The Postcritical Era

Welcome to the late post-historical period of art.

Arthur Danto, “Narratives of the End of Art,” 1990:¹

[A] certain gloom had settled upon the art world itself at the time [in 1984] - it has not altogether dissipated today - so that artists and critics alike expressed themselves with varying degrees of pessimism as to whether art had a future at all, or if, as may have seemed plausible, a certain extraordinary adventure had run its course and all that lay ahead were cycle upon cycle of repetitions of much the same options, a kind of interminable oscillation that meant the end, in disorder, of a closed system of energy everyone up to then had believed open…. And part of what I meant by art coming to an end was not so much a loss of creative energy, though that might be true, as that was raising from within the question of its philosophical identity - was doing philosophy, so to speak, in the medium of art, and hence was transforming itself into another mode of what Hegel would term Absolute Spirit.

Danto explained that by ending, he did not mean stopping. Narratives end, history continues. “Narratives cannot be endless,” he elaborated, writing that the narrative of art had run its course once philosophy of its own self became its core activity instead of an ancillary one. Unfortunately we cannot now ask Danto why this approaches Hegelian Geist and not Nietzschian Umwertung, or transvaluation. In retrospect it seems the latter, an embrace of supposedly more vital principles than the values preceding them historically. I say supposedly because it’s not clear that there have ever been any happy Nietzschians except for Bronze Age Pervert, and because when art supposedly ascended to visual philosophy, it explored some low-hanging problems pertaining only to art, and subsequently produced no philosophy worthy of the term.

But Danto appears correct that a certain narrative of art concluded. Anyone who sat through the typical Darkness at Noon introduction to art history, Lascaux to Giotto in one semester and Giotto to van Gogh in the second, was treated to parade of named styles: Archaism to Classicism to Hellenism in Greek art, primitivism to early Renaissance to High Renaissance to Mannerism in Italian art, and so on. We, in contrast, live and work in the Unlabeled Time, sons and heirs of nothing in particular.² Obviously art continued to be made after Danto described its ending, in greater quantities than ever, by his own acknowledgment. Nevertheless, again in “Narratives”:

Heidegger writes in effect that human beings are such that the question of what they are is a part of what they are - but consciousness of this question was the essence of a philosophy when philosophy itself began and Socrates asked what he was. That it should now have arisen for art in this way implied a philosophization of art that meant the end of a history.

Note “a history,” not “history.” He referred to the art of this era as post-historical, limited to the sense that it was being made and displayed after the conclusion of a narrative first set down by Giorgio Vasari in Le Vite. As Danto clarified in the introduction to After the End of Art in 1997:³

So the contemporary is, from one perspective, a period of information disorder, a condition of perfect aesthetic entropy. But it is equally a period of quite perfect freedom. Today there is no longer any pale of history. Everything is permitted. But that makes the historical transition from modernism to post-historical art all the more urgent to try to understand. And that means that it is urgent to try to understand the decade of the 1970s, a period in its own way as dark as the tenth century.

I have misgivings about Danto’s characterizations. That art should culminate in philosophy is the sort of thing that you would expect a philosopher to say. Art didn’t just continue, but many artists continued to make it in a patently visual and expressive mode; it seems apparent that, or at least worth investigating whether, such art was gate-kept from being recognized as exemplary of its time. Art practiced as a form of philosophy confined itself to tiresome, repetitive considerations of the nature of the art object. Art asked what it was, worked out the banal answer that it is some combination of materials, ideas, and social context, and then asked what it was again. And again. No wonder the financialization that rose up with the art fair phenomenon of 2002 and the postliberal progressive totalization of 2020 met with no resistance. Art attained Geist only to waft thereafter like an odor upon the brutal materiality of money and politics.⁴

But Danto recognized, without following up on the implications, that the post-historical situation was unusually difficult to analyze or even discuss. That the art of your own time is hard to characterize, one could chalk up to proximity and lack of hindsight. That the art of the 1970s would still be hard to characterize in 1997 was a new wrinkle. Labels, it turns out, are pretty useful. Sadly the old ones faded and the new ones are unsatisfactory.

