Non-Critic to Deliver 2023 AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture

The Art Critic Alliance would like to thank AICA-USA for its tacit endorsement.

This morning the news arrived that Valerie Cassel Oliver (above) would be delivering the 17th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture, described by the organization as “an annual event during which an exemplary writer addresses seminal issues in contemporary art criticism.”¹ This will be the ninth year in a row that the organization has avoided conferring this distinction upon a white person, and the twelfth year in a row that it has avoided granting it to a white man. This year they have also evaded giving the award to a critic.

This is not entirely unprecedented. Naomi Beckwith (2015 honoree) is, like Cassel Oliver, a museum curator with monograph credits. The same goes for Courtney J. Martin (2017), who had at least conducted a research project on Lawrence Alloway. Monograph writing is respectable intellectual work, certainly, but it’s not criticism. It’s apparent that with Beckwith, the impulse to give the award as an act of reparations overcame the original purpose of the award to honor writers who had actually distinguished themselves as critics, such as previous awardees Carolyn Christoph-Bakargiev, Lucy Lippard, Michelle Kuo, Peter Schjeldahl, Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Linda Nochlin, and Michael Brenson.

What could have been regarded as a tolerable political indulgence in the 20-teens looks like cruelty now. The media shed 30,000 jobs in 2020 and jobs in the field continue to disappear at a rate of a thousand per month. Local newsrooms are vanishing. The critics, to say nothing of the art critics, have never had it this bad in modern times. Nevertheless it occurred to an organization of art critics to give one of the handful of art criticism awards in existence to a curator, one with no published art criticism, comfortably ensconced in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as its Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Ostensibly committed “to elevating the values of art criticism as a discipline, and acting on behalf of the physical and moral defense of works of art,” AICA-USA is in fact content to let the discipline of art criticism dissolve into institutionally supported art historical writing, and does not so much as squeak on behalf of works of art. It meanwhile engages in statements unrelated to its purpose, such as their condemnation of the Russian government in solidarity with Ukraine (though, pointedly, no condemnation of Hamas in solidarity with Israel). I have avoided getting personal about AICA-USA, but it looks as though the organization exists solely to indulge the armchair boomer politics of its septuagenarian president and octogenarian vice-president, who have enjoyed productive careers and apparently feel little urgency to use their positions for anything more than burnishing their progressive bona fides.

Are you giving money to them for the associated press credential? Stop at once and obtain one from the Art Critic Alliance. It works just as well, costs a fraction of AICA membership, and looks immeasurably more professional. For one week, in honor of the above news, you can use the code IAMANARTCRITIC for a 10% discount at checkout.

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1. “Seminal”?