Mr. Elkins also reads widely and deeply. Though What Happened to Art Criticism? encompasses only the last 50 years (its focus being the here and now), Mr. Elkins' analysis is bolstered by an intimate knowledge of the history of art criticism-which figures, given that he is the chairman of art history at the Art Institute of Chicago. The 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot ("effectively the foundation of art criticism"), the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the English critic Roger Fry and "the stubbornly conservative" Royal Cortissoz, critic for The New York Tribune at the turn of the last century, have the same immediacy for Mr. Elkins as Janis Demkiw, a Canadian artist who wrote "play-pretend" cultural criticism for Lola magazine, and, closer to home, Jerry Saltz of The Village Voice and The New Yorker 's Peter Schjeldahl. For Mr. Elkins, art criticism is a continuum of voices speaking to (and against) each other over time.

How vital that continuum is, or has become, is another matter. "Art criticism is in worldwide crisis," Mr. Elkins' treatise opens. He describes art criticism as "diaphanous … like a veil, floating in the breeze of cultural conversations and never quite settling anywhere." At the same time, he writes that "[a]rt criticism is also healthier than ever … business is booming: it attracts an enormous number of writers." According to Mr. Elkins, art criticism is so healthy, in fact, that it's "outstripping its readers-there is more of it around than anyone can read." Enumerating the dizzying amount of venues for art writing-art-scene organs like Art in America and Artforum ; a "blur" of glossy art magazines like Tema Celeste and Modern Painters ; gallery catalogs and brochures; newspapers; the Internet-Mr. Elkins rues its general lack of character, ambition and (most notably) opinion.

The infamous survey of art critics conducted in 2002 by the Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program was hardly surprising to Mr. Elkins-"infamous" because the survey's findings confirmed what had long been obvious to devotees of the field: that aesthetic evaluation has become the least important and desirable component of a critic's job. "In the last three or four decades," Mr. Elkins writes, "critics have begun to avoid judgments altogether, preferring to describe or evoke the art rather than say what they think of it." The turn away from an "engaged, passionate, historically informed practice" is "an amazing reversal, as astonishing as if physicists had declared they would no longer try to understand the universe, but just appreciate it."

Mr. Elkins likens contemporary art criticism to a hydra with seven heads, each with its own particular (though not exclusive) set of characteristics; these include the catalog essay, the academic treatise, cultural criticism, the conservative harangue, the philosopher's essay, descriptive art criticism and poetic art criticism. Mr. Elkins has sharp things to say about each category.

There are, he explains, "compelling reasons to be wary of tapestries woven of recondite allusions"-this observation coming on the heels of a discussion of the "collaged succession of interpretive methods" as practiced by Rosalind Krauss, a model of academic criticism. Arthur Danto, art critic for The Nation and practitioner of the philosopher's essay, is on the receiving end of Mr. Elkins' shots, too. After reiterating Mr. Danto's well-known thesis-that the history of art ended in 1963 with Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes -Mr. Elkins dubs Mr. Danto's criticism " illegible " [italics in the original]: "He asks only that readers no longer take his art criticism as having historical force or interpretive power above or below any other critic's efforts-but how can that be anything other than wishful thinking?"

How much you agree with Mr. Elkins' commentary depends, to an extent, on whose ox is being gored. The ox most worthy of goring is descriptive art criticism. Of all the hydra's heads, it is the one that takes up most of his time and energy: "Art writing that attempts not to judge, and yet presents itself as criticism, is one of the fascinating paradoxes of the second half of the twentieth century." Mr. Elkins traces it to an array of causes-from the art market's need for hyperbole to the "institutional critique" typical of the radicals-for-life at the journal October , to the ongoing vilification of Clement Greenberg-and offers analysis of its proponents, among them Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times : "The new non-judgmental writing can be pleasant, but too often the pleasure comes from having escaped from the burden of historical judgment." This sentence fits Mr. Kimmelman to a T.

