How to write art criticism
What's in a painting, or any artwork for that matter?
In the course of writing my last piece, Conservative Eye for the Woke Guy (which is about how art can be seen from a conservative point of view), I waded into the territory of art criticism, a place I have not visited for many years.
It made me think it might be useful here to provide an outline or guide to art criticism for those who are interested in writing about art, or those who are just interested in developing how they look at and think about art.
Liking art and looking at art is great, but also different than writing about it. Writing is, as people here on Substack often say, a form of thinking. You learn while you are writing. You learn what you know and what you don’t. You do research to fill in the blanks (or if you’re like me, you make stuff up). If you are persistent and lucky, you maybe come up with an original idea or way of looking at things.
When it comes to art, there is merit to writing about it even if only recreationally. It causes you to think about what you are seeing and to find out how you feel about it.
Five elements of good art criticism
Generally you want to cover the following:
You are going to, usually, show a picture of what you are reviewing so you don’t have to describe it. Get right into it.
Precedents - Most artwork is related to other art; it’s part of something, a style or movement. Quite often there is other artwork from the present or not too distant past that is a lot like the work you are looking at. It’s important to point this out. Later it can become part of your interpretation (step 5 below); you can compare the artwork you are looking at to that other artwork.
Context - No artist works in a vacuum. Every artwork is “informed” by the artist’s situation. Sometimes it is explicitly part of the artwork (art about where the artist works or lives or where they have travelled or who they hang out with). More often it is implicit, artists who live in the country vs. in the city focus on different things, different kinds of experience, artists who are engaged in particular movements or causes or hold certain beliefs may drag that into their work, for better or worse. Where the art is seen or intended to be seen can be part of it too. Some work is intensely private, other work is made for showing in gallerys, museums or outdoors to the general public.
Technique - This is about the materials of the artwork and the craft of the artist. Most artwork fits within well-established sub-disciplines, often called “media,” like painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, installation. Much work today is “interdisciplinary”, meaning it combines different media, painting and photography, or performance and film for example. It’s not that interesting to read about or talk about unless there’s something remarkable about the technique or the craftsmanship.
Art History - Most artists see themselves in an historical line. Painters may, for example, do landscapes, which has a long history from the Renaissance to modern times. Or portraiture, or abstraction. They may paint loosely, expressively, or in a very controlled and detailed way. Here it is important to pinpoint as best you can where the artist is coming from. Are they painting delicately like the impressionists, more dramatically like the post-impressionists or post-post-impressionists (not a real category. I just made that up. See!)
If you can say something about each of these things, you will start to develop an appreciation for the work. You will feel some confidence about your judgement. You may already have started more or less subconsciously evaluating it: “Yes, it is a landscape painting in the style of impressionism but he really hasn’t done a very good job of it.” or “Yes, its abstraction but it’s done in way that is entirely different than anything I’ve seen before and I like it!”
Which brings us to the core of art criticism, interpretation.
Interpretation - This can be simple or complex. You might look at a painting like Las Meninas, shown at the top of this post, and see a room filled with people dressed in ornate, ancient costume, surrounding a little girl who is special, she is in the centre, brightly lit, in a white dress. You would not be wrong to think she might be a princess. She has attendants.
This picture captures what court was like at the time that the artist, Diego Velázquez, painted it in 1656. It is like a documentary. Nothing is happening, there is no “story” being told. It is a princess with her attendants, a matron, a playmate, her dog, in a room with the court artist and a few other people in the background.
Royalty in those times often retained an artist in house to paint portraits of individuals and the royal family that they could hang in their dining rooms to show off their status and also to preserve their legacy. It was part of history making.
So you might stop here and say, “Aha, so that is what it was like back then.” That is the simple explanation of the painting without digging too deep or searching for meaning.
But the fact is, Las Meninas is the most analyzed painting in the entirely of art history. Digging deeper, taking more time, you might consider things like how the artist painted the scene, who is in the light and who is not, where they are standing, how they are dressed, their expressions. All these things have an effect. They tell us something about how the artist felt about that situation and those people. They also tell us what the artist wanted us to see and understand about the situation. This is how complex interpretation begins.
Art critics and art historians over the centuries since it was painted find Las Meninas fascinating because it is not a typical court painting of that time or of any time for that matter. Most notably, the artist has painted himself in the scene. And not just in the scene, but working. The scene includes the artist painting a painting. In art jargon terms, it is “self-referential”, meaning it a painting about painting.
You might well ask:
Why has the artist taken the unusual step of painting himself into the painting?
And then, if you look at everything in the painting again, you may find more and more questions:
What is the artist painting on the very large canvas that we see only the back of? It is a bit large to be a painting of the princess. And it is not placed where it would be if he were painting her, between himself and her. And he’s not even looking at the princess, he’s looking out at us, the viewers. Is it the back of the very painting we are looking at?
Why is the artist looking at us, the viewers instead of at his presumed subject, the princess?
Why is there a mirror behind him and who is in the mirror? (Historians believe it is the King and Queen, so that is perhaps who Valázquez would want us to think he is looking at. The are outside the frame, standing where we are.
