A Voyage Around Art Criticism

© Glenn Harper

(published in Art Papers, 1995, in that magazine's anniversary issue)

A Voyage Around Art Criticism

(one of my more personal essays)

My commission for this article was to address the question of how someone becomes an art critic. (What art criticism is is another question that we'll have to deal with in due course.) The route to criticism is often, as it was in my own case, a series of accidents and wrong turns that, to follow the traffic metaphor to its absurd conclusion, is something like the scenario of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend: the film follows a French middle-class couple along a drive in the country—except that every other French couple has had the same idea, and the countryside has become a huge traffic jam, during which civilization crumbles into, first, brutality; then, philosophy; and finally anarchy and cannibalism. Where along that route art criticism lies, you will have to judge for yourself.

To continue reading this essay at artdesigncafe.com, click A voyage around art criticism. Click the following link to see the overview of writings by Glenn Harper at artdesigncafe.com.