Mr. Elkins offers a set of guidelines for the rehabilitation of art criticism under the heading of "Seven Unworkable Cures"-a title that provides a clue as to where What Happened to Art Criticism? comes up short. Mr. Elkins is good at hashing out ideas, exploring their every facet, their failings and their benefits. He loves questions as well, savoring the possibilities inherent in merely asking them; the trouble is, he doesn't much like to provide an answer . Early on, he poses two good questions: "First: does it make sense to talk about art criticism as a single practice, or is it a number of different activities with different goals? And second: does it make sense to reform criticism?"

The answers to the first question are, for all intents and purposes, "not really" and "kind of." (You can almost hear the rustling of Mr. Elkins' shirt as he shrugs his shoulders). The answer to the second question is-well, let's let him speak for himself: "I do not think it is necessarily a good idea to reform criticism: what counts is trying to understand the flight from judgment, and the attraction of description."

Understanding is all to the good, of course, but sometimes a writer needs to take a stand or get off the pot.

Mr. Elkins' anticlimactic conclusion comes on page 80 of an 86-page book. He goes on to proffer three qualities that "most engage" him in contemporary art criticism: "ambitious judgment," "reflection about judgment itself" and "criticism important enough to count as history, and vice-versa." By this point, the reader is beyond caring what Mr. Elkins thinks. His fair-mindedness-beyond-the-call-of-duty puts in mind the old line about newspaper editors preferring one-handed writers-the less capable a writer is of considering the other hand, the more likely he is to get to the point. Mr. Elkins gets to the point- What Happened to Art Criticism? is full of them. But what he believes in, I don't know. He prefers chasing his own tail to figuring out which end of the dog will lead him out of the intellectual rut he's dug himself into. And yet anyone who cares about art criticism will buy Mr. Elkins' book and read it hungrily, after which it will be put on the shelf, remembered primarily for talking the talk but not walking the walk.

James Elkins Studies the Evidence

It's a bit daunting to sit down and review What Happened to Art Criticism? , a slim book by James Elkins that has recently undergone a second printing by Prickly Paradigm Press. Not because Mr. Elkins considers art criticism "very nearly dead" as a literary discipline. (There isn't a critic alive who hasn't, at one point or another, voiced a similar sentiment.) It's because Mr. Elkins is an uncommonly attentive reader. Throughout the book, he patiently and, at times, lovingly dissects the writing of a variety of contemporary critics, gauging the nuances of each adjective, metaphor and semicolon. Knowing that Mr. Elkins may be in the vicinity will compel any writer to firm up his craft-and watch his back.

Mr. Elkins also reads widely and deeply. Though What Happened to Art Criticism? encompasses only the last 50 years (its focus being the here and now), Mr. Elkins' analysis is bolstered by an intimate knowledge of the history of art criticism-which figures, given that he is the chairman of art history at the Art Institute of Chicago. The 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot ("effectively the foundation of art criticism"), the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the English critic Roger Fry and "the stubbornly conservative" Royal Cortissoz, critic for The New York Tribune at the turn of the last century, have the same immediacy for Mr. Elkins as Janis Demkiw, a Canadian artist who wrote "play-pretend" cultural criticism for Lola magazine, and, closer to home, Jerry Saltz of The Village Voice and The New Yorker 's Peter Schjeldahl. For Mr. Elkins, art criticism is a continuum of voices speaking to (and against) each other over time.

How vital that continuum is, or has become, is another matter. "Art criticism is in worldwide crisis," Mr. Elkins' treatise opens. He describes art criticism as "diaphanous … like a veil, floating in the breeze of cultural conversations and never quite settling anywhere." At the same time, he writes that "[a]rt criticism is also healthier than ever … business is booming: it attracts an enormous number of writers." According to Mr. Elkins, art criticism is so healthy, in fact, that it's "outstripping its readers-there is more of it around than anyone can read." Enumerating the dizzying amount of venues for art writing-art-scene organs like Art in America and Artforum ; a "blur" of glossy art magazines like Tema Celeste and Modern Painters ; gallery catalogs and brochures; newspapers; the Internet-Mr. Elkins rues its general lack of character, ambition and (most notably) opinion.