That said, the freedom of the post-historical moment, in which “all art is equally and indifferently art” as Danto put it, for him held great promise. “How wonderful it would be,” he concluded the essay “Three Decades After the End of Art,” “to believe that the pluralistic art world of the historical present is a harbinger of political things to come!”⁵

Indeed it was. In 2019, two critics reacted in the New York Times to a spate of unfavorable reviews of the Whitney Biennial of that year.

“The problem is not that these [white] critics lack some essential connection with the work of artists of color,” the art critic Aruna D’Souza said in an interview. “It’s that many of them simply are not familiar with the intellectual, conceptual and artistic ideas that underlie the work.”

To be sure, people of color did review the show. But their work was much less visible than that of the white reviewers, a dynamic shaped by the perception that the opinions of people of color are not universal.

Did the authors, Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, believe that the opinions of people of color ought to be regarded as universal, even as they made clear that the opinions of white critics are not? At stake in this strangely constructed argument was no less than the fundamentals of human decency:

This matters because culture is a battleground where some narratives win and others lose. Whether we believe someone should be locked in a cage or not is shaped by the stories we absorb about one another, and whether they’re disrupted or not. At a time when inequality and white supremacy are soaring, collective opinion is born at monuments, museums, screens and stages — well before it’s confirmed at the ballot box.

And furthermore:

The six most influential art critics in the country, as selected by their peers, are all white… Yet the most dynamic art in America today is being made by artists of color and indigenous artists.

“Dynamic,” in this case, meant “illustrative of postliberal progressive politics.” Examples included “Alexandra Bell, whose incisive newspaper layouts illustrate the media’s complicity in racist stereotypes. And the gorgeous mixed-media banners of Jeffrey Gibson, which demand a rethinking of laws like ‘Stand Your Ground’ from an indigenous perspective.”

The authors, each beneficiaries of the Ford Foundation,⁶ suggested this by way of remedy:

Old-school white critics ought to step aside and make room for the emerging and the fully emerged writers of color who have been holding court in small publications and online for years, who are fluent in the Metropolitan Opera and the rapper Megan Thee Stallion.⁷

We need mainstream newspapers and their culture departments to hire people of color as assigning editors and critics. Equally necessary is to then support them with mentors, resources and management buy-in to create genuine shifts in power, not just different bylines.

This, in fact, was tried. Whether the old-school white critics stepped aside of their own accord or were simply denied opportunities, some critics of color achieved prominence. Seph Rodney was for six years senior critic and opinion editor at Hyperallergic. Upon stepping down in 2022, he penned a valedictory essay:

Last year, I wrote about the exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, which was mounted at the New Museum…. This critique did go against the grain of celebrating any show of aesthetic force that primarily included people of color, no matter how flimsy the fealty to the putative curatorial premise. Two very prominent Black artists reached out to me separately and privately to say that they were really glad that I had written that piece, and that in making that argument I had said what they were thinking…. I wish that they had been willing to say this to me publicly, out loud, where others can take stock of their allegiances, their beliefs….

[N]ot everyone in the art scene sees the value in criticism as a publicly contested activity. I’ve had a prominent African-American academic who is a full professor at a distinguished university tell me that their definition of criticism diametrically differed from mine. They are an advocate of emphatic affirmation, not of calling people out. They believe — and here I have to speculate a bit because they did not say this explicitly — that conflict arises when the kind of (public) criticism I favor is applied, that it may become impossible to hold hands with people and enjoy their company and get along in the hopes of preserving familial, friendship, or collegial relations. I argued then, as I do now, that holding discussions of the meaning and value of art pieces, shows, events in public has public value, because we get to hold each other accountable. Actually, this is invaluable….

