Clichés Reach Critical Mass, Take Writers Down Slippery Slope

Blake Gopnik

Staff Art Critic/ Newsweek Magazine and The Daily Beast

It’s not news that there’s a crisis in art criticism, at least in the mass media. Full time critics are being shed from magazine after magazine, newspaper after newspaper. There may not be more than a dozen staff critics left across the United States. This isn’t just a crisis for those of us who’ve lost our jobs, or think we soon may. If art matters – as our culture still seems to think it does, given museum attendance and expansions – then the fate of popular criticism does as well, since most non-specialists have no other source of substantial talk about art.

But there’s one aspect of the crisis that’s not much commented on: We popular critics may deserve our fate. We’ve set ourselves such modest goals that the public doesn’t care if we achieve them – or disappear. As publishing budgets get tight, we have allowed ourselves to become a frill that can be cut without anyone complaining, or maybe even noticing.

We can get to the source of this disregard by looking at quotes from art reviews by three major critics[1]:

– “You miss the physical sensuousness of French painting. Sometimes you wish the Victorians had given freer rein to their brushwork and expressive impulses,” writes a reviewer of a show of late 19th-century British art.

– “Five giant color photos of old mattresses … sullied with spreading stains of bodily fluids …. are genuinely beautiful pictures …. [The artist] plays aesthetic midwife, giving a new life of beauty to possessions otherwise too deeply caught up in the bump-and-grind of living to get much attention,” writes another, reviewing a contemporary artist named Carolyn White.

– “Freud’s brush may nuzzle into the hollow of a hip or cradle the exact weight of a sagging breast … the action symbolically unites hand, eye, mind and sexual feeling .… Freud is less a painter than ‘the Painter,’ performing the rites of his medium in the sacristy of his studio … Standing close to [his paintings], sometime I have the odd sense of passing through a looking glass – or is it a time machine? – from the art world that I know into one marked by lusher, smokier satisfaction” – a passage, obviously, from a review of a Lucien Freud show.

As I hope is clear from these examples, the problem we are facing is an addiction to cliché. It is an addiction to notions, for instance, that Gallic painting is naturally free and brushy and full of some mythic thing called “expressive impulses” (despite all the licked, inexpressive surfaces that dominated the Paris salons) while Anglo-Saxon painting, like a Limey’s upper lip, is stiff and emotion-free (despite Constable’s skies and Turner’s storms at sea). It is an addiction to notions that an artist’s job is to show us the beauty in the abject everyday (as critics have been saying at least since Rembrandt). And it’s an addiction to notions that painting is a Dionysian rite – “lush and smoky” – with the artist as its priest, oil paint as its sacrament and the transubstantiation of paint into flesh as its greatest miracle. Again and again, mass-media art writers fall back on such hackneyed formulas for explaining what art is, what it does, and what might make it good or bad. What we rarely do is try to forge new, transformative accounts of the art we write about. Not only has there come to be a dearth of truly significant art criticism, but that doesn’t even seem to be set as a goal.

In recent decades, popular art criticism has bought into what I think of as the “wall text” fallacy: That there are certain basic, “natural” things you’d want to say about any given work of art, and that once you’ve fed your reader those, you’ve done most of your job. The standard defense of critical cliché is that our average readers are so ignorant about art that just giving them some standard information and conventional interpretations still leaves them ahead of where they started out. But I believe that if that’s all you’ve done, you’ve in fact done almost nothing. Uttering clichés – saying the already-said – is in fact the equivalent of keeping silent, because clichés are not true communication. They pretend to narrate a real encounter with the world (in this case with art) but in fact they are just a rehash of other encounters that already took place. Or they’re barely even that, very often: At their worst, they merely rehash the forms of words used to describe past encounters. A paragraph or whole review goes down easy for the reader, and is easier to write, when we’ve heard what it has to say, and written what it pretends to think, a hundred times before. It doesn’t have to carry thoughts that make a reader do the hard work of understanding; it simply gives them words to digest. Clichés, you could say, are criticism’s carbon monoxide: they replace real thought the way carbon monoxide replaces the oxygen in our blood, quickly leading to brain death.

The repetition of received ideas seem to me especially pernicious when it comes to art because it can actually limit what gets seen when we look at a picture. The great thing about any art that’s halfway decent is that there’s so much information in it that there’s always something new to see – so long as there’s a reason for looking. Clichés, however, can easily point readers to the same information again and again: Monet becomes the original Painter of Light, to the exclusion of anything else he might have been up to. Art-critical clichés keep you attending the same way every time you encounter a work.

Clichés may reduce the real complexity of any good work of art to a few pat, received ideas about it, but that’s only part of their failing. They also get the nature of artistic excellence wrong. They imply that a work of art is valuable for the specific messages it sends, or the impacts it reliably has. A Rembrandt portrait of an old woman, for instance, is supposed to be admired for what it says about the so-called “human condition” and for the empathy it calls up in us. On this account, the work is just an instrument for putting certain fixed thoughts into our minds or reliably triggering the same set of sensations and emotions in our brains. The work of art becomes the paper a telegraph is printed on, useful only for the stable information it carries. Whereas I prefer a much more active model where the work gets value from the process of decipherment it launches – it’s a model where the virtue of art lies in a drawn-out process it sets off, in which we struggle to come to grips with its meanings. The moment when we settle on a single meaning and move on is closer to a moment of failure, of giving up, than to a moment of success and completion. This account, at least, rings most true to my own best moments of looking at art, where page after page of my notebook fills up with ideas and interpretations that hadn’t come to mind before, and that may even be mutually exclusive. The most notable thing about great artists such as Titian or Cézanne is that their works seem to exceed even the most brilliant single readings that have been attached to them. And if even the finest readings can never seem quite final, then they can never boil down to cliché, since they always beg to be completed or even replaced. At least some great works of art, that is, have built into them a kind of internal polemic against received ideas, by letting us know how inadequate every reading of them is.