The infamous survey of art critics conducted in 2002 by the Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program was hardly surprising to Mr. Elkins-"infamous" because the survey's findings confirmed what had long been obvious to devotees of the field: that aesthetic evaluation has become the least important and desirable component of a critic's job. "In the last three or four decades," Mr. Elkins writes, "critics have begun to avoid judgments altogether, preferring to describe or evoke the art rather than say what they think of it." The turn away from an "engaged, passionate, historically informed practice" is "an amazing reversal, as astonishing as if physicists had declared they would no longer try to understand the universe, but just appreciate it."

Mr. Elkins likens contemporary art criticism to a hydra with seven heads, each with its own particular (though not exclusive) set of characteristics; these include the catalog essay, the academic treatise, cultural criticism, the conservative harangue, the philosopher's essay, descriptive art criticism and poetic art criticism. Mr. Elkins has sharp things to say about each category.

There are, he explains, "compelling reasons to be wary of tapestries woven of recondite allusions"-this observation coming on the heels of a discussion of the "collaged succession of interpretive methods" as practiced by Rosalind Krauss, a model of academic criticism. Arthur Danto, art critic for The Nation and practitioner of the philosopher's essay, is on the receiving end of Mr. Elkins' shots, too. After reiterating Mr. Danto's well-known thesis-that the history of art ended in 1963 with Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes -Mr. Elkins dubs Mr. Danto's criticism " illegible " [italics in the original]: "He asks only that readers no longer take his art criticism as having historical force or interpretive power above or below any other critic's efforts-but how can that be anything other than wishful thinking?"

How much you agree with Mr. Elkins' commentary depends, to an extent, on whose ox is being gored. The ox most worthy of goring is descriptive art criticism. Of all the hydra's heads, it is the one that takes up most of his time and energy: "Art writing that attempts not to judge, and yet presents itself as criticism, is one of the fascinating paradoxes of the second half of the twentieth century." Mr. Elkins traces it to an array of causes-from the art market's need for hyperbole to the "institutional critique" typical of the radicals-for-life at the journal October , to the ongoing vilification of Clement Greenberg-and offers analysis of its proponents, among them Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times : "The new non-judgmental writing can be pleasant, but too often the pleasure comes from having escaped from the burden of historical judgment." This sentence fits Mr. Kimmelman to a T.

Mr. Elkins offers a set of guidelines for the rehabilitation of art criticism under the heading of "Seven Unworkable Cures"-a title that provides a clue as to where What Happened to Art Criticism? comes up short. Mr. Elkins is good at hashing out ideas, exploring their every facet, their failings and their benefits. He loves questions as well, savoring the possibilities inherent in merely asking them; the trouble is, he doesn't much like to provide an answer . Early on, he poses two good questions: "First: does it make sense to talk about art criticism as a single practice, or is it a number of different activities with different goals? And second: does it make sense to reform criticism?"

The answers to the first question are, for all intents and purposes, "not really" and "kind of." (You can almost hear the rustling of Mr. Elkins' shirt as he shrugs his shoulders). The answer to the second question is-well, let's let him speak for himself: "I do not think it is necessarily a good idea to reform criticism: what counts is trying to understand the flight from judgment, and the attraction of description."

Understanding is all to the good, of course, but sometimes a writer needs to take a stand or get off the pot.

Mr. Elkins' anticlimactic conclusion comes on page 80 of an 86-page book. He goes on to proffer three qualities that "most engage" him in contemporary art criticism: "ambitious judgment," "reflection about judgment itself" and "criticism important enough to count as history, and vice-versa." By this point, the reader is beyond caring what Mr. Elkins thinks. His fair-mindedness-beyond-the-call-of-duty puts in mind the old line about newspaper editors preferring one-handed writers-the less capable a writer is of considering the other hand, the more likely he is to get to the point. Mr. Elkins gets to the point- What Happened to Art Criticism? is full of them. But what he believes in, I don't know. He prefers chasing his own tail to figuring out which end of the dog will lead him out of the intellectual rut he's dug himself into. And yet anyone who cares about art criticism will buy Mr. Elkins' book and read it hungrily, after which it will be put on the shelf, remembered primarily for talking the talk but not walking the walk.

read the work of his predecessors. It can also at times be exhilarating, even

inspiring. Examples of high intelligence, shrewd judgment and excellent prose

command respect as well as envy. They may even serve as models to emulate. But

the all-too-frequent instances of parochial taste, hidebound prejudice, political log-rolling and moldy prose leave one in no doubt

as to why criticism is not a universally beloved enterprise.