Why is the princess all aglow in the centre of the image but also looking out at us (or her parents the King and Queen)? Are we, the viewers (or the King and Queen in our place) competing with the princess for attention?
And who is that in the background on the step. Why are they peering into the scene? Are they leaving or entering?
Velázquez has created not only a fine painting of a somewhat casual day at work in the court, which is remarkable idea in itself for the time: it is less a staged scene of royalty and more like a documentary or cinema vérité. But more than that, he has created a puzzle. The very idea of an artwork creating more questions than it answers, reflecting on itself and the artist in relation to us, the viewers (put in the position of King and Queen) is very modern. The painting speaks to us today the same as it would have to Velázquez patrons at the time, spanning the ages. (A good and readable review of the complexity of Las Meninas can be found here.)
The puzzle solved
Spoiler alert: Las Meninas is a bit like a whodunnit, the answer to the puzzle is as follows: (Skip this part if you’d rather come up with our own answer.)
Valázquez has painted a picture of himself painting a portrait of the King and Queen, who are only present as reflections in the mirror. The back of the painting we see is the portrait he is painting. Instead of showing us that picture of the King and Queen (the picture he no doubt is being paid to produce) he is showing us what the King and Queen see. This is their life.
It is an unportrait, or a portrait if you will. It shows us everything except its subjects. For Valázquez to conceive of such a thing is indicative of at least two things.
First, there is the assertion of the artists’ power and privilege to paint whatever he wants. Velazquez was of noble heritage himself and highly regarded for his talent. But imagine what the King and Queen might have thought, “But where are we, where is the portrait we thought you were painting!?!” The audacity.
Second there is the position of the Princess. Five years old at the time, Margaret Theresa was the only surviving child of King Philip IV and his queen Mariana. Known as the Infanta, she would grow up to marry Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. Placed and lighted as she was, in the spill over light that would be on the King and Queen sitting in front, you could say she is the future of this royal family.
I think it would be fair to say also that the painting tells us something about what Valázquez thought of royal families and the Court. There is no symmetry. The image is disorganized, happenstance. And as mentioned before it is like a slice-of-life documentary. Perhaps this reflects Valázquez feelings about what is important, daily life over pomp and circumstance, the household and not the monarchs. That’s a pretty radical point of view.
Why bother with art criticism?
The job of the art critic is two fold; to explain the work (what it is) so others can see it clearly, and then, to interpret it (what it means) to help them think about it, thereby enriching their experience.
Art criticism helps us to see the artwork better. It notices things, details about the work we might otherwise overlook. And it comes from an educated place; it can put the artwork into a context that we might not have known about or considered.
Art criticism also places the artwork in the context of thought as such. It can show us, as the complex interpretation of Velázquez’ Las Meninas does, how artists see themselves and their position in society, what they think of the world around them, and also how they conceive of art as a tool for communicating with others, their patrons but also the viewers, both then and for centuries to come.
These matters of interpretation blend together into what is very much like philosophy. So it is hardly surprising that there are things like art theory and a branch of philosophy for aesthetics. Nor is it surprising that artists are revered for their work; a lot of knowledge and thought as well as experience is built into the work of art.
The more carefully we look at art, the more we learn and our lives are enriched by the experience.
A course in art criticism
It occurs to me to ask, if you find post this interesting, whether you would like to try your hand at art criticism, and if so, whether you would like some help. Please leave a comment or message me privately to discuss.
The conservative eye
To pull this post into context with my series on conservative aesthetics, if art is philosophical, so is politics. Not always and not in the same way, but both disciplines are usually rooted in a way of looking at the world.
Conservatives and liberals, we are told, look at the world very differently. I agree, though in practice, they by-in-large do the same things: build, manage and prosper; they just go about it very differently, and that can of course have enormous consequences for everyone around them.
In my last post, I argued that any artwork can be looked at and valued from a conservative perspective; it depends on what you are looking for and what you can find in the artwork. I think it’s important to try because liberalism is teetering under the strain of ideological fracture; theory is overlaying reality with fictions that are unstable and untenable, so it is important to look to conservatism for grounding.
In my last post I talked about Peter Schjeldahl, long time art critic at The New Yorker. Schjeldahl didn’t care for trends, he wrote what he knew to put a particular artist or artwork or exhibition in context. He had a quirky but entertaining approach and sometimes shocking ideas, but his writing was always superb. More than that cannot be asked of a critic.
I called Schjeldahl a conservative even though the magazine he wrote for regularly, The New Yorker, is generally regarded to be a liberal publication. I called him a conservative because he wrote about the mainstream, the A-list artists and the big shows at the museums in New York. His palette, if you will, was conventional, the artist’s mastery of his medium and his or her importance in relation to art history. He said some outrageous things, but he did not reach far out, he was not experimental. He painted good, decent pictures with his words.
If you are wanting to try writing art criticism, I’d suggest you start there. Capture something about the work you are talking about. Look at it carefully. Try to make a decent likeness. As someone famous once said, “Start anywhere.”
Thanks for reading. Next up I’m working on a review of Beyoncés song Texas Hold’Em and her turn to country.