Rosalind Krauss, David Carrier, and Philosophical Art Criticism

Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to beyond Postmodernism, by David Carrier. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, 144pp.

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.

Oscar Wilde

Art criticism is a mixture of observation and fantasy.

David Carrier

"Talking about a thing" is a difficult task. But when that "thing" happens to be the visual arts in the twentieth century, it is a supreme challenge, in part because criticism — like the art it addresses — has few rules and even fewer standards. Therefore, the critic must make them up as she goes along. This leads necessarily to two phenomena; first, the critic devotes as much, if not more, creative energy to establishing his critical standards as he does to interpreting art; and second, given the fact that each critic is left to do what is right in his own eyes, no one is ever really happy with the so-called "state of criticism" for the critic feels that she is the only one left to proclaim the truth in the face of apostasy and crisis. This perceived sorry state of affairs, however, is often the very stuff out of which the best art criticism and art of the twentieth century has grown.

The early twenty-first century has held true to form. For an example ofthis recent rich and robust literature of complaint and crisis, see Raphael Rubinstein, "A Quiet Crisis," Art in America (2001): 39-45; Hilton Kramer, "Painting is Dead? Please. Down with Dumb Critics," New York Observer, 11 August 1997): 1, no. 28. Mark Van Proyen, "Art Criticism: Where's the Beef?"The New Art Examiner 28, no. 10 (July-Aug. 2001): 60-61;103; Mark Van Proyen, "Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism," October 100 (Spring 2002): 200-228; and Hal Foster, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002). If critical consciousness is, as Edward Said stated in the epigram of Foster's book, "an unstoppable predilection for alternatives," then criticism is alive and well in the contemporary art world for we definitely have alternatives, alternatives for what to address in a work of art, how to address them, and for what purposes. Art critics must write criticism, then, with their own normative framework for what criticism — as well as art — should be. A critic produces — and must sustain — a world of values, standards, and meaning. And any analysis of art criticism must take that into account.

One of these many critical alternatives is offered in David Carrier's Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism, which focuses sustained attention on the most influential critic since Clement Greenberg.Carrier's sensitive and insightful study attempts to account for Rosalind Krauss's success. It also underscores the fact that art criticism is a literary genre that refers as much to its own tradition as it does to the art it engages. But this book is not merely about Krauss, it is also about the author, for "philosophical art criticism" is Carrier's construct and, as I will argue, a more accurate description of his own critical project than Krauss's.

Along with fellow Harvard graduate student Michael Fried, Krauss was one of the first of the new breed of art critics who came to prominence in the 1960s as graduate students under the influence of the rediscovered and revived Clement Greenberg.See Amy Newman's analysis of this in Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000). They sought to give contemporary art and criticism the same historical and theoretical weight as the great masterpieces of art and interpretation they were studying. The publication of Greenberg's Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press...