Sill, it isn't only the worst criticism that has been found

to be offensive. The writers whom posterity now regards as some of the greatest

critics of visual art-John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, Félix Fénéon, Julius

Meier-Graefe, Roger Fry and, closer to our own time, Fairfield Porter and

Clement Greenberg-were all driven by strong convictions and controversial

opinions, and thus were bound to offend the pieties of their readers. (Porter

and Greenberg, both of whom I admire, were often fiercely at odds with each

other.) Moreover, it is virtually an iron law of cultural history that critics

who are too easily pleased tend to be easily forgotten. As the Victorian critic

Walter Bagehot wrote in 1856: "Let it be remembered, that the business of a

critic is criticism; that it is not

his business to be thankful; that he must attempt an estimate rather than a

eulogy."

I have lately been reminded of all this in reading through a

new anthology called Brushes with

History: Art of The Nation , 1865-2001 ,

edited by Peter G. Meyer, with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto. This volume,

scheduled for September publication, is drawn entirely from the pages of The Nation , which, from its founding in

1865 to the present time, has accorded art criticism a conspicuous place in its

cultural coverage.

Brushes with History purports

to bring us the best that The Nation

has published in this field over the entire course of

its history. In a collection that runs to more than 500 pages, it was not, of

course, to be expected that every item would be a critical masterpiece, and it

isn't. Much of what's been collected in the book isn't even criticism, but

rather reportage, editorials, etc. Yet, to speak first of the 19th-century entries-from

Russell Sturgis' brilliant analysis of Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1868, to Henry James' remarkably blunt account

of the Ruskin-Whistler libel trial in 1879 and Bernard Berenson's elegant essay

on Botticelli's illustrations for Dante's Divine

Comedy in 1896-there is plenty here to delight the connoisseur of both art

and criticism.

The 20th century got off to a rougher start in The Nation 's art columns. It is

interesting to observe that Matisse, rather than Picasso or Duchamp, seems to

have been an abiding point of contention. Berenson, who had not yet abandoned

his early interest in modern painting, was already defending Matisse against a

slur in The Nation in 1908. "I have

the conviction," Berenson wrote, "that [Matisse] has, after 20 years of very

earnest searching, at last found the great highroad travelled by all the best

masters of the visual arts." High praise, indeed. Yet

as late as 1931, the critic Paul Rosenfeld was making a muddle of a Matisse

show at the recently opened Museum of

Modern Art in an essay which the

young Meyer Schapiro, in a letter to the editor of The Nation , correctly characterized as "petulant and

irresponsible."

Of the several articles that The Nation devoted to the 1913 Armory Show, which was the first

exhibition on a blockbuster scale to introduce modern art to a mainstream

American public, none can now be said to have more than a historical interest.

In my view, anyway, the high intellectual level established by the 19th-century

contributors to The Nation was not to

be re-established in the magazine's art columns until Clement Greenberg's

appointment as art critic in the early 1940's. But whether this is an accurate

reflection of what The Nation

published on art in the 1920's and 30's, or-what I suspect may be the case-a

reflection of Mr. Meyer's politically determined selections, I am not in a

position to say.

Mr. Meyer, whose name is

new to me, is identified as the founder and director of the Public Works

Project, which is described as a "non-profit organization that produces protest

art for public interest organizations." He thus brings to the editing of Brushes with History an "activist"

rather than an aesthetic interest in art criticism. Which means, among much

else, that we are treated to an account of Richard Nixon's views on art and-of

more importance-a one-sided reprise of one of the most disgraceful episodes in The Nation 's history: the libel suit it

brought against Clement Greenberg in 1951, two years after he left the

magazine. This appalling legal action has nothing to do with Greenberg's art

criticism but everything to do with a letter to the editor that he sent to The Nation , protesting the Stalinist

line it was following in its coverage of Soviet foreign policy.

