothing else but rehearse the same discourses and is actively encouraged to do so. To venture into critical debate is not only to give voice to what no-one wishes to hear, but which the majority would ignore. Art criticism, which is destitute of philosophical values, is emasculated further by artists who eschew them altogether.

This is compounded by the reluctance of editors cowed by a meddling board and driven by subscription rates.

At about the same time as Geers' article's appearance, one of the US's pre-eminent art critics, Dave Hickey, announced his departure from the art world. As The Guardian reported, Hickey ‘launched a fierce attack on the contemporary art world, saying anyone who has “read a Batman comic” would qualify for a career in the industry’.[6]

This would not be so funny if it weren’t so true. To take enjoyment in challenging art criticism is rarer than the rampant hedonism of the art world, which is the mild compensation for a loss of nerve, and an ‘industry’ caught up in its own self-congratulation.

References:

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, Que peindre? What to paint? Trans. Herman Parret, Leuven: Leuven U.P. 2013. See also Lyotard, Tombeau de l’intellectuel, et autres papiers, Paris: Galilée, 1984.

[2] Jed Perl, ‘The Cult of Jeff Koons’, The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/sep/25/cult-jeff-koons/ Accessed 21/12/14

[3] Ibid.

[4] This is dealt with in more detail in my previous article, ‘Drained and Confused: Insistent Voices on “The Contemporary”’, Contemporary Art+Culture Broadsheet, 43.4, 6-11.

[5] David Geers, ‘Neo-Modern’, October 137, Winter 2012, 9.

[6] Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher, The Guardian, 28 October, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/28/art-critic-dave-hickey-quits-art-world

Has Art Become Too User-Friendly and Art Criticism Too Nice?