I hate to criticise an article that I largely agree with from an author I admire, but there's a few things here that can't be left to stand.
You say criticism is happening in coteries, social niches and geographic pockets....and your touchstone is dance criticism centered in southern New York, a niche within the nicheiest place on Earth.
The cultural boom in the 50s didn't happen by accident, or simply as a result of the interests of a resurgent middle class. The Cold War was a least partly a cultural war, and this era marks perhaps the only time the US government has taken a serious interest in cultural affairs.
Saying criticism "arose" during the Romantic era erases the line of Enlightenment thought, from Dryden through Pope to Samuel Johnson, from which English criticism, if from anywhere, actually arose. And Johnson did not eschew tradition - nor biography.
This brings me to your Columbia professor. I hope, had I encountered his question, that I would have had the courage to write "Go to Hell" as my whole answer. I hope as well that we have gone beyond the belief that "tradition" and "Great Books" impose some kind of obligation on us. You do not have to like Moby Dick. And reading Shakespeare or Goethe will not, by default, make you a better person; deeply literate societies have shown absolutely no propensity to greater kindness of action or empathetic reason. 19th century Britain and 20th century Germany serve as enough evidence of that.
Now, of course, it would be nice if people still read Melville and Shakespeare and Goethe, but it would also be nice if critics could articulate precisely why that would be nice. You say criticism has become moralistic, but then also want readers to be "worthy" of art. Which is it? Do you want a return to aestheticism, or are you simply arguing for criticism to teach different morals from what's dominant at the moment?
I am tired of the idea that we should study literature and art and music "because" it leads to something else, some other good. It's precisely this kind of instrumentalism that is bracketing all of our mundane lives, and there should be a place reserved for something that's useless. Art for art's sake - no, knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We need to study these things for the same reason we study black holes; they are unusual, they contain hidden combinations of forces we barely understand, and at their centre is something completely inscrutable.
Almost perfect. The only purpose of critics is to take out the garbage and to point to the MAGIC — “the être” in art’s “raison d’être. “Fascinating, “intriguing” and “new” is B-tier art-adjacent.
Great piece. Indeed, the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion--turning critics into moral scolds--is largely responsible for this decline of truly enlightening, aesthetic art appreciation. As far as art itself goes, the purely mercantile functions it has been subsumed into erode artistic greatness. Visiting Art Basel Miami last month offered a pretty depressing spectacle. The overwhelming majority of contemporary art exhibited/on sale there was either trivial or incompetent and certainly uninteresting, with very few exceptions. We've set the bar incredibly low. But instead of simply bemoaning this state of affairs, I appeal to all good souls who believe in the intellectual and aesthetic values that William expounds here to do something active to promote merit-based art in all of its manifestations.
It began long ago, when art dealers started dumbing down the market to expand the number of sellable pieces. Andy Warhol was happy to oblige. Hardly a light in the darkness, was he?
This is a wonderful piece! Thank you for adding to my depression. But I am still optimistic. Some good things are happening in film and even dance— eg Alvin Ailey and writing itself. Some of the new generation are arting up. But please keep on us!
Thank you for writing this article. I found it very beautiful. Three thoughts:
>> When I was in my twenties I read somewhere that the art critic Walter Pater had proposed that criticism is – or at least can be - an art form in its own right. That might not be something Pater actually said or believed, but either way, the idea permanently, radically altered the way I read and the way I experience art. Before that I thought of high culture as a walled garden, something you look at from the outside, something brightly delineated, something serious, something tended by an aesthetic priesthood, something external you studied or consumed, something apart. But when I considered that our response to art is central to the artist’s work and even a kind of echo of it, an aesthetic act in its own right and therefore itself expressive, the garden walls collapsed forever. When we are lucky and open and available art is a place where we participate. Critics, at their best, both demonstrate and enable this magic at its peak. I know dance only very superficially and I haven’t read any of the dance critics you reference in your article but it seems lovely to me that writing, the most permanent of all human creations, might stretch “dance’s very evanescence” out past the performance, past the run, past the dancers’ working lives, indefinitely really.
