Introducing the Art Critic Alliance

AICA, it's time to say GoodbAICA.

Behold the Art Critic Alliance, a new organization which I have summoned into existence. The mission of the Art Critic Alliance is to foster access to and encourage excellence within the field of art criticism.

Unlike the International Association of Art Critics (known by its acronym in French of AICA), in which my membership of twelve years I’m allowing to lapse, the Art Critic Alliance has no review process. If you aspire to write art criticism, or already do, on art or other topics, you may purchase an Art Critic Alliance membership. The only requirement is that you honor the Art Critic Alliance Principles, and pledge:

• To practice criticism and journalism at the highest standards of excellence and ethics.

• To defend freedom of expression, and the display and preservation of art, and to fight censorship, iconoclasm, cancellation, and deplatforming.

• To render fellowship to other critics.

Membership in the Art Critic Alliance includes a press pass with your headshot and signature in a handsome, authoritative design on a durable wallet-size plastic card with a holographic overlay. I’m working with a local printer to make it sparkle. The card is undated so it does not need to be renewed. The cost of the card and associated membership is a one-time fee of $54, about two-thirds of which goes into producing the card. (Also, 54 is triple חַי.)

The Art Critic Alliance will not engage in advocacy or programming akin to what goes on at AICA. Since a significant portion of AICA members and those who would join it only want a press pass, this is a much more affordable and accessible alternative. (Membership at AICA is $100 per year.)

The chief use of the AICA card is museum admission. Although I have not yet tested the hypothesis, and make no guarantees, I believe that the Art Critic Alliance card will be as effective as the AICA card in that regard, if not more. (Discussion about that follows below.) There is no substitute for contacting a museum in advance to arrange admission, preferably with a writing assignment, and increasingly I find that museums require this anyway, even if you have press credentials. Nevertheless, press credentials make certain conversations with museum personnel easier and can come in handy in other situations, such as the art fairs.

If there’s sufficient demand I will consider forming a proper membership organization, opening a message board, compiling a member directory, or even publishing a magazine. But baby steps. If I save one other person some hassle and indignity it will be worth it.

What follows is a long, possibly edifying but not really necessary explanation of why I did this. I thank you for considering membership in the Art Critic Alliance.

A long, possibly edifying but not really necessary explanation of why I did this

“What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Art Criticism in the 21st Century?” asks the 54th Congress of the International Association of Art Critics.

As a symbolic expression of social concerns, today’s art calls for us to reflect on the times in which we live, which have been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, raising questions not only in the domain of health, but everywhere in the world where it has wreaked havoc, by exacerbating existing inequalities and deep-seated problems affecting the most fragile societies. This combination of factors has cut off societies and thrown communities into isolation, creating a powerful impact on institutional agendas, starkly exposing the digital divide and provoking new challenges in the art world, while manifestations of discontent have spilled over into the street in some countries and have generated actions and public practices that have shifted towards the expressive/symbolic sphere usually reserved for art practice. The military conflict in Europe…

Et cetera. You’ve read some news in the last twelve months, I’m sure. Anyway:

This context makes it indispensable for us to reflect, revise and discuss current problematics in the fields of criticism and curating. Multiple perspectives and a range of ambiguities open up in the fields of art and criticism. For example, feminist critique of the nature of relationships of power and knowledge has revealed different types of exclusion that persist in the art world, particularly in the areas of gender, ethnicity and class. In this sense, the contemporary arts have expanded and defied both theory and criticism, by proposing problematics linked, for example, to discrimination, invisibility and gender stereotypes. As a result, cultural theorists face the challenge of analyzing creations mediated by identity constructions that question the art system and the discourse that regulates it. The processes of de-naturalizing sexuality have broadened the boundaries of criticism and curating by being subjected to interrogation by queer and feminist works that aim to subvert established discourse.  

Though not at all apparent, this passage is a call for papers to be presented at this year’s congress in Valparaiso and Buenos Aires. In the details they suggest subtopics. Two jumped out at me, “Art critics in the face of differences” and “Art and criticism in the face of historical traumas provoked by the health emergency and the context of war and migrations.” I submitted an abstract. The title was “National Divorce Aesthetics.”

