Image by Kelly Sikkema.

This essay is for Hakim Bishara

Recently various commentators, myself amongst them, have pointed to the present crisis of art criticism. Some older publications have been rebooted or even closed, and there is general awareness of the severe financial problems facing writers. Thanks to gentrification, the traditional role of the independent intellectual has become increasingly difficult. And, given the problems faced also by our academic institutions, especially in the humanities, it’s obvious that their ability to support critics is limited. The practical problems now facing critics are very difficult.

I certainly don’t have any dramatic, upbeat answer to these questions. And I don’t want to pretend that practical financial concerns are unimportant. As I’ve occasionally noted in my publications, I was (and am) able to write criticism without much concern for the marketplace because I was a tenured professor of philosophy, now safely retired, in good institutions. That such positions are becoming rarer means that I am not a good role model. Here, however, I want to change the subject completely, and focus on why I (and, I believe, also some other scholars) write criticism.

For as long as I can remember, forty some years now, more than half of my lifetime, I have been enchanted by the romance of doing art criticism. I go to an exhibition, and with the aid of a handout or catalogue, I look at the art and compose a narrative. That process never fails to excite reflections. My personal background is in academic analytic philosophy, and so I tend to describe this process by contrasting the activity of a philosopher. When you have some philosophical issue to discuss, you need to read the literature and identify some important concern not previously dealt with adequately. In........

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