Criticism, Again

he stakes of criticism have drastically changed since ’s 2015 issue on the topic. The increased visibility of the output of artists, writers and curators who’d been marginalized by the art world has shifted its cultural landscape in a handful of years. The demographics have evidently changed, but have the power dynamics? And how has the practice of criticism, and publishing as an industry, responded? The 2019 Whitney Biennial featured more BIPOC and womxn than previous iterations, but initial reviews from predominantly white critics dismissed much of the work for its derivative lack of aesthetic “radicality,” and evaluated it according to the Euro-American canon. In response, critic and author of (2019) Antwaun Sargent tweeted: “The consistent voices at [] and everywhere else are entirely white. It’s 2019 and we are in the middle of a Renaissance in [B]lack artistic production. And you are telling me the best people to evaluate that are the same article “The Dominance of the White Male Critic” (whose calls for established white critics to step aside in order to make room for those voices predictably instigated whitelash). A few months later, a piece by a white reporter reiterated age-old stereotypes about Inuk artists working in Cape Dorset. Indigenous artists and journalists called out its peddled trauma-porn tropes, and furthered the dialogue on representation in publishing.