The role of the critic has always been a thorny question for artists. I was stimulated to think about this question during the past few days by the recent renewal of interest in, and public discussion of, the work of John Ruskin. Why might he continue to be taken seriously so long after his death?
Reflecting on this I wondered whether an important factor in his favour might have been the fact that he was himself a talented artist (particularly as a draftsman). Relatively few of the people who have really shaped modern criticism seem to have had direct experience as painters. Vassari did, of course, but that was a long time ago. In recent times it appears that only Roger Fry was a painter of note as well as being a writer about art. Sir Kenneth Clark, of course, who really set the tone of critical discussion when I was growing up, certainly was no painter. This might well be an injustice to him, but there was definitely a suspicion hanging about Sir K. that as a proper “gentleman” he didn’t actually do things with his hands. The mere painter was “in trade”.
Herbert Read, for whom I have a lot of time, did have the distinction of being a poet, and perhaps this infused his understanding of the creative process.
The two great voices who wrote the script for American criticism, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, despite their strong commitment to particular views of what art was about, don’t seem to have gone on record as ever having tried to paint. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the degree of dogmatism on the part of any critic about what art is “supposed to be” possibly correlates fairly well with the degree of their distance from actual practice.
When I was an undergraduate student at Leicester, the person who introduced me to sociology was Norbert Elias. I remember him well proposing that the foundation of any social theory of knowledge ought to be what he called the “telephone theory”. The first thing you need to know, in relation to any claim to knowledge, is who is calling. I would suggest that this is not a bad principal to bear in mind in approaching art criticism.