The Shiniest Shoes in the Graveyard

AICA-USA makes the news in a bad way as the profession of art criticism implodes. I'm here to help.

Iron Maiden, video still

A remarkable article appeared days ago at the New York Times, “Art Critics: Next Endangered Species?” Subheadline: “A dispute within AICA-USA, representing art critics, reveals the widening rift between the dream of being a culture writer and shrinking job opportunities.”

Questions about the future of art criticism and how it might survive another season of layoffs and corporate mergers have dogged the International Association of Art Critics, a nonprofit organization based in Paris that represents more than 6,000 art writers worldwide including some 500 critics, art historians and scholars in the United States.

Six board members — nearly half its leadership team — have resigned in recent months from the organization’s American chapter, with most citing its failure to enact a diversity plan that members had supported since the George Floyd protests in 2020. The plan included award and fellowship opportunities for writers of color, as well as a revised mission statement reflecting the organization’s commitment to social justice.

There is a lot to unpack here, but first, some disclosure: I worked for AICA-USA as its Digital Communications Officer in 2016 and 2017. I will discuss no specific people or organizational details from my tenure - everything I say here, I say only as a former member.¹ Also, I now run an alternative entity, the Art Critic Alliance, which offers a beautifully designed press credential for a one-time fee of $54, in contrast to AICA, which offers a junky-looking press credential for an annual fee of $115. So I am not disinterested, though my formation of the Alliance stems from longstanding and publicly stated criticisms of AICA.

Key to understanding the Times article is the translation of this sentence:

Seven U.S. members said that tension between conservative leaders of the group in Paris and liberal critics in America had thwarted progress on diversity initiatives.

To this:

Seven U.S. members said that tension between liberal leaders of the group in Paris and progressive critics in America had thwarted progress on diversity initiatives.

The leadership in Paris has no conservatives.² Like most American arts benefactors, they too are working to minimize white men in their proceedings to the point of preclusion. But in contrast to the Americans, the European progressives have not completely abandoned class issues, they have a significant contingent of left-nationalists, and they remain cognizant of the need for the open exchange of ideas - that is, liberalism - in order for art and criticism to flourish.

I interacted with European culture sector bureaucrats when I did my Fulbright in Vienna. I can attest that they’re not eager to adopt American progressive racial priorities, which are not as universal as many Americans believe them to be. Their diversity efforts are chiefly concerned with economic access, and involve the inclusion of Romanians and Slovenians and other poorer³ enclaves of Europe. The ideological homogeneity in the American institutions, with people getting punished for disagreeing with the associated racial orthodoxy, reminds many of them of the Stasi. It is not difficult to imagine them on the receiving end of the USA chapter’s DEI committee’s demand for the organization to rewrite its mission statement, and saying to one another, pfeh, Americans.⁴

AICA-USA’s lack of interest in a revised mission compares with its lack of interest in its extant mission, which I have been imploring the organization to mind since the Philip Guston debacle in 2020. At the time I addressed Noah Dillon, then co-chair of AICA-USA’s Professional Issues committee and a member of its board, regarding the urgent need to establish a Task Force on Censorship, Cancel Culture, and Iconoclasm. Ten other signatories on that letter reinforced the sentiment. I have learned from this Times story that Dillon resigned from AICA-USA last year. He observes that “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”

Back in the summer of 2020, when members of AICA-USA had a message board with which they could communicate with one another, discussion took place regarding a petition initiated by John Corso-Esquivel, “AICA-USA Must Hire an Independent Anti-racism Consultant.”

AICA-USA members have continued to use its member's listserve to promote deep-seated racist beliefs and an environment hostile to critics of color. AICA-USA has proven unequipped to counteract this longstanding, institutionally-hosted racism… Some of AICA-USA's membership has deployed racist, hateful speech masquerading as a legitimate debate about the role of race in the discipline. AICA-USA must stop using its infrastructure to give voice to this thinly veiled white supremacist hate speech. It is time for AICA-USA to reimagine itself as an agent for equality, equity, and anti-racist change.

There’s no journalistic need to expose the details, but I will say for the record that I was involved in the exchange on the listserv that prompted this petition, and the claim that anyone expressed “hate speech” or endorsed white supremacy, even tacitly, is claptrap. The petition was nothing short of an attempt to crush dissent from the progressive narrative concerning the upheavals of that summer, and it succeeded.⁵ I bring it up to note that I commented on the listserv regarding the petition (this is from June 2020):

Art criticism hasn't paid for itself in a long time. Instead it relies on academia and journalism gigs. Academia has long been expecting, if not really preparing for, a demographic bomb expected to go off in 2026, when all the babies that weren't conceived in the wake of the 2008 recession don't go to college. People are talking seriously about half of all colleges closing in the next decade. And that was before COVID shut the schools down. What's going on in journalism at the moment is nothing short of wholesale slaughter. One in eight museums may not reopen. One in three galleries may not reopen. The younger collectors are fewer and spending less money. The ensuing landscape, as I wrote recently for the AICA-USA magazine, is engendering technological solutions that look roundly bad for the art critics. Art will endure forever. Art criticism sometimes looks like it's due to expire on Monday morning.