In 2016, the anarchist Michael Malice wrote “The Case for American Secession: Why it’s time to disunite the States” for the Observer. “Even when we were united ideologically as a country,” he noted, “we have never been united culturally.” This has only become increasingly the case over the last two years, as debates rage regarding the government’s response to Covid-19, immigration, racial justice, foreign policy, and election legitimacy. Malice’s remark invites an examination of cultural phenomena associated with the germane divisions, which have culminated over the last twelve months in the notion of a “national divorce” in which progressives and conservatives accept their differences as irreconcilable and agree to separate into their own sovereignties. Ironically, polling has found wide bipartisan support of the idea. This paper examines the cultural artifacts of progressive and conservative America as distinct aggregates, and theorizes about the possibilities and limits of criticism in bipolar America.

Like last year, they rejected it. Unlike last year, I’m not going to go through the trouble of crowdfunding the paper and publishing it on my own. Instead, I’m going to go through with my long-overdue divorce from AICA.

I’m not quitting an honorary organization for art critics because their representatives rejected a couple of papers. That would be silly. I’m quitting because of AICA’s abdication of its mission and its surrender to partisanship, decay, and autocracy.

One paper that did get accepted to the congress was “Crítica del arte de las derechas: un oxímoron” by performance art expert Malgorzata Kazmierczak. Without the abstract it’s unclear whether the oxymoron in question is right-wing art criticism or criticism of right-wing art. Either way it’s an admission, to paraphrase Malice, that this organization has never been united culturally. That would be fine, if it represented some kind of plurality of opinion.

It does not. Take for instance its condemnation of Poland from back in February.

What we are witnessing is the systematic persecution of dissenting voices and minority viewpoints under the guise of patriotism, religion and family values.¹ Public officials and cultural administrators seem keen to vie with each other to see who is quickest to enforce the ideology of the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party. The result is a preemptive culture of censorship and self-censorship that defies European laws and disregards universal values.

The incidents to which it refers are dismaying.² One of the incidents not on the list were the protests against and calls to censor an August 2021 exhibition at the Ujazdowski Castle Center that was perceived as expressing right-wing views. And since May, climate extremists have attacked a Monet in the Barbarini, a Van Gogh at the National Gallery in London, a Picasso in the National Gallery of Victoria, a Botticelli in the Uffizi, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and a Vermeer in the Mauritshuis. The activists involved are funded by millionaires. What does the premiere organization of art critics have to remark about it? Nothing. No enemies to the left, as they used to say during The Terror.

AICA, like most every other arts organization, has become the tool of progressive postliberal autocracy (the subject of my rejected paper from last year). Its revealed priorities, right down to its endorsement of Ukraine and boycott of Russia, are policy points of progressive postliberal autocracy, not art per se. When climate extremists attack examples of the Western canon, art worlders allied with AICA support both the climate extremism and the attack on the Western canon.³ As I said in the aforementioned paper, the progressive postliberal ethos…

…disdains the European phenotype, its extant values, and its history, particularly its history of male accomplishment, and because it is postliberal, favors collective obligations, intolerance, command economics, and existential inequality in order to reduce the number of specimens of the phenotype among its ranks, alter their values, and denigrate their history. Its program of existential inequality manifests as monomaniacal valorization of non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-able-bodied identities. It takes the assumptions of endemic moral inferiority that have long been directed at Jews, applies them to all whites, and recasts the Jews as prototypically white.

The USA section of AICA is no better. Now that Peter Schjeldahl has passed away, the last living white man to be invited to give AICA-USA’s Distinguished Critic Lecture is Holland Cotter, in 2010. The last living straight white man is Michael Brenson, in 2007, when the honor was conceived. (Schjeldahl’s lecture was 2011.)

An upcoming panel on “Supporting Arts Writers Through Artist Legacies” produced by AICA-USA will be moderated by the president of Creative Capital, the umbrella org for the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, which has almost entirely eliminated white men from its awardees. The panel’s featured artist foundations give out a tiny number of grants, largely to academics and political progressives; this recent prize from Dedalus to a CUNY professor to write a book titled Art of the Opaque: African Modernisms, Decolonization, and the Cold War is typical.

