As far as talking points for a Monday go, one can do a lot worse than Edward Winkleman’s self-professed Quick-Cliche question this morning on the value of negative criticism as opposed to no criticism at all, a notion coincidentally yet sagely examined in Joanne Mattera’s highly useful Marketing Monday post for today. To quote Ed, who in turn quotes Oscar Wilde:

They say the opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is ambivalence. You actually have to care a lot about something to hate it. And as Wilde would note, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

As someone frequently identified - sometimes accusingly, sometimes with a certain delight depending on the person - of being a harsh critic myself, the question being posed there-and-there is worth examining here, particularly since I’m quite committed to the belief that any manner of negativity is intrinsically more valuable than none whatsoever. Art has its tender moments, true, but that old adage of ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’ just doesn’t hold any weight here.

Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598. Oil on canvas, 56 3/4 x 76 3/4 inches. Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Antica, Rome.

In context, it even seems a silly or wrong sort of question given that most criticism-of-criticism discussions these days are more likely to accuse the critic of not being critical enough, and there is certainly cause to believe that much published criticism these days flinches from devoting valuable word-space to negative opinions. But that’s a thesis for another day, and probably not a Monday at that, and the present question does seem to extend itself beyond written criticism towards a wider receptivity of art in the public eye. To borrow the key question from Ed again:

As much as artists hate it when someone hates their work, clearly there’s something to it for anyone to even care that much, no?

To which I would say yes, but also no. Often, the ’something in it’ that prompts me to invest time and thought in ‘negative’ criticism is very much a question of what could have been in it: its potential for improvement or the change that can come from refusal, which I would identify as ‘constructive’ rather than ‘negative’ criticism. I write criticism because I love being with and looking at art. That’s the sort of love that’s the opposite of ambivalence, where hate is something of a bitchy, sword-weilding handmaiden to love. The ’something in it’ that makes me say anything at all is a love for a tradition in which people will continue to create art in the first place. Sometimes, the ’something in it’ is less about the object of criticism and more about art itself. I wish a work were better because I care about art, and not about you.

This is both a function of my dual condition as both a practicing artist and critical writer, and it also reveals the inherent subjectivity of such judgments in the first place - my own opinion as a maker of what would improve a given work is merely that, an opinion. Joanne Mattera has it right when she says that any artist has the final choice to accept or reject the validity of any negative feedback they may receive, and gaining experience in receiving and parsing that sort of feedback is a great asset to any artist who would aim to improve their working practice. I say that even after going through the sort of critiques at Glasgow where leaving a jar of Vaseline on display for certain visiting critics became a standing joke, and wrapping up crit days by snarling and/or sobbing into pints of Guinness at the local pub was practically scheduled into the curriculum. It didn’t kill us, but… well, you can fill in the rest.

Share This

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « ReMix Institute Phase II Hits Hamilton Next Month
• » Three Reasons Why Power Brokers are Bad for Art

• BROWSE / IN 2 Criticism Education
• « On “Being included in revised versions of art history”
• » The dubious value of art education