>> The water through fingers image is marvelous, but sometimes the memory of a dance stays with you forever. I saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform one time. It was in 1988 at the Joyce Theater near Chelsea, part of the New York that I imagine you are conjuring back in your essay. I was young, not familiar with modern dance, and yet the whole thing was a wonder to me. Strangely, one of the dances which I felt at the time to be difficult and less accessible or pleasurable than the ones I most enjoyed, is fixed so sharply in my memory that I will never forget it, while only faint recollections persist of the dances I found most moving. In a piece titled “Odysseus” or something close to that, a male dancer stood center stage wearing a pleated skirt-like garment. He faced sideways to the audience and stood almost perfectly still on one straight leg while his other leg – also straight - swung slowly forward and back over and over so that it moved the pleated skirt like a fan or a slow oar. The sense of a man making a lonely journey was astonishing. I didn’t “like” it exactly but at some emotional level it made Odysseus more real to me than he had been after all those hours I spent reading the Odyssey. I never forgot it and I never will. “My” Odysseus became the Odysseus of that performance.
>> A sadness for the world which is dissolving or has dissolved under us already seems right but it does seem to me that there is a renewal built into the human spirit which simply hasn’t yet found its form in the human space now so shaped by technology. High culture arises to address persistent and unanswerable questions humans face. We don’t know what it will look like yet, and you do make a nod to some of the possibilities in your essay, but I sense your discouragement. I wonder if earlier generations have not lived through comparably pessimistic moods. I think of Europe in the 1930s because I know a little about it but there are surely other periods which have experienced cycles of decline and rebirth. We just don’t yet know what shape it will take. If you have not come across it I highly recommend Martin Gurri's book "The Revolt of the Public." More persuasively than anyone I have read, Gurri distinguishes what is happening to fragment our shared experiences, undermine our institutions, and push our culture into a state of great disequilibrium. Gurri makes no predictions, except to observe that in comparable past periods of disruption new institutions and new stabilities have always followed. It is likely that our chaotic period will follow the same pattern and return to some sort of stability where a new iteration of high culture will arise.
I’d long hoped someone would take up the topic of decline in arts criticism. It’s something one senses but struggles to pin down, give words to. You identified the disease and the cause, and provided a beautiful history of arts criticism in the process. Thank you!
Recently I’ve been reading an anthology of Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays, a little bit at a time. Her prose is so fine, her observations so precise, yet I find myself depressed more than enamored. Where to find such literary sketches these days? Can we discuss past figures in arts and culture without the heavy glasses of presentism? Where can emerging writers learn by reading, or try their own hand?
I read some NYRB, NYT, and WashPost, and follow a handful of really great Substack newsletters. I’m heartened by the writing and dialogue of this platform, and by its potential to keep arts criticism alive.
Yes, this is indeed a beautiful piece - beautiful because it’s true.
I think that everybody needs to stop thinking that art needs to be justified, or that being driven to absorb art is some kind of elitist preoccupation. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, the history of civilizations is not told by statistics but by literature. And by all art. Because it’s ALWAYS immediate when you’re directly engaged with it.
On a somewhat less lofty level, I wonder how anyone finds good music these days. It seems like such a desert but i'm sure there is good music being made How do you find it? Swift and Beyonce suck all of the oxygen out of the air. When I was a kid there were lots of DJ's on WNEW (and WQXR for that matter) who could always point you in the right direction.
Back when I lived in NYC I once had lunch at a table next to Stanley Crouch and Nat Hentoff. Now THAT was some interesting eavesdropping. I wonder if that happens anymore.
Tremendous piece of commentary. Yes, yes, and yes to every point Deresiewicz makes here, except for one: "Criticism, not coincidentally, arose with Romanticism, at the dawn of modernity and in the age of revolutions, when, for the first time, artists sought not to work within traditions but to break them and to break with them." Is it fair to present artists of the pre-Romantic era as handmaids to tradition in this wholesale way? I'd argue that artists like Shakespeare and Cervantes, the great Baroque composers, the artists of the Italian and northern renaissances, and many other practitioners and movements going back to antiquity could be every bit as revolutionary (and in some ways more so) than those of the Romantic era. But this is a minor quibble and in no way impinges Deresiewicz's larger argument.
This is an excellent piece. Thank you. I wonder if the decline of dance/theatre/art/architecture critics in the publications is a result of people not reading complete articles anymore. And culture now seems to be about headlines, fast takes, movies, tv series, musicals, and Taylor Swift & co. Thank you for reminding us of the rest. I miss it.
Art without a space in which it echoes is indeed under threat. I would like to thank the author for his warm-hearted words and hope so much that his words will be echoed in turn.
I hate to criticise an article that I largely agree with from an author I admire, but there's a few things here that can't be left to stand.