Here I am recalling a Latina NYU professor who was initially quite friendly with me. At an awards dinner, she publicly called me out by name, praising the work I had written for Hyperallergic — at least up until that point. But that praise was rescinded when I wrote a piece on the protests roiling El Museo del Barrio after its controversial appointments of Patrick Charpenel, a Chicano man, as the executive director of the museum, and Rodrigo Moura, a Brazilian, as its chief curator. I made the point that part of the issue may be differences in understandings of the museum’s mission that are linked to generational perspectives. This academic told me that I was wrong, that I had misunderstood, that the problem was race. I said I disagreed and held my ground. She has not spoken to me since.

Rodney had positive experiences as well, but it remains that a black critic with a doctorate in museum studies from the University of London, a book published at Routledge (2019), a Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize (2020), and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2022) had an opportunity to write thoroughly informed, racially aware art criticism, and the reaction was accusations of faithlessness and cluelessness by culture workers of color who were as well-positioned as him. That, and sotto voce support from allies described as “prominent,” but evidently not prominent enough to violate the omertà.

Rodney found out the hard way something that we dissidents have known from the beginning: that the politics that moved into the vacuum of art historical narrative are patently anti-criticism. They allow criticism in the dictionary sense, of political enemies real and imagined. But those politics forbid criticism in the sense that we care about, the literary act of seeing art truly, when it obliges the author, as it sometimes does, to remark upon the creative failures of artists whose politics and persons are deemed laudable.⁸

---

If visual art became post-historical in 1964, as Danto times it in conjunction with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, or 1984, when he said so, it was not yet postcritical. Important, useful commentary continued to appear into the 1990s: the last writings of Clement Greenberg and Donald Judd, Jed Perl’s first reviews for The New Republic in 1994, Robert Hughes’s American Visions (1997), and more. The pluralism was merely a condition of multiple roads being taken at once. Critics could deal with that using known paradigms. It is germane that in the ‘90s, liberalism in the sense of “left-leaning politics” was still connected to liberalism in the sense of tolerance, equality, individual rights, and market economics (however regulated). The ethos of the former sense I have come to call liberal progressivism, to distinguish it from the postliberal progressivism that abandoned the latter sense.

Art became postcritical in 2002 in conjunction with the first iteration of Art Basel Miami Beach. The fairs, offering themeless displays of art in quantities that no human could sensibly absorb in a five-day stretch, were immune to critique. Critics who should have known better lapsed into filing market reports, or contriving plotlines that reinforced whatever socially relevant complaint was on their minds at the time. Aesthetes came to feel like they were drowning in other peoples’ money. By 2007 Perl was sufficiently exasperated to write “Laissez-Faire Aesthetics” at TNR.

Amid the gold-rush atmosphere of recent months, however, something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money—a new attitude, now pervasive in the upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred. This has deep and complex origins; but when you come right down to it, the attitude is almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics.

The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now—think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes—believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other.

Which is the logical conclusion of Danto’s observation from ten years earlier “that there really is no art more true than any other, and that there is no one way art has to be.”⁹ Post-narrative art finally produced a side-effect: the lack of common narrative had devolved into a lack of common valuation. Any reaction to art was justifiable no matter how bereft of insight. “Laissez-faire aesthetics makes a mockery of nothing,” wrote Perl. “Even irony is too much of an idea.” The only judgments capable of transcending that kind of atomized solipsism are the numbers following the dollar signs.

In 2012 Danto wrote his “Letter to Posterity” (he died in 2013), evincing the conflation of artistic, political, and personal judgment that had become the default in the art world:

I am very grateful that I was not a conservative by temperament, and that I did not resist the revolution that was happening in art, though it had little to do with the art that made me want to be an artist in the first place. Nineteen sixty-four, as I mentioned, was the “Freedom Summer,” in which the boundary between blacks and whites began to be erased. In 1968, the antiwar movement exploded in the universities. It was also then that the modern feminist movement was launched, inspired by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, but even more by the recognition that discrimination against women was arbitrary. In 1969 came the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, and the beginning of gay liberation. What began as an overcoming of boundaries in the art world culminated in the overcoming of boundaries in political life everywhere. I take great pride that these movements were detonated in America, and especially in New York, and I am ashamed by the conservative reaction in America that has taken place in the past decades. I am an advocate of openness, in art, in politics, in sex, in life.