It’s easy to get caught up in how racist this all is. But it’s important to remember that it serves a larger goal, which is to establish autocracies in America, Canada, and Europe in defiance of their traditions of the sanctity of the individual. Progressive postliberal autocracy is a scheme of command economics justified primarily by real and manufactured emergencies of climate and race. Greta Thunberg recently renewed her place in its pantheon as Holy Virgin by calling for the overthrow of capitalism as the source of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide” and “racist, oppressive extractionism.”

To clarify what progressive postliberal autocracy looks like in practice, think China with its bureaucracies, collectivism, and hamstrung citizenry, but instead of promoting Han nationalism and heteronormativity, the regime condemns whiteness and showcases “processes of de-naturalizing sexuality.”⁴ Conservative postliberalism arose as an immune response to progressive postliberalism, and so comes in for particular rebuke. That is why AICA goes out of its way to condemn Poland and Russia, which are conservative postliberal regimes. As Russia, Poland, and Hungary increasingly influence conservatism throughout western Europe, Canada, and America, we’re going to be hearing more from the art critics about ascendant fascism. That will be lazy calumny, as both the progressive and conservative postliberals crave access to the same powers.⁵

AICA-USA also duly endorsed Ukraine, which is not germane to its mission. It was silent regarding the Philip Guston debacle, which was patently germane to its mission. Instead it let the parent organization speak for them, who declared in a brief statement, sic erat scriptum: “AICA International strongly deplores the National Gallery Washington DC attitude is the opposite of the international rights to freedom of expression.”

AICA is this way because academia is this way. Most art critics survive on academic appointments, which have not been plentiful since the boomers established their careers in them, since then have dwindled, and are expected to shrink still further. Expect academia to become more politically homogeneous and less serious as it craters along with the economy.⁶

And academia is this way, at least in the humanities, because very little real work has been done there for decades. There are notable exceptions, but most of it is utter blithering. Progressive postliberal autocratic politics moved into the intellectual vacuum that countenances the use of problematic as a noun twice in one paragraph. As of 2021 the number of graduates in the humanities has been declining for nine consecutive years, and we haven’t even hit an official recession yet.

AICA leadership has known for a long time that its main, and for some, only benefit of membership is its press pass. At one time the reputation of the AICA press pass was formidable. Supposedly you could present it to a ticket-taker at any museum in the world and they would wave you in, with the rumored exception of the Vatican.

When I went to Europe in 2019 for my Fulbright I found that that was not the case. The AICA card wouldn’t get me in anywhere in Vienna, not the Leopold, not MUMOK, not the Albertina, not the Belvedere. It did not get me into the Mucha Museum in Prague. It did get me into the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. I expected more solid results in Paris, where AICA is based. It worked at the Orangerie. But at the Maison du Japon, trying to get into a Foujita show, I had to have tiresome conversations with two different museum officers before they relented to admit me. I hate troubling blameless institutional staff workers like that.

Also, the AICA card looks like trash. You receive one upon membership, and when you renew they send you a sticker with the current year on it. The years take their toll. For reasons of personal security (mine and others’, it’s an identification card after all) I’m not posting it, but I suspect that your average museum desk clerk has never heard of the organization, but looks at the card and thinks, “He must be press, a real person would not be this pathetic.”

AICA’s main value proposition having grown decrepit, an opportunity opens for a challenge. The Art Critic Alliance will not engage in other activities performed (or are purported to be performed) by AICA. If you reside in the echelon of privilege that AICA recognizes as worthy of honor, by all means continue with them. Likewise if you find their programming edifying or interesting, or their advocacy at all convincing. Likewise if you enjoy institutional backing that funds your traipsing down to Valparaiso or wherever. (In which case, support us both.) But if all you want is the press pass, the one from the Art Critic Alliance is much cheaper, particularly over time, and will probably be as effective if not more.

