Criticism in Crisis!! Part 2

It's not in crisis. Anyway this is about making art and writing criticism at the same time.

First

Typing the word crisis in any post that isn’t about e.g. nuclear armament or ICE makes me grimace. If you are reading this, read this too.

Okay

Hello and welcome to PART TWO of this series, in which I reverse-engineer my own writing to REVEAL my beliefs and assumptions about CRITICISM. It is a back-to-elementals exercise to find out where my ideas came from and whether they hold up.

Recently I’ve read several useful conversations about criticism and its functions, plus there are many types of critical writing proliferating on Substack, as well as new magazines entirely dedicated to reforming or reinvigorating criticism (agenda pls?!), all of which made me want to assess what I take for granted.

A lot of the current discourse is based on the idea that there is a Crisis Afoot. There are some things that make criticism in this era unique(ly fucked), but many aspects of publishing have always been in “crisis,” making this not a crisis but an intrinsic condition that we rely on to stay hyped. My conclusion from PART ONE is that if there is a crisis, it’s a labor crisis.

In PART ONE I talked about my philosophy of book reviews: the good, the bad, and the pan. I tried to articulate what I think it means to be a good faith — not positive — reviewer.

For PART TWO I am going to deal with my confusion about the idea that writing novels and writing criticism would be mutually exclusive — or that writing anything and anything else would be mutually exclusive. As you read this sentence, I am setting up a straw person who staunchly believes this, in order to argue against it. To get to the Don Quixote battle we will have to take a detour through My Life Story. Join me.

How it started, how it’s going

Over 15 years I’ve written at least 50 reviews. I didn’t mean to become a critic, although it was probably obvious that I would end up this way bc I am overflowing with critical opinions. I started in art, veered into architecture, stopped for a roadside snack in media theory, careened into literature, and now I’m just out here pantheistically critiquing. While this may have led me to a master-of-none situation, it also gives me a comparative perspective on the peculiarities and implicit rules of different realms of aesthetic/cultural production.

Rewind to the 2000s: I thought I was going to be a poet (fr), but halfway through college I decided to be an artist for [redacted] reasons. I mostly built big sculptures out of wood and drywall with holes in them that were about hiding and sometimes I actually hid inside them and that was part of the art. In 2010 after graduating I went on an outsider art road trip and then moved to Berlin, where I got a babysitting job, a restaurant job, and a gallery internship, and I rented a studio so I could go ahead and be an artist.

I spent a year glumly trying to make art in that studio and hating it. My art had been about hiding, remember, which is to say that I did not enjoy the exact type of self-exposure that is required for making and exhibiting one’s objects (interestingly I now know that you cannot really hide as a writer either, but it’s a different type of not-hiding). Instead of making art, I spent most of my studio hours reading theory and learning to code hyperlink poetry (yes it was the post-internet art era). Despairing, I found a therapist, to whom I expressed my abject misery staring at the blank studio wall. In maybe our third session she stopped my rant and told me: “You do know that the world does not need your art, right?”

It was one of those devastations that are actually revelations. I could have been crushed but I was liberated. The therapist was right; the world obviously did not need my art, so the question was only whether I needed my art. I did not. I left the studio.

Immediately things got better. What I had liked most about art in the first place was hanging out at shows and having opinions. At some point a friend asked me to write a review of his show for a website and… from then on I just called myself a writer.

It turned out I could get paid for writing art reviews, so I wrote more of them. For the next years I did every kind of writing imaginable. I wrote press releases for art shows, I ghostwrote copy for catalogs on Scandinavian design, I gave poetry readings at bookstores, I wrote essays about object-oriented ontology for blogs. Chapbooks were made. Zines were launched. I got a job as a curatorial assistant and vowed never to work as a nanny again.