In 2014, deep into the second term of a president whose supporters had gotten into the habit of characterizing all criticism of the man as racism,¹⁰ Perl returned with these observations:

The trouble with the reasonableness of the liberal imagination is that it threatens to explain away what it cannot explain…. The rational mind, with its desire for logical equations, is upset by the idea that a great artist can be a bad person, and would perhaps prefer that the art also look bad, or at least be tainted. And behind this desire for a logical equation is the liberal imagination’s refusal to believe that art can lay claim to some irreducible mystery and magic.

Just as many had come to think that Obama had no sincere and moral critics, a cultured subset of them had acquired the impression that good art, good politics, and good character were a single project. This too fell out of the lack of common valuation in the post-historical arts. Everyone knows that a price tag is no indicator of aesthetic value when it comes to contemporary art, but when the nakedness of monetary value collides with the inscrutability of aesthetic value, in a time when the latter has no more significance than how you like your coffee, the former prevails. During the Obama years, when a certain attitude of progressive politics was adopted as a supposedly obvious good, dissent from which was wholly attributable to duplicity, stupidity, or evil, it likewise trampled aesthetic considerations.

It was a short hop from there to the claim in 2019 by Méndez Berry and Yang that, to paraphrase Animal Farm, all art experiences are equal, but some are more equal than others. Orwell, of course, was pointing out that it’s in the nature of egalitarian revolutions to corrode; the fight against oppression is finally found to require as much oppression as was present in the overthrown system. If anyone’s experience of art is equal to anyone else’s, then it’s a wash, from the standpoint of criticism, to replace a seasoned white critic with a newcomer of color. The value of such a gesture, like the high prices at the art fairs, was hardly aesthetically decisive, but it was at least apparent. The narrative of art may have concluded, but the narrative of postliberal progressivism that gained traction by then and turned virulent in 2020 - that its critics are all white bigots, white fascists, white ignoramuses, or race traitors of color - is going strong.

Again, ending does not mean stopping. Criticism will continue to be written in the postcritical era just as art continues to be made after Danto’s end of art. But one, following art’s example with respect to the philosophical turn, henceforth it will be written in light of its exogenous marginalization by big art world money and its endogenous marginalization by postliberal progressive politics. Two, the system is closed and the energy is running out. Criticism’s chief concern will be the policing of opinion, from which not even the Seph Rodneys of the world will be excused. The consolidation of three major American art glossies under one corporate entity indicates serious, maybe fatal dissipation of the critical project. To be candid, there are hardly any critics under the age of forty who are worth reading. Over the years AICA has made attempts to cultivate new critics, but they’re ineffectual and politically patrolled. AICA and the activity it represents have grown so irrelevant that Artnet just reported on a sculpture of a dog that uses AI to generate art criticism, which it dispenses via thermal printer out of its butt, and related its name, A.I.C.C.A. (purportedly for Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine), without appearing to get the joke.¹¹

There’s a hopeful possibility that The Monoculture has dedicated itself to policing opinion because it is cratering, and it knows it. In May I wrote about Alan Harrison,

[He] says, almost in so many words, that the purpose of the arts and their attendant organizations is to put aside their artistic visions and devote themselves to forcing everyone who questions the fairness, humanism, and sanity of DEI to survive in the margins. It’s not racial justice, it’s Stalinism in blackface. Harrison says that the organizations must adopt this pernicious ideology, or be destroyed. I say instead that any organization that adopts it deserves to be destroyed.