And now someone is demanding that this organization hire an "independent anti-racist consultant" - an organization that does not have a development officer. Whether you support this politically or not, from a financial standpoint it is bonkers. It is setting us up to have the shiniest shoes in the graveyard.

The board looks like it's going to have a difficult meeting tomorrow. I hope it engages in some responsible threat assessment, taking not just the tragic events of the last couple of weeks into account, but the whole dismaying panorama. I would encourage both the board and the members to put some thought into the state of the field and ask themselves how they can contribute to its health. As always, I sincerely wish everyone the best.

While the institutional and commercial collapse did not turn out as badly as was feared, the economic environment with respect to art criticism only worsened since then. Maybe AICA-USA will listen to the New York Times:

…the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.

While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs. In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant. (National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )…

Even jobs that blur the line between criticism and advertising are rarely secure. During the pandemic, Sotheby’s stopped publishing most of its glossy catalogs that appear before each auction season. The company had employed dozens of writers and editors to produce those volumes; now, it has just two editors split across New York and London.

Because they sure didn’t listen to me in March 2019:

1. Patrick Deneen is correct, at least in outline, that liberalism is a victim of its own success and has resulted in social and existential atomization across the board.

2. Responding to this disenfranchisement, left-liberalism has admitted socialism and identitarianism to live within its gates.

3. Thus much of what goes on in the name of left-liberalism is in fact an illiberal exercise of some kind. This goes for the overwhelmingly left-liberal and progressive art writers as much as anyone.

4. The art writers blame racial disconnect (and other identitarian concerns) for problems that are caused by a political disconnect of far greater magnitude, and write accordingly.

5. The audience, already bewildered and now only more so, steps cautiously away. Periodicals that would support art journalism and art criticism, periodicals already under gargantuan fiscal pressures, put their dwindling resources elsewhere.

6. Art writing becomes an increasingly niche pursuit, turns into an even better-insulated echo chamber, starts again at Step #4, and repeats until all the full-time positions are gone and the alternative publishing projects can no longer sustain themselves.

As I have been saying for four years and counting, art criticism has a diversity problem - a political diversity problem. Consider it: someone verified by research that in a country that’s 70% white and 36% conservative, the profession of art criticism is 80% white and less than 1% conservative. The fortunes of that profession faltered, thus obliging its practitioners to consider why they’re out of sync with the wider world. And they concluded that they really need to do something about their somewhat unbalanced racial representation, and not their comically unbalanced political representation.

But it’s even more absurd than that. I was trying to get the organization to do what it says on the label, “acting on behalf of the physical and moral defense of works of art.” Meanwhile they gave out one Distinguished Critic Lecture appointment after another to Not White Men, going back more than a decade. They established an award in memory of Irving Sandler and gave it to a black writer. The entire philanthropic landscape had shifted to favor women and people of color in a manner that was openly discriminatory. But AICA-USA’s race progressives were demanding that the organization create still more award and fellowship opportunities for critics of color, and rewrite the mission statement to “[reflect] the organization’s commitment to social justice.”⁶ When the organization took those demands to an expert on nonprofit management, with the obvious intention of implementing them in a responsible fashion, the race progressives interpreted it as a stalling tactic and quit.

The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming. So leaders behind the diversity action plan were frustrated when AICA-USA hired an outside consultant, Buff Kavelman, to review their work.

“It felt like a feet-dragging exercise,” said Rodney (he is also a New York Times contributor).

AICA-USA still does not have a development officer. The economic environment for the profession is melting. So they did what arts organizations do these days, which is to invite a black woman on the board “to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.”

[Jasmine] Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine… runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)

Amussen said the nonprofit model has allowed Burnaway to experiment with art criticism through summer writing boot camps and a recruitment effort to bring untraditional writers into the magazine’s digital pages. Recent contributors included a landscape architect, a rap scholar and a comic illustrator. Widening the appeal of arts writing is the goal.

“I’m in the art world because there is no other option for strange people who want to write about cultural things,” Amussen said in a phone interview. “And I worry that if something isn’t done to remind people why art and criticism are important, then the industry won’t survive.”