When I was ~24 I was hired to help launch a new, properly funded and brilliantly staffed online magazine called uncube, where I got to write all the fucking time, sometimes one piece a week, which was glorious, and I also learned to be an editor by commissioning other writers, which I LOVED. The magazine was focused on architecture and design, so I got into architectural history and *contemporary speculative practice.* Possibly my crowning achievement was a review of the 2015 Expo Milano for the site.

Inspired by two friends who wrote novels, when I was 25 I thought “maybe I could do that too,” so I wrote a novel. (It was grueling and took four years.) Meanwhile I was editing a para-academic journal, moderating panels for a media art festival, copy editing wall labels… Catalog texts! Interviews! Grant proposals! Profiles! Review after review!

But it was all just writing. Because I switched teams from artist to writer overnight, I didn’t pause to consider that there were different teams within “writer.” Even when my writing was framed on the wall of an art show and listed as a work for sale (lol), it didn’t occur to me to call myself an Artist. Even when I was writing a critical takedown of a design biennial, I didn’t think of myself as a Design Critic. Even when I’d finished the novel, I didn’t use the word Novelist. I just said Writer. As opposed to artist — the only distinction that seemed to matter.

A nice average day in the Berlin art world.

In retrospect, this is weird. These types of writing to not involve the same skillsets or roles or milieus, ALTHOUGH in Berlin the venn diagram of social worlds was more like a big blob (or a flooded street with everyone rolling around in it). I was happily delusional about being able to write anything for anyone without claiming a niche, and more to the point I am a lifetime freelancer and I follow the money.

To be clear: in the art world, the artist is not the same person as the critic, and that line is clear. You do not typically have painters writing reviews, either savage or glowing, of each other’s painting shows. (There are notable exceptions!! But let me generalize.) It was exactly the clarity of the line between artist and art critic that tricked me into believing “writer” was just one big job. Once I took on the writer mantle I was free to run with it. (The only thing I never said I was doing was journalism, because I had the sense that there were rules and ethics when it comes to reporting that I was clueless about. That was true.)

Oops

When I moved to New York in 2018 to do a masters degree and try to publish my novel I learned that this trajectory is not 100% normal in the publishing world here. “Writer” was not a complete answer anymore. It was confusing to explain to people what I’d been doing for all those years. The great critics I met were not always also poets and novelists and editors and academics and hybrid-video-essay-scriptwriters and proofers — or at least they had one thing that was their main thing, and when they did other things they were entering new territory or testing genre (from the acclaimed novelist comes a riveting memoir, etc). Also baffling: the book people and the art people were not mingling very much. (This is not a post about Berlin vs. New York but I can write one if you want.)

In NYC I went to far fewer art shows and spent more time with writers. Maybe this was a natural evolution of my curiosities, maybe it was life’s randomness, maybe art institutions here felt less accessible/loose, but I just went where my friends were and where the jobs were and figured that the blob would keep blobbing. And since I had started writing fiction, obviously I wanted to write criticism about novels, too. Seemed fine!

Pause to honor the art review

Because I wrote art reviews for money in those first years, I have a somewhat mercenary understanding of art-review-writing. I churned them out, and they served a purpose: they lassoed me to the discourse, they thickened my social context, they gave me a reason to be somewhere and a method to politically position myself. (And they taught me work with editors and meet word counts and deadlines, which is how I learned to write, period. That was my MFA.)

Ofc art reviews are compromised. Reviews are promo, and they are in ways both direct and indirect essential to the functioning of the art machine, just like the publishing world relies on press via reviews and interviews and profiles to keep the gears in motion. The review ecosystem is its own market system that is a symbiotic parasite on its given industry.

But one special function of the art review, as distinct from the lit review, is that for many art shows the review is the only document of what happened. Imagine a group show of ephemera made by emerging net artists in a warehouse in Berlin… the review better be comprehensive. OR: imagine a painting show by an artist who strikes gold and whose prices suddenly inflate to the point that all the paintings get poached by private collectors and shipped to a freeport in Dubai, never to be seen together in the flesh again. Or maybe the artists accidentally cause an explosion and the audience catches on fire?! And only One Critic lives to tell the story?!

