Call-Response-Release

How do you review the arts?
For me this question only leads to more questions. First of all, what are the arts? Should it be how do you review culture? And furthermore, why do we need anyone to review it?

This may sound cliché, but art can be anything and everything. From the exhibit at the A+D gallery at Columbia College, to your masterfully designed toothbrush with the tongue scraper on the back, the romantic mid-life crisis comedy flick, or perhaps even the pile of bricks next to the sidewalk on Broadway. It’s all art. This may be somewhat of a post-modern stance, but where we sit today as a society we are gradually reducing our reality and culture to a greater discourse of abstraction.

In 1980, Hans Haacke wrote that “purely visual art is increasingly unable to communicate the complexities of the contemporary world,” recommending, “hybrid forms of communication, mixture of many media, including the context in which they are applied as signifiers.” So I believe the role of the critic is to evaluate the success to which the art piece is conveying the intended message; and his job is to break down the signifiers and try to communicate the context of the piece.

How I review the arts is best explained in this quote from Lucy Lippard’s writing, “ The Lure of the Local.” “‘Call, response, release’- as a metaphor for the communicative art process, from society to artist to community. Connection of people and places, with the artist as medium or catalyst, comes first.” The role of the critic in reviewing the arts is to give their response to the art piece and artist, to dispense the context, and to describe the extent to which it is successful. Of course this opinion is purely subjective, but a critic develops an analytical eye and a format for reviewing that a normal art-goer may not possess.
“The criteria for art and for public interaction diverge so drastically that the education of public artists and their publics (including their critics)-together-is crucial.” Yet, sometimes people don’t see it as crucial because it could be argued that a critic’s opinion is just another stance on the artwork—but I truly think anyone can benefit from differing viewpoints.

So when I personally review the arts I’m trying to let the public know the straight info and facts on the piece, exhibition or show, along with what the exhibit is trying to do or convey, and to what extend it succeeds or fails. With this basic outline the critic is also entitled to slip their opinion in as well. They respond and then release. But if only it were as simple as it sounds. Critics have a lot of power; they can come together and make a nobody someone, or do just the opposite and knock a well-known, famous artist off their pedestal.

Without the critic in our world I think art in our society and culture would not posses as high of quality because there wouldn’t be a critical eye scrutinizing it, and the public would be less informed as a whole of the art world and lack any guidance or introspect into artists and their works. We need critics. So I will leave you with this simple quote from John Bergers, “Ways of Seeing;” “everything we see and read about art requires an expectation.”