Michael Malice’s 2016 essay seems prescient. “We have never had a single culture in the United States, and it is increasingly unlikely that we ever will,” he wrote. “The real conundrum is why two cultures should attempt to move forward as one unit when they are increasingly diverging in their world views—and never had the same worldview to begin with.”

Yea verily, let us diverge. People of all kinds, colors, and creeds who love humanity more than identity, liberals in the broad sense who believe in freedom of expression and the value of dialogue, everyone in the economic margins of the art and academic systems, or beyond them - we will go down a road of freedom. Let others go down the road to autocracy, manufacturing artifacts and spewing scholarship of no interest except to the shrinking epistemic bubble that produced them.

1. That the mere guise of family values is driving the censorship is an interesting charge, given that the upcoming congress takes for granted that “processes of de-naturalizing sexuality” are influencing the course of criticism. Who is instigating those processes? Does everyone welcome them?

2. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość is guilty mostly of not having developed a sense of plausible deniability. Here in the United States, you don’t baldly censor an exhibition. You delay it for some undeclared number of years “until a time at which [the supposedly offensive art] can be more clearly interpreted.”

3. Hyperallergic: “The Van Gogh Is Fine; You Won’t Be: The real target of Just Stop Oil’s tomato soup action wasn’t Van Gogh’s painting. It was our complacency.” An enormous quantity of oil production and oil wealth is concentrated in the Islamic world, but imagine the activists targeting one of its art objects in protest. Then imagine Hyperallergic’s response.

I have not started reading Hyperallergic again. I just know that if I need an example of a garbage-tier take on a given art world issue, I can plug “Hyperallergic Van Gogh soup” or whatever into a search engine and find one.

Having done so, another essay came to my attention while perusing the art news: “Three arguments why Just Stop Oil was right to target Van Gogh’s Sunflowers,” posted at The Conversation. The author is Oli Mould, Lecturer in Human Geography, Royal Holloway University of London. Sure enough: “…fighting against the changing climate means also fighting capitalism’s class (and indeed, racial, gendered and ableist) imbalance. The two are, and need to continue to be, one.” The magazine acknowledges Royal Holloway as a funder.

4. While emergencies of climate and race are the backbone of progressive postliberal cultural assault, it includes many other subsidiary concerns, one of which is the disdain of straight masculinity. Progressive postliberals also malign Christianity as backward while accusing the white western world of fostering Islamophobia. When the Chinese state bans portrayals of gays in the media and imprisons and kills its native Muslim population, that is of no interest to progressive postliberals, who are bent on dismantling the western sanctity of the individual. The hypocrisy is a byproduct of political focus.

5. Progressive and conservative liberals think rightly or wrongly that those powers may yet be sensibly restrained. Only we libertarians want to unwind them. Related reading: “The Realistic Market for Private Governance” by Jeff Deist, “Parallel Structures Are the Only Way to Freedom” by Titus Gebel.

6. As is the case with American identity politics in general, the powerful in academia are invoking race to protect their class interests. Crystal Williams, the new RISD president about whom I’ve already remarked, has since promised to supplement the “cluster hire” of a slate of black faculty by “hiring additional clusters of excellent faculty focused on knowledge bases such as First Nations, North Africa/Middle East, the Asian diaspora, sustainability, and disability studies.” In her vision for RISD, or whatever would be the auditory equivalent of “vision”:

I hear a beautiful community-wide chorus that envisions a campus and culture where the principles, goals, and outcomes of equity and inclusion are centered and central. A chorus that desires to inhabit and co-create a teaching, learning, and working environment where racism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and other social scourges are expunged as inadequate intellectual and creative frameworks for the 21st century.

This tells me that RISD is dying anyway, and the people running it are out of ideas about how to keep it going except to bear down on identity politics. RISD under Williams will be reduced to a tool of progressive postliberal autocracy as expressed through the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that produced her. Is DEI an adequate intellectual framework? The dullness of its sacred texts answers the question. Is DEI an adequate creative framework? Bureaucracies have never been amenable to creativity. You might as well try to grow a orange tree in a meat locker.