Contributed by Anna Gregor / If yesteryear the call for negative art criticism rang clear and true, today complaints about the state of art blur into an inarticulate whine. Be they artist or critic, Marxist or capitalist, academic or anti-intellectual: everyone is dissatisfied. Or so it seems. Despite their complaints, however, one starts to suspect that few of the YouTubers, Substackers, or Instagrammers who presume the title of critic want the circumstances they complain about to change, so lacking are they in convincing diagnoses of present problems and convinced visions of alternatives, not to mention actual critical engagement with artworks. One imagines that, after smirking through an exhibition or two, more unmoved than offended, they return to their computers to contrive their lack of interest or pleasure (or whatever other effect they expect art to cause) into half-formed polemics, more or less decorated with the trappings of their pet theorist, before chucking them into the void of their preferred social medium with self-satisfied smugness. Their proclaimed dissatisfaction is all too often its opposite: at its most forgivable, a juvenile pleasure in being the harbinger of the emptiness of art; at its least, a masturbatory high-mindedness that collapses into nihilism. I will allow the reader to fill in the picture with whichever “critics” come to mind.
Their whining is effective, in a sense. It arouses their audience, prompting ejaculations of pleasured resentment in the comments, but it fails to actually rouse anyone, themselves included, to productive discourse or better art.
Their whining is effective, in a sense. It arouses their audience, prompting ejaculations of pleasured resentment in the comments, but it fails to actually rouse anyone, themselves included, to productive discourse or better art. So the critics so-called who commit to this bit settle for effecting mere arousal (after all, it gets more likes) and reduce themselves to complaining rather than criticizing. Complaints an audience can participate in sympathetically, their sense of vague dissatisfaction coaxed into indeterminate indignation. True criticism, by contrast, not only requires that the critic produce a work that expresses what an artwork is doing and how it succeeds or fails, overcoming the temptation to cater to the lowest common denominator of a general audience (which is not, and never has been, an interest in art)—true criticism demands, further, labor on the audience’s part, that they step out of their passive role of content consumer, doomscroller, or Substack skimmer to become a critic in their own right by actually going to see the artwork to test the critic’s judgment against their own experience of it. Given the effort required, the desire for true criticism is, unsurprisingly, weak, and the deluge of mediocre art sufficiently powerful to drown any critic committed to engagement with particulars, paving the way for those seduced by their own voice, whose only standard of success is mass approval in the form of views or likes.
Such a standard promotes exaggeration and abstraction, gradually choking out any real commitments to art that may have set these petty pontificators down this path, until they ultimately reduce themselves into one of two popular types: the anti-intellectual playboi looking for a shock and an afterparty that drags on into the wee hours of the morning, or the intellectual [enter theorist here]-ian or –ist who has a questionable grasp on their leader’s theory but has no problem making sweeping generalizations on that shaky ground. In both cases, the mere appearance of negativity is mistaken for true criticism, whether it takes the shape of Yelp-style blurbs, poorly-written essays embarrassingly endorsed by Harper’s, or documentary-style YouTube videos that, although they occasionally hint at leftist ends, fail to specify how their complaints relate to their political commitments, so that the vague content resonates with any disgruntled viewer, right or left, conveniently broadening their base for views and likes.
The difference between the anti- and the intellectual art critic, however, is insubstantial. Neither is committed to art. Unreflectively presuming the platitude that art is the highest expression of humanity while, at the same time, collapsing all hierarchical values into subjective pleasure, they narcissistically take what merely gratifies them to be a universal good, and rail against all art they don’t find pleasing. They call for stronger effects, cloaking their desire for mere pleasure under whichever synonym suits their shtick (beauty, awe, shock, aesthetic experience, exhilaration, transcendence, etc., etc., etc.), never pausing to consider that their anesthesia may not be the artwork’s fault, but their own; nor that one truly committed to art cannot in good faith claim that mere pleasurable effects are art’s purpose in an overstimulated, dopamine-fueled time like ours, when our desires are regulated by screen addictions and the present slips away through atrophied attention. They betray their bad faith by misleading their audiences down a further desensitizing path of unsubtle thought and reactivity, pulling them farther away from the possibility of meaningfully engaging with art at all.
The issue is not that these critics are wrong to be dissatisfied with art. Art today is, in general, dissatisfying. Most art is indeed mediocre, reduced to the cliché standards of pop-so-called-culture or requiring support from academic scaffolding to stand. But this is nothing new. It has long been the case that only a fraction of artworks rise above the clichés of their time. Rather, the issue is, precisely, that such critics deal generally with art as something abstracted from artworks, their critiques reduced to clichés by trading in historical narratives, -isms, exhibitions, and oeuvres, all of which are removed from the proper object of art and its criticism: individual artworks themselves. Thus, they blind themselves to what might be worthwhile and cripple themselves in their ability to engage in productive criticism.