You say criticism is happening in coteries, social niches and geographic pockets....and your touchstone is dance criticism centered in southern New York, a niche within the nicheiest place on Earth.
The cultural boom in the 50s didn't happen by accident, or simply as a result of the interests of a resurgent middle class. The Cold War was a least partly a cultural war, and this era marks perhaps the only time the US government has taken a serious interest in cultural affairs.
Saying criticism "arose" during the Romantic era erases the line of Enlightenment thought, from Dryden through Pope to Samuel Johnson, from which English criticism, if from anywhere, actually arose. And Johnson did not eschew tradition - nor biography.
This brings me to your Columbia professor. I hope, had I encountered his question, that I would have had the courage to write "Go to Hell" as my whole answer. I hope as well that we have gone beyond the belief that "tradition" and "Great Books" impose some kind of obligation on us. You do not have to like Moby Dick. And reading Shakespeare or Goethe will not, by default, make you a better person; deeply literate societies have shown absolutely no propensity to greater kindness of action or empathetic reason. 19th century Britain and 20th century Germany serve as enough evidence of that.
Now, of course, it would be nice if people still read Melville and Shakespeare and Goethe, but it would also be nice if critics could articulate precisely why that would be nice. You say criticism has become moralistic, but then also want readers to be "worthy" of art. Which is it? Do you want a return to aestheticism, or are you simply arguing for criticism to teach different morals from what's dominant at the moment?
I am tired of the idea that we should study literature and art and music "because" it leads to something else, some other good. It's precisely this kind of instrumentalism that is bracketing all of our mundane lives, and there should be a place reserved for something that's useless. Art for art's sake - no, knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We need to study these things for the same reason we study black holes; they are unusual, they contain hidden combinations of forces we barely understand, and at their centre is something completely inscrutable.
Almost perfect. The only purpose of critics is to take out the garbage and to point to the MAGIC — “the être” in art’s “raison d’être. “Fascinating, “intriguing” and “new” is B-tier art-adjacent.
Great piece. Indeed, the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion--turning critics into moral scolds--is largely responsible for this decline of truly enlightening, aesthetic art appreciation. As far as art itself goes, the purely mercantile functions it has been subsumed into erode artistic greatness. Visiting Art Basel Miami last month offered a pretty depressing spectacle. The overwhelming majority of contemporary art exhibited/on sale there was either trivial or incompetent and certainly uninteresting, with very few exceptions. We've set the bar incredibly low. But instead of simply bemoaning this state of affairs, I appeal to all good souls who believe in the intellectual and aesthetic values that William expounds here to do something active to promote merit-based art in all of its manifestations.
Everything has to pass a political test to be shown at all
It began long ago, when art dealers started dumbing down the market to expand the number of sellable pieces. Andy Warhol was happy to oblige. Hardly a light in the darkness, was he?
This is a wonderful piece! Thank you for adding to my depression. But I am still optimistic. Some good things are happening in film and even dance— eg Alvin Ailey and writing itself. Some of the new generation are arting up. But please keep on us!
Thank you!
Thank you for writing this article. I found it very beautiful. Three thoughts:
>> When I was in my twenties I read somewhere that the art critic Walter Pater had proposed that criticism is – or at least can be - an art form in its own right. That might not be something Pater actually said or believed, but either way, the idea permanently, radically altered the way I read and the way I experience art. Before that I thought of high culture as a walled garden, something you look at from the outside, something brightly delineated, something serious, something tended by an aesthetic priesthood, something external you studied or consumed, something apart. But when I considered that our response to art is central to the artist’s work and even a kind of echo of it, an aesthetic act in its own right and therefore itself expressive, the garden walls collapsed forever. When we are lucky and open and available art is a place where we participate. Critics, at their best, both demonstrate and enable this magic at its peak. I know dance only very superficially and I haven’t read any of the dance critics you reference in your article but it seems lovely to me that writing, the most permanent of all human creations, might stretch “dance’s very evanescence” out past the performance, past the run, past the dancers’ working lives, indefinitely really.