The future reviewer or historian or collector will find evidence in photos, some PR, and if the artist is lucky, more than one review that serves as proof it existed and what it was like and why it mattered at the time and who caught on fire. You can probably download a PDF of a book you want to experience/judge, but most human beings in the world will never get to see a given art show IRL. For this special reason the job of art reviewing can feel like providing both a live dispatch and a historical document—it’s perfectly gossipful and properly instrumental at the same time.

But do you know what you’re talking about

I couldn’t land a book review in a book magazine until I moved to New York and had my own book coming out. You could call that a form of gatekeeping, and it probably is, but it’s also valid, because why would someone know how to review a novel if they’ve only ever written about art and media art and architecture and design? This is logical if you think being a critic has any relation to expertise.

There’s a lot to say about populism and Goodreadification and Substackification: anyone can publish opinions and I will read them!! But I’m usually reading reviews because the perspective of the writer has some heft. I’m just gonna be much more curious about your perspective on a novel if you know something about the history of novels and what current books discourse is like.. It would not only be incomplete/boring but misleading and wrong to review e.g. a Carl Andre show on formal principles alone because you are somehow unaware of the umm situation. To evaluate what’s intrinsic to the book or the art, you should be able to place it in extrinsic context, which means you have to do research. Experts have already done research. That’s all.

Switching from being an artist to an art critic didn’t make me feel compromised—it made me feel qualified. I knew how hard it was to make art that withstood scrutiny. I felt the same about writing a novel and then reviewing novels. The former qualified me for the latter. That is how I learned to write in good faith, which I think is what makes me a good critic.

But then a few years ago I was hanging out with a True Novelist and she kept referring to “artists like us.” It took me TWO DAYS to understand who she meant by “us.” Artist?? I wanted to call her and set the record straight—do not slander me by holding me accountable to a standard I cannot meet! the world does not need my art!—but then I was like… perhaps I have been coming at this from the wrong direction. By ignoring the lines I have been mucking them up. Maybe “not artist” is not working anymore. Maybe I punked that therapist…?

Rules of reviews, conflicts of interest

We know what a classic art review written for a magazine does and why it exists. Same with a book review. The critical review of the last ~two decades is a distinct form. It contains multiple subdivisions—briefly-mentioned-gloss vs. 10k-word-NYRB-investigation—but each is recognizable within the form. I love this form. LOVE IT. For a fee, I can execute a review that contains the standard and pleasing proportions of description, summary, contextualization, analysis, and opinion, but which is not boring to read. Most of the time, when I write reviews, I follow the recipe (without measuring the salt), because I like seeing how much I can do within the constraints. I also believe it works and tastes good. It’s usually annoying when someone tries to “subvert the review” because it’s rarely done in good faith. Like, if you don’t want to write a review, just write something else.

You can write something else because every form is malleable, depending on where you publish it. There’s fiction nested in criticism, criticism nested in fiction, art magazines nested in artworks. This piece of fiction consists of a work of fake criticism of a Korean comic! I’ve written plenty of stories composed entirely of fake found text. Borges did it, people do it all the time. Of course this is different from responding to a “real” thing, but when it comes to craft… there’s no reason to be a genre cop.

The reason you might really not want to be both a novelist and critic is obvious. It’s the same reasons painters don’t review each other in print. Competing interests. If you review another novelist unfavorably it might be harder to get people to write favorably about your own books. But that’s just the eternal conundrum from PART ONE, which we’ve been worrying about for 100 years: can you write objectively when you have a vested interest in a system and when the gears of that system are your employers and friends? Sort of.¹

When I started writing art reviews, I was reviewing my friends’ shows. I did not consider that my opinion would have enough authority for it to matter that I was essentially writing flattering press for my friends and anyway I thought their work was good, so I wasn’t lying. Admittedly the rules were very loose. I stopped doing that when I began publishing in bigger magazines and developing more damning critical opinions (even of my friends’ work), and that is how my concept of the good faith reviewer emerged in the first place. But this was an honor system as far as I knew.

