Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art. Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty. A goal of art criticism is the pursuit of a rational basis for art appreciation but it is questionable whether such criticism can transcend prevailing socio-political circumstances.Kaplan, Marty. "The curious case of criticism." Jewish Journal. 23 January 2014.
The variety of artistic movements has resulted in a division of art criticism into different disciplines which may each use different criteria for their judgements. The most common division in the field of criticism is between historical criticism and evaluation, a form of art history, and contemporary criticism of work by living artists.
Despite perceptions that art criticism is a much lower risk activity than making art, opinions of current art are always liable to drastic corrections with the passage of time. Critics of the past are often ridiculed for dismissing artists now venerated (like the early work of the Impressionists). Some art movements themselves were named disparagingly by critics, with the name later adopted as a sort of badge of honour by the artists of the style (e.g., Impressionism, Cubism), with the original negative meaning forgotten.Rewald, John (1973). The History of Impressionism (4th, Revised Ed.). New York: The Museum of Modern Art. p. 323
Artists have often had an uneasy relationship with their critics. Artists usually need positive opinions from critics for their work to be viewed and purchased; unfortunately for the artists, only later generations may understand it.
There are many different variables that determine judgment of art such as aesthetics, cognition or perception. Art is a human instinct with a diverse range of form and expression. Art can stand alone with an instantaneous judgment, or be viewed with a deeper knowledge. Aesthetic, pragmatic, expressive, formalist, relativist, processional, imitation, ritual, cognition, mimetic and postmodern theories, are some of many theories to criticize and appreciate art. Art criticism and appreciation can be subjective based on personal preference toward aesthetics and form, or it can be based on the elements and principle of design and by social and cultural acceptance.
Definition Art criticism has many and often numerous subjective viewpoints which are nearly as varied as there are people practising it. It is difficult to come by a more stable definition than the activity being related to the discussion and interpretation of art and its value. Depending on who is writing on the subject, "art criticism" itself may be obviated as a direct goal or it may include art history within its framework. Regardless of definitional problems, art criticism can refer to the history of the craft in its essays and art history itself may use critical methods implicitly. According to art historian R. Siva Kumar, "The borders between art history and art criticism... are no more as firmly drawn as they once used to be. It perhaps began with art historians taking interest in modern art."
Methodology Art criticism includes a descriptive aspect, where the work of art is sufficiently translated into words so as to allow a case to be made. The evaluation of a work of art that follows the description (or is interspersed with it) depends as much on the artist's output as on the experience of the critic. There is in an activity with such a marked subjective component a variety of ways in which it can be pursued. As extremes in a possible spectrum, while some favour simply remarking on the immediate impressions caused by an artistic object, others prefer a more systematic approach calling on technical knowledge, favoured aesthetic theory and the known sociocultural context the artist is immersed in to discern their intent.
History Critiques of art likely originated with the origins of art itself, as evidenced by texts found in the works of Plato, Vitruvius or Augustine of Hippo among others, that contain early forms of art criticism. Also, wealthy patrons have employed, at least since the start of Renaissance, intermediary art-evaluators to assist them in the procurement of commissions and/or finished pieces.
Origins
Art criticism as a genre of writing, obtained its modern form in the 18th century. The earliest use of the term art criticism was by the English painter Jonathan Richardson in his 1719 publication An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism. In this work, he attempted to create an objective system for the ranking of works of art. Seven categories, including drawing, composition, invention and colouring, were given a score from 0 to 18, which were combined to give a final score. The term he introduced quickly caught on, especially as the English middle class began to be more discerning in their art acquisitions, as symbols of their flaunted social status.
In France and England in the mid-1700s, public interest in art began to become widespread, and art was regularly exhibited at the Salons in Paris and the Summer Exhibitions of London. The first writers to acquire an individual reputation as art critics in 18th-century France were Jean-Baptiste Dubos with his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1718) which garnered the acclaim of Voltaire for the sagacity of his approach to aesthetic theory; and Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne with Reflexions sur quelques causes de l'état présent de la peinture en France who wrote about the Salon of 1746, commenting on the socioeconomic framework of the production of the then popular Baroque art style, which led to a perception of anti-monarchist sentiments in the text.