The Nation 's editor in chief, Freda Kirchwey, not only refused to publish

Greenberg's letter, but threatened him with a lawsuit if he attempted to

publish it elsewhere. Greenberg responded to this challenge by dispatching his

letter to The New Leader , which

promptly published it, and The Nation

then filed suit against both him and The

New Leader .

Mr. Meyer devotes a

great deal of space to this non-art scandal but doesn't tell the entire story.

He omits any reference to the uproar that Kirchwey's legal action caused within

the ranks of The Nation 's own writers

and editors. Many of those listed on its masthead-among them, Reinhold Niebuhr

and Richard H. Rovere-promptly denounced the lawsuit and severed their

connection to the magazine. The suit remained on the books, unresolved, until

1955, when Kirchwey's successor, Carey McWilliams, accepted the editorship of The Nation on condition that the magazine drop the suit.

Mercifully, Mr. Meyer's partisan interest in this scandal

hasn't prevented him from according Greenberg his due as an art critic in Brushes with History , which nicely

chronicles his now-celebrated reviews of de Kooning, Pollock, Baziotes,

Motherwell, Gorky, Hofmann et al. in the 1940's. However much Greenberg's

successors at The Nation -Fairfield

Porter, Max Kozloff, Lawrence Alloway and Arthur C. Danto, the present

incumbent-may disagree with his judgments and his ideas, all have been indebted

to the high level of critical discourse Greenberg brought to art criticism and

have endeavored to meet it. (See, in this regard, Mr. Danto's

1994 obituary appreciation of Greenberg in this volume.) Indeed, Brushes with History recovers a good

deal of intellectual vitality in the selections culled from Greenberg and his

successors, all of whom are well represented in the book.

I, too, by the way, make an appearance in the book, but on

an appropriately smaller scale. At the invitation of Robert Hatch, then The Nation 's literary editor and film

critic, I served as the magazine's art critic for a single season, 1962-63, to

fill in for its regular critic, Max Kozloff, during his temporary absence from New

York. To judge from Mr. Meyer's editorial note-"Oddly

enough, the conservative writer Hilton Kramer was The Nation 's art critic from 1962 to 1964"-this was evidently an

unpleasant surprise to him. Lest he be thought to approve of such an odd

appointment, he hastens to add that "Kramer has often been accused of being an

'enemy' of modern art."

In fact, my tenure at the magazine ended in 1963, when Mr.

Kozloff returned, but I did contribute some book reviews for a short time

thereafter-until, that is, Hatch was succeeded by a more politically "activist"

literary editor who really was an enemy of modernism, and everything else that

smacked of highbrow culture. But her tenure was mercifully short-lived.

Was I a "conservative

writer" when I wrote for The Nation ?

Not really. Politically, I belonged to the camp of anti-Communist liberals, a

species of intellectual apparently distasteful to Mr. Meyer, who may or may not

be aware that they once provided some of the best writing on art, literature

and other cultural subjects The Nation

has ever published-especially in the 1940's and 50's, when Margaret Marshall

was the magazine's stellar literary editor. It was in the mid-40's,

when I was in high school, that I first encountered The Nation in the Sawyer Free Library in Glouchester, Mass.,

and became addicted to the music criticism of B.H. Haggin. It's a pity that

there's so little in Brushes with History

that conveys the quality of The Nation 's

back-of-the-book writers in that period-among them, besides Greenberg and

Haggin, James Agee on movies, Joseph Wood Krutch on theater and Diana Trilling

on fiction.

Brushes with History:

Art of The Nation 1865-2001 is

published by Thunder's Mouth Press–Nation Books.

