Art criticism operates with a time lag. If you accept that art is shaped by the historical contexts in which it is made, then the critic must always be writing after the fact: after all, it takes time for the artist to make the work, it takes time to organize the exhibition, and then it takes time to write the review of that exhibition. Even a work made expressly in response to a specific event might not come to be written about until weeks, months, or years have passed. By which time the world might have moved on, the calamity been forgotten, the government deposed, attitudes shifted.
Yet this might be the great advantage of the form. However frustrating it can be that criticism must trail behind the news, this means that it also resists the violently unstable model of history that a hyper-accelerated and functionally hysterical media cycle propounds. Criticism narrates an encounter with the past (whether near or distant) and with other perspectives. It depends on a belief in continuities and commonalities, which is to say a commitment to the principle that the past carries meaning in the present, and that every other person’s experience of the world is connected to our own. These articles of faith are under challenge.
To take into account the contexts in which a work of art was made is not, as this monthly letter has repeatedly stated, to reduce it to them. To understand the work of Hamad Butt, as Tom Denman writes in a forthcoming piece, requires an appreciation of how the artist’s society was shaped by the AIDS crisis. The provision of that context might, in turn, allow us—thirty years after the artist’s untimely death—to better understand the time through which we are living and its commensurate attitudes to sexuality, disease, and mortality.
Similarly, when Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes of how Antonio Obá repurposes Catholic and Yoruba iconography to memorialize the victims of Jair Bolsonaro’s “war on crime,” this is not to deny his paintings’ aesthetic value or to pack their meaning into a box marked “Brazil, 2019–23.” Rather, it is to recognize that social inequality, police militarization, and authoritarianism are interlinked issues shaping the lived experiences of people all over the world and, by extension, the culture they produce. A number of the reviews we are set to publish this month reflect on work made under the emergencies of a year, two years, or a decade ago. In doing so, they give us cause to return to and reconsider the underlying causes of our present moment, and to resist the idea that its predicaments sprang ex nihilo.
It is the lesson of history that we understand our time through the study of others. The dangers of neglecting as much might be illustrated by an exhibition at Italy’s national gallery that showcases the “time of Futurism” while eliding the movement’s close association with Fascism. To act as if art can be understood without reference to politics is at best a privilege born of the conviction that the air breathed by artists and their appreciators is too rarefied to be poisoned by such base concerns. At worst it gives cover to those who would present propaganda as the natural expression of “the national character” (or some other invention) rather than of whatever political agenda supported its production and made possible its dissemination.
It is impossible at its beginning to know whether this will, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, be a year that asks questions or a year that answers. Criticism is neither journalism—it is not a direct commentary on current affairs—nor history as it attends to the longue durée—the slow evolution (or dissolution) of the underlying structures that give shape to a society. Rather it is something in between, a means by which we might reflect upon our connection to other times and places. It is to that principle that our program will in the coming months be dedicated.
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