ABSTRACT
Term given to writing focused on the appreciation, analysis, and judgement of the value of artworks. In this respect, the production of art criticism – while certainly overlapping with some of the concerns of art history – involves a specialised concern and set of interests. Before the twentieth century, however, art criticism and art history did not exist as clearly separate practices (much less as discrete disciplines or fields taught in universities). The notion of any professional distinction between being an art critic and an art historian was not possible either until probably the early to mid twentieth century. Since the 1960s, however, criticism has been joined by other kinds of writing about postmodernist and contemporary art not focused on evaluative judgements of aesthetic^ quality: political criticism, cultural commentary, and art theory have been some of the names given to this much broader area of discourse. The emergence of the modern art critic, and of criticism as a
particular practice of thinking and writing, was closely related to the development of art in France in the c. 1850-90s. These first critics – in the sense recognisable to us – wanted to find ways to emphasise the differences between contemporary artworks and those in the museums that had begun to seem to them locked into a definitely concluded past. So the stress in the writings of, for example, Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, and Ste´phane Mallarme´, is on how the newly produced paintings of artists such as E´douard Manet and the impressionists highlight the characteristic and yet fleeting experiences and meanings of Parisian modernity. Manet represents, for example, his own (but typical) experiences of the contemporary city – its urban bustle, commercial encounters with strangers, his own friends and social occasions (see e.g.: Portrait of E´mile Zola (1867); The Railway (1873), Boating (1874), The Bar at the Folies-Berge`re (1882)). These works constitute, Mallarme´ remarks, ‘an original and exact perception which distinguishes for itself the
things it perceives with the steadfast gaze of a vision restored to its simplest perfection’. This type of criticism, however, certainly had a historical
perspective – as many painters of the ‘1863 generation’ had been trained in a traditional, if by then residual^ academic^ manner often including references to the art of the past in their works – but the primary purpose of their writing was to account for the look, meaning, and importance of the new art that they saw in the Salon exhibitions, and in the other, recently established, places that displayed
paintings by Manet and the impressionist artists with whom he became associated by the mid 1860s. Since then, and for the next century, orthodox art criticism centred on the critic’s personal experience and response to seeing artworks: attempting to (1) describe and analyse their formal attributes; (2) relate them to their producers’ lives and to the wider world; and (3) say whether, and why, these works were good or bad. Notions of beauty, convention, morality, creativity, influence, modernity and social^ function – amongst others – have been closely bound up with these judgements made by the mainstream critics in the twentieth century who descend from Mallarme´, Baudelaire, and their contemporaries.