I like to think of art objects as machines for thinking, rather than as transmitters of finished thoughts. Criticism’s most basic duty may be to communicate that larger notion, rather than to transmit single readings of single works. In other words, a good review, or a good critic’s career, ought to model art’s conceptual fertility. It ought to convey the generative ability of art in general, rather than the specific fruits of any one work of art. A good piece of critical writing needs to communicate the critic’s search (even his failure) as much as what’s come out of the searching. And if that’s right, it’s yet another argument against critical clichés, since they imply a fixed store of stable thoughts that need to be transmitted about art, and retransmitted time after time. Clichés cannot talk about art’s vastly productive flux because they don’t believe in it.

When works of art are reduced to their clichés, there’s a sense that they become surplus goods. Who needs the artifact itself, if its virtues can be encapsulated in a set of fixed ideas? Just putting an object into a museum and declaring it to be art denies it any kind of normal function. That object is of even less use once it can be replaced by a wall text or by a few standard reactions and ideas we already know that it is supposed to trigger. If you’ve absorbed the fact (or cliché) that Monet’s art is all about optical play and its capture by a speedy brush, there isn’t much reason for attending yet again to the pictures that prove and re-prove that dimension. Novel readings, on the other hand, can reanimate a work as something worth re-attending to, since it turns out to be entirely un-exhausted by the established takes on it. Even if one new interpretation is rejected as wrong or implausible or unhelpful, it invites an audience to replace it with a new one that is a better fit. That is, it suggests that works of art demand and repay active reading, rather than a passive acceptance of what’s already known and written about them. New interpretations, and the act of interpreting they advertise, give us new reasons for attending to actual works. That’s as great a service to art and its audience as there ever could be.

Now it’s important that “attending to actual works” not boil down to the ur-cliché of art criticism – to the notion that a critic can simply look very hard, with an aesthete’s eagle-sharp eyes, and winkle out the truth about a piece. “Understanding is not the way we get the world. It’s through experience,” said one senior critic a few years ago, but that probably gets “getting” wrong. Even babies, psychologists tell us, build their world-view by making mental arguments about the nature of reality and then testing them to see if they work. There is no transparent experience to which they have direct access without conducting those thought experiments. Critics can’t do any better. The critic isn’t just a tuning fork that vibrates in brilliant sympathy with certain works, allowing him to arrive at their essences. That model, it seems to me, turns the critic into a guaranteed cliché-generator, since the vibration is almost certain to happen according to accepted ideas of what those essences are. (The very idea of “directly accessible essences” may invoke the kinds of stable readings that I see as indistinguishable from clichés.) Accounts that pretend to be “just” responding to the picture itself seem most prone to cliché and least able to generate new ideas about it. “What stuck in the viewer's mind were [the painter’s] … mappings of the troublesome weather-systems that cross an uncertain artist's soul as he works alone, towards an unknown future, in his studio,” wrote one senior critic, apparently “responding” directly to a picture, but in the process piling up clichés about the troubled, soulful artist as existentialist hero.

Even a writer as great as John Updike seems to fall into cliché when he’s “just describing” what he sees in Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning: “The dawn … arrives stealthily, while the windows still sleep, and we think of the inhabitants behind those curtains, dreaming or groggily stirring as the day, like an ambitious merchant, is already setting up shop.” It’s not the writing or the metaphor itself that strikes me as notably weak, here. It’s the hackneyed structure of the argument, whereby the picture is billed as a trigger for a kind of imaginary divagation through its scene.

No critical discussion of art is a direct, unmediated, “natural” account of an object or our reactions to it. If you study the historiography of art, there was always a first moment when someone suggested attending to art in one particular way. All accounts of art (quite possibly like all accounts of the world) are built around a constructed argument about what features and reactions matter, and in what ways. The question, then, is whether critics want to use someone else’s received constructions or take the risk of building something of their own. “One is, after all, always at fault,” says the theorist Irit Rogoff, “since every year we become aware of a new and hitherto unrealized perspective.”[2]

In science, the fact that cannonballs and apples fall at the same speed stays true and important over many centuries. Whereas in art criticism, the moment that a claim starts to seem patently true – that it gels into cliché – is just the moment when we may want to abandon it as limiting our field of view. When Leonardo da Vinci argues for the notion that important art should be as realistic as possible in about 1500, it’s a productive model for both artists and audiences. And now of course it is one of the rare claims that is such an obvious cliché that almost no one dares advance it. (I look forward to the day when notions of “self-expression” suffer a similar fate.) Clement Greenberg’s claim, in the 1950s, that an art work must address the “natural” values of its medium – flatness for painting, space for sculpture, narrative for the novel – was equally productive and is now equally hackneyed and untenable. That, I believe, is the good and proper fate of almost every significant claim about art: It starts as insight, degenerates into cliché and eventually passes away. The last thing we ought to want is for it to keep passing as timelessly true, and to keep being repeated in reviews and wall texts.

It ought to seem strange that an activity like artmaking, that seems to have at its heart a commitment to rethinking stale forms and ideas, should so often be approached using stale critical forms and ideas. If nothing else, you’d think art criticism would be inspired to be inventive by the inventive objects and creators it covers.