Integrity and the Critic

Friendship and honesty when writing about culture

The Art Critic (1919-20) by Raoul Hausmann

Have I ever told you about my secret nemesis? There was a journalist who reviewed exhibitions for a local paper and it felt like each month they would hand out five-star reviews to their friends without ever declaring a conflict of interest. Maybe all the shows were worthy of five stars, but not acknowledging a relationship with the artists showed a lack of integrity.

Such things are typical in the incestuous and vain world of contemporary art, where entire careers can be made by a few curators, dealers, gallerists, and administrators. If you fall out with the wrong person it can have catastrophic consequences for your livelihood, no matter how good is your work.¹

Am I a utopian meritocrat for believing that you should only praise things as excellent if they actually are excellent? Maybe. For who of us can really say we know what is beautiful? How arrogant to believe that I have access to the truth. Aren't all these things relative? Maybe. We lack an authority to pass judgment on who is acting truthfully and who is lying for their own gain. Even so, I do know that a critic is not worth reading if they don’t demonstrate some integrity.

Olivia Laing at the University of Glasgow

Olivia Laing, at her recent University of Glasgow talk, confessed that she didn’t like to write about living artists because it is hard to be truthful when you know people might get offended. Social awkwardness is a strong motivator to be genial, especially now when words are searchable and egos are built on ‘likes’. Far better to wait until the person is on the slab so you can dissect their oeuvre in peace.²

What happened to the independent critics of old? Where are the reviewers whose weekly column gave them a jester-like position to tell the truth without reservation?

I suspect what happened is that media conglomerates got big enough to blacklist outlets for negative coverage, forcing writers to submit to the publicity circus. Withering reviews can occasionally be found on Amazon, but they aren’t as common as you might think and often seem to conveniently disappear. And, whilst anonymous scores on Rotten Tomatoes can still lead to striking divergences in critical opinion, aggregated ratings are subject to abuse.

Twenty-odd years ago, no-holds-barred reviewing was quite common. When I moved to London in my early twenties, I was enthralled by Brian Sewell's demolitions of the YBAs or whoever else had an exhibition that week. Whatever else you thought of him or his views, at least he wasn't being kind in order to get invited to parties.

Brian Sewell had dogs for company rather than sucking up to artists

AA Gill was similarly vicious when writing about bad restaurants:

To say the food is repellently awful would be to credit it with a vim and vigor and attitude it simply can’t rise to. The bowls and dishes dribble and limp to the table with a yawning lassitude. A vain empty ennui. They weren’t so much presented as wilted and folded to death. It was all prepared with that most depressing and effete culinary style—tepid whimsy. Tell me, off the top of your head, what two attributes should hot-and-sour soup have? Take your time. It was neither. Nor anything else much.

Most people don't go to posh restaurants, so these reviews are written more for entertainment than information, but the damage can be real. Bad reviews can haunt a restaurant for years even when the menu is totally different.

AA Gill collecting the third (and last) Hatchet Job of the Year award in 2014.

For TV, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn column in The Guardian was entertaining because he punched up at mainstream celebrities. It ended when he became mainstream himself and because people tend to soften once they realise how hurt people can be by such pieces. Nicky Campbell, for instance, was in bed with depression for days after seeing a section on the TV version of Screen Burn, Screenwipe.³

Martin Amis wrote book reviews with the ethical exactitude of someone committed to an idea of canonical greatness. Crucially, he used people's own quotes to convict them. But even Amis relented, writing in his introduction to The War Against Cliché: “enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember.”

When you are sitting behind a keyboard, tapping away, it is sometimes difficult to believe that your actions have consequences. It is bizarre that by stringing together a few words you can ruin someone's day, like magic.

When I ran a webzine, I was something of an integrity fundamentalist and wrote things that I now deem cruel and unnecessary. The worst example was when I wrote about one of my favourite bands of the era, Luxembourg.

I remember being dismayed by the cover to their single Luxembourg vs Great Britain and wrote an almost sociopathic review about it. These were people I got on well with and I cringe that I wrote about it in public rather than mentioning it in private, as I’d hopefully do now. I think on some level it was a rebellion against the prison of being nice, to assert the primacy of honesty above all else. I thought that praising the Emperor's new clothes was going to lead to the end civilization.

A part of me still believes this. He who knows the truth and keeps silent is committing a sin. An artist friend, K, was outraged recently that a hairdresser in Italy casually defrauded the taxman by ringing up less money on the till than they charged her. It didn't even occur to me to be surprised — this kind of low-level tax evasion is so ubiquitous in Mediterranean countries. But she was right to see it as a slippery slope toward total corruption. Isn't the same true with criticism? By being silent about the bad aren’t we allowing ugliness to spread?

1. At the apex of the art world is a cabal of administrators: people with good salaries and stable jobs who lord it over thousands of impecunious artists who fight it out amongst each other for the occasional grant. The average graduate gets a couple of years where the art world is vaguely interested in them, after which they either stay poor, get a ‘real’ job, or live the dream of getting a mid-level admin position in an arts organisation.

2. It is difficult to offend the dead, although in Scotland a man was almost jailed for a tweet about Captain Tom and another woman decided to make a point about climate change by pouring excrement on one of Captain Tom's monuments. At a time of all-out culture war, it seems even the dead are subject to the friend/enemy distinction.

3. Nicky Campbell is notable for being sensitive to criticism. On The Spirit of Staircase, the podcast I did with Antony Murray, we featured a brief section on Nicky Campbell’s autobiography and within days had an email from the man himself asking us to remove things from the recording.