The Dove of Criticism

At drinks after an off-off-Broadway play with the playwright and director, the conversation turned to the critics. So-and-so from New York Magazine had been in the audience that night. The New Yorker critic had canceled. The New York Times piece was out already. The playwright felt the review had been blasé, lukewarm at best—and since this was his first play produced after eighteen months in COVID-19’s grip, lukewarm felt downright icy. The director agreed, and said that something was missing in all of the theater reviews in that day’s paper, namely any nod whatsoever to the collective ordeal that we culturati, conversing in a heated plywood box built on a Brooklyn curb, felt was more or less over. Now, business as usual felt forced—critics could see their shows and write their reviews—and the bland reception of that fact called into question whether critics were glad to have survived.

Granted, good criticism is contemporary. But is it the critic’s job, post-COVID, to shunt every minor work into the pandemic’s frame? In the theatre world, a positive review in the Times drives a theater production’s ticket sales, and it makes sense that artists might expect critics to bow in the direction of their symbiosis. But visual art criticism is different. Here, art collectors take their picks on a private plane, shielded from casual visitors and critics alike, and insulated from the effects of reviews—in fact, any review, good or bad, blasé or raving, is more or less a notice, only a weak variable in the investment calculus of “buzz.” And anyway, most reviews publish after the show has closed.

Will there be art during the pandemic? Yes: there will be art about the pandemic. But the best COVID-era shows I’ve seen haven’t named the virus, which, after all, is only one more embroidery on the pattern of regular traumas. I’m glad to be writing reviews again. I never really stopped. Meanwhile, by summer of 2020, galleries large and small in Los Angeles and New York had lost no time banding together to build online “platforms”—Gallery Platform LA, sponsored by a bank; and simply Platform, underwritten by a megagallery. For once, even the cool galleries posted their prices. These websites are rafts on the sea of time, maybe; not stages so much as desperate efforts to survive the latest wreck. Also, as they float on, tacit acknowledgements that the waters won’t recede any time soon. Oh, but the dove of criticism carries yet its olive branch, pointy end down, eyes on the rainbow.

To mark the re-release of this popular title—with two additional contributions—we have republished this text by Travis Diehl.