The critic who fails to deal with particular works fails to deal with art, and thus fails to be a critic of it. Instead of offering a concrete way into a work of art, showing how it succeeds or falls short, these critics so-called of so-called art talk about it, circling around it. Instead of serving as an exemplar for looking at a work of art, they are an example of turning away from it to hedonism, history, economics, or an incoherent cocktail of all three. Some (including one self-reportedly scorned by the muses) go so far as to attribute their own sense of artistic failure to historical forces, venturing to suggest they would’ve been great artists at another time, had only circumstances been different, and to project their disappointment in themselves into resentment for anyone who chooses, or, rather, chooses to be chosen by, the vocation of art—those who actively open themselves up to the muses, to receive them and, in turn, be received by them. They forget that criticism, too, is a vocation, and not just a backup plan; its greats as rare, if not rarer, than those who make the art they champion. Most damningly, they deny that to be great, that is, to manage to make a great work of art, has always occurred within and despite present circumstances. So when, after lamenting the impossibility of greatness, having convinced themselves of their lack of freedom, agency, and self-responsibility, they, in their next breath, conjure a mirage of a utopic future, calling for a neo-neo-avant-garde to take the helm of History and lead us there—… here, one can’t help but roll one’s eyes. Nihilism hides behind the mask of utopic vision. But this is no surprise when critics and artists are suckled on romantic narratives of the coming of the avant-garde. Inundated by what they see to be the old and the unoriginal—that is, unwilling to put in the effort to let an artwork, past or present, reveal itself to them, they call for the new, already despairing that it will never arrive.
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Indeed, there will be no avant-garde to deliver us. Not because history is over, but because we have the wrong picture of the new: something that will exhilarate us, offend us, shift the paradigm, “move the dial,” make us cry, move us to ecstasy, rally the masses. But when the market immediately co-opts any appearance of novelty, and the content fed to us by algorithms causes reactions of pleasure or shock more extreme than any artwork could, the military-inspired imagery of the avant-garde must be recognized for what it is: merely a symptom of our visually overstimulated, screen-addicted, pleasure-laced despair; a half-baked narrative that excuses our complacency with superficiality, our distaste for the effort required to overcome our habitual comforts that nonetheless fail to fulfill us, our aversion to true engagement with particulars, and our inclination, instead, for oversimplification. It teaches us to await an invading army that will never come, like damsels in distress.
In reality, art does not move us. But particular artworks can. Take Philip Guston’s Ancient Wall, for instance: a painting that first appears as a pile of shoes in front of a brick wall with legs hanging over the top, which, over the course of long-looking, shifts the viewer’s vantage point, so they are at once standing, staring straight at the canvas on the wall in the gallery, and lying on the ground within the painting, among the painted pile of limbs, their head against the brick wall so that they can see the bottoms of the shoes slung over it. Or Botticelli’s Annunciation, which translates the viewer’s position, hunched over the tiny diptych, into Mary’s by means of a formal analogy between the two-part painting and the two pages of the open Bible over which Mary bows: the miracle of the divine becoming flesh translated into the miracle of two dimensions becoming three through linear perspective and invisible brushwork. Or Pissarro’s Rue de L’Epicerie, which builds the viewer into a world composed of individual brushstrokes, which, compounded, depict individuals in a crowd that, massed, construct the facades that combine into a city street, out of which sprouts the spires of a cathedral: a picture of the raw material, of paint and humanity, formed by art into a tribute to the secular religion of democracy. In each of these works, the viewer is, in a sense, moved—but only once they’ve come to see the work as it asks to be seen, so that they can move with the work into the imaginative relation that it determines for them.
So, it may be said that artworks do move us, in particular ways. They do not cause [enter general effect here (beauty, awe, shock…)], simply. If they can be said to cause effects at all, they are effects that must be effected by a viewer, who, in reciprocal activity and passivity, approaches an artwork and receives it, determines it in their experience of it, which is in turn determined by it. The particularities of such complex effects, which overcome the clichéd ways we generally engage with each other and the world, are what make artworks new. This is why so-called old works of art, when we move with them, are experienced to be newer than most cliché contemporary art we encounter. They are as new as truly new contemporary works of art, because particular and self-determined. In forgoing responsibility to particulars, in closing themselves off from them, the so-called critics condemn themselves to stagnation and the resulting dissatisfaction around which they build their theoretical castles in the air, or because of which they try to tear those of others down: unmoved by art, unable to let themselves be moved, they call for a revolution or, depending on their taste, perhaps a party.
The new arrives individual by individual. Only one with the power to be moved — the active ability to let an individual reveal itself to them — will be attuned to it. The critics who have developed this power will create works that open up artworks to those who want to engage with them but aren’t sure how. Meanwhile, the others, our critics so-called among them, will continue to visit the exhibitions, the galleries, the fairs, circumambulating, the physical equivalent of doomscrolling, and waiting for an apocalyptic newness with the perverse pleasure of the doomsday prophet.
About the author: Anna Gregor is a painter and occasional writer about painting based in New York City. She received her BFA from Parsons in 2019 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2025.