This quote comes from Arthur Danto, the art critic for The Nation, and can be found in the essay for the catalog accompanying the current exhibition of the work of Sean Scully at Knoedler & Company gallery. Mr. Danto finds the diminution of painting unjust, arguing that " there has to be room for [it] in the open disjunction of ways of making art. " He doesn't, however, make his argument too vehemently and is, one feels, more than a little enamored of the art world's reigning " open disjunction. "

Take Mr. Danto's statement that some artists whom " we think of primarily as painters have in some ways been liberated by the pluralism of art. " He cites as an example the painter David Reed, who has created tableaux within which his pictures are placed alongside video monitors, beds and other objects. Yet when Mr. Reed contrives such an installation or, for that matter, when Mr. Scully covers a metal box jutting a foot or two from the wall with stripes, are they freed by the anything-goes ethos of the " pluralistic art world? " Or are these painters doing their damnedest to compete with a scene that places a premium on the brute fact of fashion? There's a difference between liberation and covering one's backside. It is this distinction that Mr. Danto elides, lest the pluralist boat be rocked too much for his liking.

In fairness to Mr. Danto, Mr. Reed and Mr. Scully, it should be noted they aren't the only people made fidgety by their fidelity to a medium as woefully unhip as painting. The art world is chock-full of such folks, and the painter Terry Winters has joined their ranks. Mr. Winters, whose paintings and drawings are at both Lehmann Maupin and Matthew Marks Gallery, may seem an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this crowd. He has, after all, long pursued a rough-hewn brand of quasi-abstract painting, one that takes as its precedent the work of Philip Guston and Cy Twombly.

Having established himself as a painter of biological forms, Mr. Winters has, in recent years, dedicated himself to depicting a schematic, sci-fi flavored architecture. These canvases, with their overlapping and interpenetrating diagrams, give flesh to the verities of our virtual age and have done much to jump-start a career that was threatening to become as moist and murky as the artist's signature biomorphs. After initially resisting the new work's scrabbled willfulness, I ultimately found myself converted to its ungainly but impressively ambitious determination. I vividly recall the wobbly inside-out complexity of Gray Scale Image (1998), a piece from Mr. Winters' last show at Marks, and have become quite fond of Light Source Direction (1997), a painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has been on display for some time in the atrium of the museum's 20th-century wing.

Since visiting Set Diagram at Lehmann Maupin, however, I'm inclined to reinstate my atheism in all things Winters. Here's an exhibition in which the art of painting willingly happily cries " Uncle! " to extra-aesthetic considerations. The title is a term used to describe " relationships between two or more sets of information. " In the 60 yes, 60 paintings on view, we see Mr. Winters limning digital-age imagery: woozy and rubbery meshes, scrabbled circuitry and, as a sop to the faithful, a duo of bobbing biomorphs.

Yet Set Diagram isn't, it should be understood, an exhibition of paintings. It's a site-specific installation, a collaboration between Mr. Winters and Rem Koolhaas, the renowned architect and writer. Mr. Koolhaas has arranged, salon style, the artist's modestly scaled pictures on sheets of plywood that cover a good portion of the walls and ceiling of the gallery. (Three of Mr. Winters' paintings can, in fact, be found on the ceiling.) This installation, we are told, " create[s] a matrix of difference, correspondence, and counterpoint. " Yet the only thing that's technologically true about Set Diagram is its built-in obsolescence. The thing hasn't been up a month and it already looks like a cornpone relic of the Information Age.

One would be less inclined to cavil about Set Diagram if the pictures themselves were any good. As it is, the canvases are thin and threadbare when they aren't congealed or congested. (Perhaps Mr. Winters was hoping that Mr. Koolhaas' Zeitgeist cool would camouflage their indolence.) Mr. Winters fares better in the Marks exhibition. While needlessly overstuffed, the show includes what may be the most elegant piece of art this ham-handed painter has ever done an untitled netting of silvery lines from 1999. Even so, one leaves the exhibition feeling that Mr. Winters is not so much in a holding pattern as he is running scared. From the pretentious tomfoolery of Set Diagram to the let's-empty-the-flat-files overkill of the Marks show, Mr. Winters would appear to be a painter who's begun to harbor significant doubts about the viability of his medium. As a result, he's begun to grasp at straws. No wonder the recent work is all over the place, and no place at all. Terry Winters: Set Diagram is at Lehmann Maupin, 39 Greene Street, and Terry Winters: Drawings is at Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, both until April 28.