The 18th-century French writer Denis Diderot greatly advanced the medium of art criticism. Diderot's "The Salon of 1765" was one of the first real attempts to capture art in words. According to art historian Thomas E. Crow, "When Diderot took up art criticism it was on the heels of the first generation of professional writers who made it their business to offer descriptions and judgments of contemporary painting and sculpture. The demand for such commentary was a product of the similarly novel institution of regular, free, public exhibitions of the latest art".
Meanwhile, in England an exhibition of the Society of Arts in 1762 and later, in 1766, prompted a flurry of critical, though anonymous, pamphlets. Newspapers and periodicals of the period, such as the London Chronicle, began to carry columns for art criticism; a form that took off with the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768. In the 1770s, the Morning Chronicle became the first newspaper to systematically review the art featured at exhibitions.
19th century
From the 19th century onwards, art criticism became a more common vocation and even a profession, developing at times formalised methods based on particular aesthetic theories. In France, a rift emerged in the 1820s between the proponents of traditional neo-classical forms of art and the new romantic fashion. The Neoclassicists, under Étienne-Jean Delécluze defended the classical ideal and preferred carefully finished form in paintings. Romantics, such as Stendhal, criticized the old styles as overly formulaic and devoid of any feeling. Instead, they championed the new expressive, Idealistic, and emotional nuances of Romantic art. A similar, though more muted, debate also occurred in England.
One of the prominent critics in England at the time was William Hazlitt, a painter and essayist. He wrote about his deep pleasure in art and his belief that the arts could be used to improve mankind's generosity of spirit and knowledge of the world around it. He was one of a rising tide of English critics that began to grow uneasy with the increasingly abstract direction J. M. W. Turner's landscape art was moving in.
One of the great critics of the 19th century was John Ruskin. In 1843 he published Modern Painters, which repeated concepts from "Landscape and Portrait-Painting" in The Yankee (1829) by first American art critic John Neal in its distinction between "things seen by the artist" and "things as they are." Through painstaking analysis and attention to detail, Ruskin achieved what art historian E. H. Gombrich called "the most ambitious work of scientific art criticism ever attempted." Ruskin became renowned for his rich and flowing prose, and later in life he branched out to become an active and wide-ranging critic, publishing works on architecture and Renaissance art, including the Stones of Venice.
Another dominating figure in 19th-century art criticism, was the French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose first published work was his art review Salon of 1845, which attracted immediate attention for its boldness. Many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, including his championing of Eugène Delacroix. When Édouard Manet's famous Olympia (1865), a portrait of a nude courtesan, provoked a scandal for its blatant realism, Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend. He claimed that "criticism should be partial, impassioned, political— that is to say, formed from an exclusive point of view, but also from a point of view that opens up the greatest number of horizons". He tried to move the debate from the old binary positions of previous decades, declaring that "the true painter, will be he who can wring from contemporary life its epic aspect and make us see and understand, with colour or in drawing, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our polished boots".
In 1877, John Ruskin derided Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket after the artist, James McNeill Whistler, showed it at Grosvenor Gallery:Merrill, Linda, After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting. City: Publisher, 2003. p. 112 "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval, James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1994, p. 215 This criticism provoked Whistler into suing the critic for libel.Stuttaford, Genevieve. "Nonfiction – the Aesthetic Movement by Lionel Lambourne." Vol. 243. (1996).Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval, James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1994, p. 216 The ensuing court case proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for Whistler.Whistler, James Abbott McNeill. WebMuseumn, ParisPrideaux, Tom. The World of Whistler. New York: Time-Life Books, 1970. p. 123Peters, Lisa N. (1998). James McNeil Whistler. New Line Books. pp. 51–52 .
Turn of the twentieth century
Towards the end of the 19th century a movement towards abstraction, as opposed to specific content, began to gain ground in England, notably championed by the playwright Oscar Wilde. By the early twentieth century these attitudes formally coalesced into a coherent philosophy, through the work of Bloomsbury Group members Roger Fry and Clive Bell. As an art historian in the 1890s, Fry became intrigued with the new modernist art and its shift away from traditional depiction. His 1910 exhibition of what he called post-Impressionist art attracted much criticism for its iconoclasm. He vigorously defended himself in a lecture, in which he argued that art had moved to attempt to discover the language of pure imagination, rather than the staid and, to his mind, dishonest scientific capturing of landscape. Fry's argument proved to be very influential at the time, especially among the progressive elite. Virginia Woolf remarked that: "in or about December 1910 [the date Fry gave his lecture] human character changed."