It is a curious fact that mediocre exhibitions are much easier to write about than good ones. The dim light cast by second-rate works of art is sufficient only to illuminate their immediate surroundings, which is to say the conventional ideas and economies on which they depend for their value. Great works, by contrast, are sometimes so blinding that it can be impossible, on first encounter, to make out clearly what they signify. The history of criticism is strewn with the corpses of writers unfortunate enough to have been commissioned to review the debut of a masterpiece.
As even the weakest work of art sheds a light, so one responsibility of the critic is to identify—or at least speculate intelligently upon—what it reveals to the viewer. A vision of the future, or merely a repackaged version of the present? The naked truth, or a platitude dressed up in dazzling words and forms? Does it show us what the artist or their representatives want us to see, or something else entirely? To put it another way, might an exhibition that aspires through lyrical gestures to reconcile humans with nature, as John Douglas Millar recently wrote, instead “unwittingly trace” through its banality “the expansion of the globalized art market”?
John Berger insisted that “imagination is not, as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent; it is the capacity to disclose that which exists.” 1 It is not to claim equivalent status for criticism and art to point out some shared characteristics between the two projects: a casting around for what is real by the unreliable glow of one’s own (and others’) intelligence. The critic must, like the artist, establish the set of principles that will serve as their compass in this search: that bad art is always sentimental, for example, or that good art is incompatible with despair. By these means they grope their way forward.
These instruments must sometimes lead them away from the brightly lit squares in which opinions congregate. And it might be that this tendency distinguishes those who are committed to the search from those who would prefer to be at the center of the crowd. As an artist whose only desire is to be acclaimed in the present is doomed to historical insignificance, so the critic who seeks the affirmation of their peers should always be discounted. They are anyway doomed to obsolescence: for the unconscious recapitulation of received ideas, we can now rely upon artificial intelligence.
Indeed, judgments that stand alone are often the most revealing. In the review from which the above quotation is taken, Berger dismisses an early painting by Jasper Johns as “the most extreme example of [a] gimmick mentality” according to which “each artist has desperately searched for some little novelty of his own […] to mass-produce and market.” It might be that Berger wasn’t able to see the reality that Johns’s now-acknowledged masterpiece portended, or it might be that he rejected it. To read the review now is to be reminded that a critic should not be judged according to their ability to predict what comes to pass, as if they were trend forecasters seeking only to profit from the markets, but in their willingness to light ways forward that accord with their commitments. Whether anyone follows is another matter.
John Berger, “The difficulty of being an artist,” in Permanent Red (London: Verso, 2025), 46.