>> The water through fingers image is marvelous, but sometimes the memory of a dance stays with you forever. I saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform one time. It was in 1988 at the Joyce Theater near Chelsea, part of the New York that I imagine you are conjuring back in your essay. I was young, not familiar with modern dance, and yet the whole thing was a wonder to me. Strangely, one of the dances which I felt at the time to be difficult and less accessible or pleasurable than the ones I most enjoyed, is fixed so sharply in my memory that I will never forget it, while only faint recollections persist of the dances I found most moving. In a piece titled “Odysseus” or something close to that, a male dancer stood center stage wearing a pleated skirt-like garment. He faced sideways to the audience and stood almost perfectly still on one straight leg while his other leg – also straight - swung slowly forward and back over and over so that it moved the pleated skirt like a fan or a slow oar. The sense of a man making a lonely journey was astonishing. I didn’t “like” it exactly but at some emotional level it made Odysseus more real to me than he had been after all those hours I spent reading the Odyssey. I never forgot it and I never will. “My” Odysseus became the Odysseus of that performance.
>> A sadness for the world which is dissolving or has dissolved under us already seems right but it does seem to me that there is a renewal built into the human spirit which simply hasn’t yet found its form in the human space now so shaped by technology. High culture arises to address persistent and unanswerable questions humans face. We don’t know what it will look like yet, and you do make a nod to some of the possibilities in your essay, but I sense your discouragement. I wonder if earlier generations have not lived through comparably pessimistic moods. I think of Europe in the 1930s because I know a little about it but there are surely other periods which have experienced cycles of decline and rebirth. We just don’t yet know what shape it will take. If you have not come across it I highly recommend Martin Gurri's book "The Revolt of the Public." More persuasively than anyone I have read, Gurri distinguishes what is happening to fragment our shared experiences, undermine our institutions, and push our culture into a state of great disequilibrium. Gurri makes no predictions, except to observe that in comparable past periods of disruption new institutions and new stabilities have always followed. It is likely that our chaotic period will follow the same pattern and return to some sort of stability where a new iteration of high culture will arise.
I’d long hoped someone would take up the topic of decline in arts criticism. It’s something one senses but struggles to pin down, give words to. You identified the disease and the cause, and provided a beautiful history of arts criticism in the process. Thank you!
Recently I’ve been reading an anthology of Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays, a little bit at a time. Her prose is so fine, her observations so precise, yet I find myself depressed more than enamored. Where to find such literary sketches these days? Can we discuss past figures in arts and culture without the heavy glasses of presentism? Where can emerging writers learn by reading, or try their own hand?
I read some NYRB, NYT, and WashPost, and follow a handful of really great Substack newsletters. I’m heartened by the writing and dialogue of this platform, and by its potential to keep arts criticism alive.
Yes, this is indeed a beautiful piece - beautiful because it’s true.
I think that everybody needs to stop thinking that art needs to be justified, or that being driven to absorb art is some kind of elitist preoccupation. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, the history of civilizations is not told by statistics but by literature. And by all art. Because it’s ALWAYS immediate when you’re directly engaged with it.
On a somewhat less lofty level, I wonder how anyone finds good music these days. It seems like such a desert but i'm sure there is good music being made How do you find it? Swift and Beyonce suck all of the oxygen out of the air. When I was a kid there were lots of DJ's on WNEW (and WQXR for that matter) who could always point you in the right direction.
Back when I lived in NYC I once had lunch at a table next to Stanley Crouch and Nat Hentoff. Now THAT was some interesting eavesdropping. I wonder if that happens anymore.
Tremendous piece of commentary. Yes, yes, and yes to every point Deresiewicz makes here, except for one: "Criticism, not coincidentally, arose with Romanticism, at the dawn of modernity and in the age of revolutions, when, for the first time, artists sought not to work within traditions but to break them and to break with them." Is it fair to present artists of the pre-Romantic era as handmaids to tradition in this wholesale way? I'd argue that artists like Shakespeare and Cervantes, the great Baroque composers, the artists of the Italian and northern renaissances, and many other practitioners and movements going back to antiquity could be every bit as revolutionary (and in some ways more so) than those of the Romantic era. But this is a minor quibble and in no way impinges Deresiewicz's larger argument.
Thank you. Just let me add that a failing culture precedes a failing State, since the former communicates the latter’s reason for being alive.
This is an excellent piece. Thank you. I wonder if the decline of dance/theatre/art/architecture critics in the publications is a result of people not reading complete articles anymore. And culture now seems to be about headlines, fast takes, movies, tv series, musicals, and Taylor Swift & co. Thank you for reminding us of the rest. I miss it.
So, thank you.
Art without a space in which it echoes is indeed under threat. I would like to thank the author for his warm-hearted words and hope so much that his words will be echoed in turn.
I just came here to mention Laura Jacobs, whose exhilarating dance criticism did so much for my appreciation of the art.