In this instance I’m in favor of the move. Burnaway is a solid product. Ms. Amussen wants to provide a good reading experience to a wider audience. She represents another form of diversity sorely needed in the organization, namely geographic diversity. She writes skeptically. She seems to understand representation as a means to an end, to send the signal that art is important, which is the case of diversity initiative that I support.⁷ She sounds like a more beneficent presence than Seph Rodney.

There is nevertheless a question of how widely her success can be duplicated, or if it will rub off on AICA-USA by virtue of proximity. I founded Delicious Line as a nonprofit because even in 2017, it was clear that the market for art criticism was cratering. But now white men are having trouble garnering support from the post-George Floyd philanthropic system at the organizational level as well as the individual level. One nonprofit leader in the world of journalism tells me that he now has to argue to funders that the work of substantive change is slow, his team of two people can’t diversify because it can’t afford to expand to three, and if they don’t support his efforts on their merits now, then he’s not going to have an organization to diversify later.

Possibly the only viable model for a new art criticism publication at the moment is to put a woman or a person of color, preferably both, at the helm of a 501(c)(3) and seek grant money. This situation is self-evidently unsustainable, and all but guaranteed to express ever-narrower politics to an ever-shrinking audience. I am once again obliged to mention that we haven’t even hit a proper recession yet.

The valuable difference of perspective between Amussen and much of the rest of the remaining board inheres not to race, but to age. The boomers came up at a time when art magazines were paying living wages and academic careers were relatively plentiful. Amussen has experienced her whole career as an editor since then, reliant on drumming up supporters and canny grantwriting.

I’m tempted to entertain the idea that half of AICA-USA’s board quitting over stalled DEI reforms is a net good for the organization. It demonstrates that the postliberal progressives are implacable and have no goals except diversity for diversity’s sake. Their departure is an opportunity to re-found the organization on the humanistic exchange of ideas and the universal value of art.

Thus freed, AICA-USA can finally direct its efforts into mitigating the field’s economic challenges. The organization is in a position to use its reputation to establish its own network of nonprofit funding. It could become a kind of clearinghouse for support of art criticism publications - obtain disbursements from the Ford Foundation, for instance, and distribute them to a portfolio of niche art criticism publications featuring a diverse range of perspectives with respect to race, gender, geography, politics, class, and any other aspect of human experience you could name.

A benefit of membership could be access to resources for nonprofit management: education, even training, to turn writers into publishers in the current reality of art criticism. Members who didn’t have such ambitions could be connected, as writers, to those who do. Board members chosen to replace the recently resigned ones should be selected from writers and editors who, like Amussen, are attached to publications that were started in the last fifteen years and can bring with them the associated organizational knowledge. Just as Burnaway has an incubator program for new writers, AICA-USA could start an incubator program for new magazines.⁸

That’s an organization I would join. After all, I already have a press credential. It’s really nice.

This proposition may in fact be hopeless. Art criticism, I’m convinced, can’t advance more than the art of its time. I know of no one who thinks that American art circa 2023 is the best art of its whole history. We don’t even have distinct movements anymore. But one might as well kick off those shiny shoes and pull on something with a steel toe. And old bit of wisdom from the American frontier counsels that if you’re going to die, die with your boots on.

1. As of 2023 I have not paid membership dues for two consecutive years. According to the organization’s rules, 2024 will entail not a renewal, but a reapplication.

2. The Times seems to have made no effort to reach them for comment.

3. That is, formerly communist.

4. The Times does not make clear whether the demand was for the USA section or AICA International to rewrite its mission. How Paris thwarted the USA section’s diversity efforts is wholly unexplained.

5. AICA-USA shut down the channel in late June of 2020, announcing, “After much consideration AICA-USA’s board has voted to temporarily suspend our internal members listserv. We heard from many members who felt that the discussions that took place were often counterproductive and created an environment hostile to collegial dialogue. We observed personal insults, racist rhetoric, and other insensitive uses of this resource to an extent that makes it necessary to seek alternatives.” It was never seen again and the alternatives never appeared.

6. I wish that the signatories had published their resignation letter in full somewhere, because I would like to know whether they wanted to get rid of that “acting on behalf of the physical and moral defense of works of art” business.

7. I’m entirely in favor of diversity efforts as a means to discover talent and worth. I’m against them as ends in themselves, by which they become parodies of racial justice and only make the systems in which they’ve been deployed look rigged.

8. AICA-USA also has, or had, a kind of incubator program for writers in the form of the Art Critic Mentoring Program. Unfortunately its coordinator was Lilly Wei, and Wei, too, resigned from the organization last year.