When I started writing book reviews, people told me the honor system was more explicit when it comes to book reviews, which surprised me, because then how does opportunism work? But of course soft power still exists; many of the reviews that get written are because someone’s friend put that book on someone’s desk. You can’t control the outcome but you can definitely gear it and all press is good press so help me god. Also you can always interview someone if you can’t pretend to be impartial, which is imo the best way to do things anyway.

So why don’t you just choose

It’s too late. I didn’t pick a lane early on. What was ignorance and/or hubris is now a permanent condition. I like doing all the things. Sometimes newer writers email me and say they are interested in how I have managed to write so many different types of things over the years and I tell them not to do it. Working writers just don’t have time or leeway to develop more than one craft simultaneously, and it’s better to focus on one writerly identity — not for reasons of incapacity, but for reasons of branding (the nation’s most preeminent young critic, a new generation’s voice in fiction, etc.) and reasons of resources. Pick one thing when you start, get command of it, and then deviate later. That’s my advice.

But which is your dominant hand

I’ve been procrastinating the question that (straw)people are really asking when they ask which team you’re on. The question is not whether you can or should be a critic and a novelist at once, but whether you can be good at both at once. The consensus is usually that most people are objectively better at one or the other.

I’m not sure. For me, these remain different forms on a continuum of things I write. Sometimes I write a dud review. Sometimes I write a good piece of fiction. Sometimes I write a “searing memoir” (ok no). If I’m inconsistent or uneven… I’m equal-opportunity inconsistent across genres.

Of course I am aware that fiction is an art form, but at which point did I switch from critic to artist anyway? Was it the moment I opened a file and titled it “novel.docx”? And what was I doing before — was that absolutely 0% art?

I learn different tools every time I want to write a new type of thing. I use those tools until I finish the thing and then try to use them again and get frustrated if they don’t work and then I have to find new tools. One reason it took me many years to write a second novel is that I found I was bored with the tools I had learned after the first. I didn’t want to write dialogue the way I had practiced it. I didn’t want to write scenes the same way I had learned. I didn’t want to show rather than tell. I can’t figure out why I’d write another novel (exhausting, frustrating, mostly rewardless until the end) unless it forced me to pick up new sticks and rub them together in a new way. It’s the same for learning to write anything.

I’m not avoiding the question entirely. It is true that I do not have a novelist brain. Fiction is not my first language and I am okay with that; I can still write novels and I can still learn Italian. The True Novelists I know think about writing in a particular way that is different than me, because it is their native tongue, which I admire, yet I don’t think is a prerequisite.

At the start of this year I was talking with a known great critic who just wrote his first novel, and when he told me that he was still definitely not a novelist, I understood: he wasn’t being falsely modest. He was just saying that he had learned to do something that didn’t come naturally to him. He learned by practicing. And his novel took on a non-traditional form because he had found his own tools and built a hybrid thing that worked for him. Aren’t those often the best novels?²

When Brandon Taylor says: “I always feel when I’m writing criticism I’m working with the dullest part of my mind to do the most intricate kind of work and it feels so hard in the way that fiction doesn’t,” I feel more toward the opposite. So yeah, critic first. But critic better? I don’t know. I’ll leave that to the critics to decide.

1. On whether I think this conflict-of-interest has been an issue for me: Yes, of course. I haven’t taken-down, but as was pointed out in the Comments Section of PART ONE, an ambivalent-but-not-glowing review is probably worse to publish than a takedown, because it’s not bombastic enough to get the critic a lot of attention, it just causes quiet anger.

2. To return to our most elementary metaphor: If you are not a chef sometimes you make bad carbonara, and sometimes you make a dish that can no longer realistically be called carbonara but which tastes good anyway. Maybe the problem is not that a non-chef makes non-carbonara but that we have to call it carbonara anyway.