Harrison concluded his latest outpouring of hysteria in homage to my remarks:

People want their nonprofits to reduce and eliminate harm. If we have discovered nothing else by living in a pandemic, in a society of great upheaval, and in a world where the last fair election in the United States might have already happened, we have learned that the stakes for the arts have become so low as to only appeal to those who don’t have to worry about it. Donors donate so that donors may attend, the most elitist system one can imagine. Is what’s happening now similar to Nero fiddling while Rome burnt? Probably… unless there’s a way for a metaphorical 2023 violin to put out a metaphorical city-wide fire. Figure out that [sic] way to do that and you’ll get all the support you need. Don’t and you won’t get any. Deservedly so.

The stakes are low, as is obvious even to Harrison, because the arts are now fully postcritical and common valuation is impossible. Harrison’s demand that the nonprofits instead work “to reduce and eliminate harm,” or die, is the sort of thing Perl condemned almost a decade ago as “the increasingly utilitarian and mechanistic arguments that are made on behalf of the arts.” The Monoculture, thinking engagement beneath them and incapable of it anyway, picks up the language of its critics and hurls it back at them like a monkey. Harrison has even appropriated conservative fretting about election integrity. His lack of editorial flair aside, his is the voice of vehemence without confidence.

Harrison and his kind do not believe in the power of art as art. They don’t believe it because they don’t feel it. I do. I’m not alone. And we’re not the only ones who have noticed that something has gone wrong with the people and entities to whom we have entrusted culture, something that Harrison’s exhortations will only worsen.

The shared valuation that went on in the aforementioned Vasarian narrative may be unavailable today, but there’s an opportunity for a renewed individualism which recognizes that our responses to art are at once personal and communicable via humanity itself. We need not be the solipsistic consumers of laissez-faire aesthetics, scratching private artistic itches by trading money for art objects. Most certainly we are not the mutually inscrutable silos of identity that contemporary politics would have us imagine ourselves. Rather we are owners of our own persons and borrowers of the common nature from which we derive our being. The force of art lives in both aspects of ourselves, spanning them, at once affording individual delight and connection to a greater sphere of life.

While a history has ended, another may yet take its place. It is the responsibility of those living in the present to form it into the most satisfactory shape possible. How we might do so is an open question. Danto, with his typical optimism, called our era “a period of quite perfect freedom.” To me it seems far less than perfect. But it’s as free as one needs if not as free as one would like, and it’s ours.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.

1. From Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

2. “How Soon is Now” by The Smiths and “The End of Art” by Danto both appeared in 1984.

3. Archived here.

4. I’m impressed by the idea proposed by Matt Taibbi and others that the progressive totalization of the mid-teens, extending to the present, was engineered by those who benefited from the financialization of the 2000s continuing to the mid-teens. Concerns somehow transferred from those of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, which threatened the status quo monetarily, to concerns around racial justice, trans rights, and climate change that reinforce the sacrosanct nature of regime priorities and the associated piles of money.

5. After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 37.

6. See previous footnote about regime priorities and piles of money: the net worth of the Ford Foundation is $12 billion.

7. I maintain that Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang were and remain almost totally unfamiliar with both the Metropolitan Opera and Megan Thee Stallion.

8. Had Rodney been inclined to express as much dissent as

Kimi Katiti

or

Erec Smith

he could have found himself similarly marginalized from personhood of color. See “We Love ‘Lived Experience’...Until It Undermines The Narrative” by Katiti.

9. After the End of Art, p. 34.

10. It’s worth remembering how hard the legacy media worked to establish that impression. From 2008 (“Ugly election incidents show lingering US racism,” Reuters) to 2016 (“The racist backlash Obama has faced during his presidency,” the Washington Post) they ran story after story airing the view “that race-based antagonism is so endemic to the American way of life that it will take more than the election of a black president to move the country beyond its long traditions of racism and discrimination,” as the WaPo put it.

11. I run an alternative organization, the Art Critic Alliance, which for many reasons art critics should join instead. Spread the word to your circles.