Rosalind
Krauss, David Carrier, and Philosophical Art Criticism
ROSALIND
KRAUSS AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ART CRITICIM: FROM FORMALISM TO BEYOND
POSTMODERNISM, by David Carrier. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group,
2002, 144pp.
More difficult to
do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular
error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do
it.
— Oscar Wilde
Art criticism is a mixture of observation and fantasy.
—David Carrier
"Talking about a thing" is a difficult task. But when that "thing"
happens to be the visual arts in the twentieth century, it is a supreme
challenge, in part because criticism — like the art it addresses —
has few rules and even fewer standards. Therefore, the critic must make
them up as she goes along. This leads necessarily to two phenomena; first,
the critic devotes as much, if not more, creative energy to establishing
his critical standards as he does to interpreting art; and second, given
the fact that each critic is left to do what is right in his own eyes, no
one is ever really happy with the so-called "state of criticism"
for the critic feels that she is the only one left to proclaim the truth
in the face of apostasy and crisis. This perceived sorry state of affairs,
however, is often the very stuff out of which the best art criticism and
art of the twentieth century has grown.
Daniel A. Siedell
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
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