Massive Influence of Art Critics

While working on our recent art presentations, I realized that prominent art critics can have massive influence on contemporary art movements and the careers and reputations of artists.

In the early 20th century, the English critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) was a highly effective champion of Post-Impressionism, and did much to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain. His 1910 exhibition called "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" attracted much criticism for its iconoclasm. He vigorously defended himself in a lecture, in which he argued that art had moved to attempt to discover the language of pure imagination, rather than the staid and, to his mind, dishonest scientific capturing of landscape. Fry's argument proved to be very influential at the time, especially among the progressive elite. Virginia Woolf remarked that, "in or about December 1910 [the date Fry gave his lecture] human character changed." During the 1950s in Britain, the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway (1926-1990) made his name by coining the term Pop Art, before settling in New York to become a curator at the Guggenheim and art critic for The Nation.

In the US, Clement Greenberg (1909-94) was instrumental in popularizing Jackson Pollock and other exponents of Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Greenberg, who was probably the most influential art critic in the 20th century, fervently believed in the necessity of abstract art as a means to resist the intrusion of politics and commerce into art. This belief is shown in his 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Greenberg believed that avant-garde arose in order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste perpetuated by the mass-production of consumer society, and saw kitsch and art as opposites. One of his more controversial claims was that kitsch was equivalent to Academic art: "All kitsch is academic, and conversely, all that is academic is kitsch." He argued this based on the fact that Academic art was heavily centered in rules and formulations that were taught and tried to make art into something learnable and easily expressible. He later came to withdraw from his position of equating the tow, as it became heavily criticized. Although he championed avant-garde art, Greenberg saw modern art as an unfolding tradition, and by the end of his career he found himself attacking what many others saw as avant-garde art—Pop and Neo-Dada—against the values he held dear in earlier modern art.