A foreign country

Every generation makes its own world. Most of us prefer our own, having been brought up in it, and must work to understand those that come before and after, much as we have to learn the customs of a foreign country in order to live rewardingly in it. Visiting—or surviving into—another’s time is similarly estranging or enlightening, depending on your willingness to engage with its unfamiliar forms and weird preoccupations.

Criticism dramatizes these intergenerational tensions. Younger writers dismiss the work of older artists as no longer fitting to a changed world; older writers dismiss new movements as shallow in their thinking, misguided in their priorities, or derivative in their strategies. These frictions between generations—like those between cultures—generate the heat and light that animate the history of art. So it has always been, so it will always be.

Such disagreements are not a bad thing; indeed, they might be the purpose of the form. Because criticism depends upon a nuance that is best articulated in practice. The reality in which we live is to some degree—it has become fashionable to point out—constructed. But recognizing that there are different ways of building does not invalidate the principles of architecture. To attempt sincerely to engage with difference is not to succumb to relativism, nor should the fact that new things are confusing legitimate the reimposition of an old order.

Any student of art criticism (or political history) will recognize that fallacy, which depends upon a failure of imagination that works in both directions (the young cannot understand why those in the past did not see that which is to them obvious; the old maintain that the way of seeing that is to them most natural must also, therefore, be most true). The truly difficult thing to realize, as Iris Murdoch wrote, is that “something other than oneself is real.”1 Art is the discovery of that reality. Criticism is an attempt to come to terms with it.

The difficulty here is not only to see the world through the eyes of the other—for which art is good practice—but to find a way to articulate your world to those who perceive it differently. As frustrating as it might be to have to explain what seems to your peers self-evident, the attempt helps to separate that which is merely fashionable from that which might carry meaning beyond its immediate constituency and thereby endure.2 That is a significant part of every generation’s work, if its culture isn’t to be wiped from the record when the next one arrives.

These tensions might recently have become more acute because we are living through the end of an era. The nature of what is ending might be disputed—a decade of protest against the reactionary turn, the postwar liberal democratic order, modernity itself—but there is no escaping that something is changing. And this change is accompanied by a creeping sense that the stories we have been told—that we have been telling ourselves—are insufficient to it. That the institutions of the news media and liberal arts might have become insulated from their societies. Whether that is necessarily a bad thing—whether the arts have a responsibility to reflect popular opinions or might provide a refuge from them—is itself a matter for discussion, but there can be no doubt that the traffic between the much invoked and little-understood “wider public” and the art world has slowed significantly, reduced to culture-wars sniping and expressions of bafflement or disdain at opinions alternative to those held up as the consensus within a particular group.

The one thing we can’t do is simply return to the art of the past, whether of a decade ago or the late nineteenth century. So what comes next? According to which models will the future be built? Perhaps the most striking feature of our current program is its reminder that the future—good and bad—arrives at different speeds in different parts of the world, and might already be visible if you know where to seek it. A review of the Jakarta Biennale proposes that the future of art might belong to communities living outside the world’s richest cities; a survey of political art from the region reinforces that if you’re not finding work that impacts society, then you might not be looking in the right places. It remains the responsibility of art’s critics—which is to say, its advocates—to make sense of the new realities that are everywhere emerging.