The Crisis of Criticism [Paperback]

Sharon Beder (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 1565844173 | ISBN-13: 978-1565844179

Not long ago, the fate of a film or Broadway show rested in the hands of the critics. Producers and directors could be found in Sardis opening night waiting nervously for the reviews in the late edition papers. A film would fail with a pan from Pauline Kael. An artist's work would instantly increase in value if celebrated by the right papers. But what is the purpose of the critic today? Are they the legislators of cultural tastes, or a conduit for the public's understanding of art? Why are these people entitled to dictate what is good or bad, and who is listening anymore? Maurice Berger assembles the top critics in each field to address the problematic nature of the critic's authority and responsibilities. Contributors include Richard Martin, bell hooks, Jim Hoberman, Arlene Croce, Wayne Koestenbaum, and others.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A collection of provocative, often insightful essays on the endangered state of contemporary arts criticism. Alarmed by critics' failure to act as aesthetic mentors to difficult new work, editor Berger, a senior fellow at the New School's Vera List Center for Art and Politics, has selected a diverse range of essays that speak to the challenges critics now face. Berger's contributors, Homi Bhabha, Arlene Croce, bell hooks, Joyce Carol Oates, and Wayne Koestenbaum, among others, all harbor profoundly different opinions on critics' responsibilities, and Berger highlights those contrasts by launching his collection with a now-infamous article by Croce. The dance critic for the New Yorker refused to see Bill T. Jones's Still/Here, about AIDS, and yet savaged it anyway, calling the piece a prime example of victim art. Jones, who is black, gay, and HIV-positive, had committed the apparently unpardonable act of including gravely ill performers; as a result, Croce considered his work to be undiscussable. And yet her dismissal provides the grounds for lively debate: Joyce Carol Oates and Homi Bhabha rebut Croce's points with verve and clarity. The collection benefits from such momentum; unfortunately, it isn't uniformly sustainedas when the subject changes to fashion, for example. On the whole, however, Berger has chosen contributors fearless enough to question the role of the critic in a society that has become increasingly hostile toward artists and their work and brave enough to implicate themselves in the failing of much art criticism. As he surely intended, their honesty supports his own argument for criticism that breaks through the constraints of adjectives to inspire, move, and incite the reader. Although Berger's outlook is grim, his collection offers the undeniable pleasure of reading intellectually stimulating arguments about the role of contemporary criticism. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 172 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565844173
• ISBN-13: 978-1565844179
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #954,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maurice Berger is a cultural historian, art critic, and curator. He is Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A student of the pioneering theoretical art historian, Rosalind E. Krauss, he completed a B.A. at Hunter College and Ph.D. in art history and critical theory at the City University of New York. He then turned his attention to race. One of the few white kids in his low-income housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Berger grew up hyper-sensitized to race. Due to his experiences, he looked beyond the world of "critical theory" to address the relevance of visual culture, and especially images of race, to everyday life.

Berger engages the issues of racism, whiteness, and contemporary race relations and their connection to visual culture in the United States. His study on institutional racism--"Are Art Museums Racist?"--appeared in Art in America. Berger has also curated a number of race-related exhibitions, including For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights--a joint venture of the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This exhibition examines the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States. It opened at International Center of Photography in New York in May 2010 and travels to the DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago), Smithsonian National Museum of American History (DC), Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (Baltimore), Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA) and other venues. For All the World to See was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the tenth NEH on the Road exhibition, an initiative that will adapt the exhibition in a smaller, lower security version and travel it to up to 35 more venues, mostly smaller and mid-size institutions across the country over a five year period from 2012 to 2017.

Berger is the author of eleven books on the subject of American art, culture, and the politics of race. His memoir, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) was one of the earliest books to introduce the idea of "whiteness" as a racial concept to a more general audience. The book was a finalist for the Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award of Boston University School of Social Work. Other books include: Masterworks of the Jewish Museum (Yale, 2004); The Crisis of Criticism (The New Press, 1998); Constructing Masculinity (Routledge, 1995); Modern Art and Society (HarperCollins, 1994); How Art Becomes History (HarperCollins, 1992); Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (Harper & Row, 1989). Berger's writing on art, film, television, theater, law, and the politics of race have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, New York Times, Village Voice, October, Wired, and Los Angeles Times. He has also contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies.

Berger is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts; book awards from the American Library Association, W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Harvard University, Boston University School of Social Work, and Benjamin L. Hooks Institute of the University of Memphis; curatorial honors from the International Association of Art Critics, American Section and the Association of Art Museum Curators; and a 2011 Emmy Award nomination for his work on the "For All the World to See" segment of WNET's Sunday Arts.

Berger has also been involved in a number of national and local initiatives around American race relations, visual culture, and education in the arts. From June 2002 to March 2005, he was Chairman of the External Advisory Committee of The Digital Library of The New York Public Library. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion, Columbia University (New York), Education Committee of Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Artistic Advisory Committee of National Foundation for Jewish Culture. He is the author of "The Crisis in Art Education," a white paper requested by President William Jefferson Clinton for his Committee on the Arts and The Humanities (1995) and a Position Report, The Future of the National Endowment for the Arts, requested by the Democratic National Committee for the transition team of President-elect Bill Clinton (1992).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essays question role of the critic and criticism, November 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Crisis of Criticism (Paperback)

Arlene Croce wrote a review of "Still/Here", a dance choreographed by Bill T. Jones and published it in the New Yorker. She had not seen the work but wrote the review to protest Jones' use of terminally ill persons in his work, men with AIDS. As might be expected, Croce's article provoked a storm of protest. "The Crisis of Criticism" grew out of the controversy over Croce's article. The book is a collection of essays about criticism itself and addresses the questions of the critic's role in modern culture. Berger reprints Croce's article and a long rebuttal by Joyce Carol Oates. But the best two essays are by Michael Brenson (Resisting the Dangerous Journey: the Crisis of Journalistic Criticsm), and Sarah Rothenberg (Measuring the Immeasurable). The Brenson piece focuses on the critics that most of us read (in The New Yorker, the NY Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal) and castigates them for failing to deal with the major issues of contemporary art. Interestingly, Brenson finds them all deficient in even acknowledging the controversy over the NEA funding which he thinks is "the intersection for almost every major artistic cultural issue..." The essay by Sarah Rothenberg is a wonderful description of the role of the critic and, by extension, the role of "high culture" in civilized society. She rejects the absolute evaluation of artistic creativity by the marketplace, i.e. financial success and fame as the business of artistic promotion and self-promotion, and asks that art "define itself by values of its own." The role of the critic is to be apart from the marketplace: "critical commentary in terms that are idealistic rather than utilitarian". Croce's original article, by reviewing a performance that the critic had not seen, led to a reevaluation of the role of the critic - something she really asked for anyway.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling essays on all the arts, not just visual, December 20, 2006

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Andrea (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Crisis of Criticism (Paperback)

I agree with the earlier rating of this book in that I found all of these essays exceptionally sharp. While the focus is the problematic nature of criticism at a particular time (the mid nineties), the contributors address larger questions which are still pertinent and motivating. Joyce Carol Oats and Homi Bhabha offer retorts to Arlene Croce's non-review (see summary below), Richard Martin writes about the sad (or nonexistent) state of fashion criticism, Jim Hoberman and bell hooks contribute excellent essays on film criticism, Wayne Koestenbaum considers the literary review, Michael Brenson admonishes contemporary art critics for not taking risks and writing reviews which are (in Baudelaire's words) "partial, passionate, and political", and the last entry is by Sarah Rothenberg and is on music criticism. This book would not only be interesting to aspiring writers or critics, but studio artists, historians, or theorists who seek to understand the function or purpose of criticism.

5.0 out of 5 stars Contents and authors, April 25, 2009

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Curupira (Salvador, Bahia Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crisis of Criticism (Paperback)

Introduction: the crisis of criticism (Maurice Berger)

Discussing the undisscussable (Arlene Croce)

Confronting head-on the face of the afflicted (Joyce Carol Oates)

Dance this diss around (Homi Bhabha)

Addressing the dress (Richard Martin)

The film critic of tomorrow, today (Jim Hoberman)

Why bully literature? (Wayne Koestenbaum)

Resisting the dangerous journey: the crisis of journalistic criticism (Michael Brenson)

Making movie magic (Bell Hooks)

Measuring the immeasurable (Sarah Rothenberg)