Lecture to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (Dundee, Scotland) undergraduate students by Giles Sutherland, February 2015

1. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk
The Art Critic?

2. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

3. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

4. What is an Art Critic?
“An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing,
interpreting and evaluating art. Their written critiques or
reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in
newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures and
catalogues and on web sites.”
(Wikipedia, 2015)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

5. * Lawrence Alloway
* Guillaume Apollinaire
* Zacharie Astruc
* Albert Aurier
* Charles Baudelaire
* Michael Baxandall
* Sister Wendy Beckett
* Clive Bell
* Bernard Berenson
* John Berger
* John Canaday
* Champfleury
* Kenneth Clark
* .J. Clark
* Robert Coates
* Clarence Cook
* Douglas Cooper
* Royal Cortissoz
* Thomas Craven
* Arthur Danto
* Denis Diderot
* John Elderfield
* James Elkins
* Félix Fénéon
* Hal Foster
* Peter Frank
* Michael Fried
* B. H. Friedman
* Roger Fry
* Geeta Kapur
* Théophile Gautier
* Gustave Geffroy
* Clement Greenberg
* Boris Groys
* Dave Hickey
* Robert Hughes
* Edouard Jaguer
* Michael Kimmelman
* Hilton Kramer
* Rosalind Krauss
* Donald Kuspit
* Julien Leclercq
• Louis Leroy
• Lucy Lippard
• Giovanni Lista
• Nancy Marmer
• Camille Mauclair
• R . Siva Kumar
• Octave Mirbeau
• Robert C. Morgan
• Linda Nochlin
• Frank O'Hara
• Saul Ostrow
• Jed Perl
• Griselda Pollock
• Arlene Raven
• Herbert Read
• Pierre Restany
• John Rewald
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Barbara Rose
• Harold Rosenberg
• Robert Rosenblum
• John Ruskin
• John Russell
• Frank Rutter
• André Salmon
• Jerry Saltz
• Irving Sandler
• Meyer Schapiro
• Peter Schjeldahl
• Brian Sewell
• Roberta Smith
• Rafael Squirru
• Leo Stein
• Leo Steinberg
• Michel Tapié
• Théophile Thoré-Bürger
• Eric Troncy
• Tristan Tzara
• Kirk Varnedoe
• Louis Vauxcelles
• Karen Wilkin
• Émile Zola
(Wikipedia, 2015)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

6. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

7. “I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without
knowing something of his early development. His subject
matter will be determined by the age he lives in--at least
this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own--
but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an
emotional attitude from which he will never completely
escape.”
(George Orwell, Why I Write, 1946)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

8. (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the
external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their
right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on
another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a
good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels
is valuable and ought not to be missed.
(George Orwell Why I Write 1946)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

9. (iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to
find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(George Orwell Why I Write 1946)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

10. (iv) Political purpose.--Using the word 'political' in the
widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain
direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society
that they should strive after.
Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias.
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics
is itself a political attitude.
(George Orwell Why I Write 1946)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

11. “… there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost
all evocative power and are merely used because they save
people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
Examples are: RING THE CHANGES ON, TAKE UP THE
CUDGELS FOR, TOE THE LINE, RIDE ROUGHSHOD OVER,
STAND SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH, PLAY INTO THE
HANDS OF, AN AXE TO GRIND, GRIST TO THE MILL,
FISHING IN TROUBLED WATERS, ON THE ORDER OF THE
DAY, ACHILLES' HEEL, SWAN SONG, HOTBED. Many of these
are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for
instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a
sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.”
(George Orwell, Politics and The English Language, 1946)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

12. “The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be
horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be
questioned, but to find out WHY he exhibits that particular set of
aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself
am not competent to examine. But I can point to one clue which
perhaps takes one part of the distance. This is the old-fashioned, over-
ornate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert when
he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dali's drawings are reminiscent of
Dürer, one (p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another
(p. 269) seems to borrow something from Blake. But the most
persistent strain is the Edwardian one….”
(George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes On Salvador Dali
1944)
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

13. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk
Lys Hansen, Athena (1982) Lys Hansen, Mrs Harris II (1983)

14. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk
Lys Hansen, The Glorious and The Grotesque (2014)

15. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk
Lys Hansen, One Fine Day (2007)

16. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

17. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

18. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

19. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

20. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

21. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

22. GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

23. International Art English, by Alix Rule & David Levine
On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release.
Of this English upper-middle class speech we may note (a)that it is not
localised in any one place, (b) that though the people who use this
speech are not all acquainted with one another, they can easily
recognise each other’s status by this index alone, (c) that this elite
speech form tends to be imitated by those who are not of the elite, so
that other dialect forms are gradually eliminated, (d) that the elite,
recognising this imitation, is constantly creating new linguistic
elaborations to mark itself off from the common herd.
—E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin
Social Structure, 1954
canopycanopycanopy.com
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

24. The internationalized art world relies on a unique language.
Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release.
This language has everything to do with English, but it is
emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the
Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of
English for its current reach. But what really matters for this
language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the
pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.
canopycanopycanopy.com
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

25. Vocabulary
The language we use for writing about art is oddly
pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would
deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably
produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too
precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar,
investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and
describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.
canopycanopycanopy.com
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

26. IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space,
proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An
artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes,
transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it
doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions
to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE
rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes
visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes
potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.
canopycanopycanopy.com
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

27. IAE’s literary conventions actually favor the hard-to-picture
spatial metaphor: A practice “spans” from drawing all the
way to artist’s books; Matthew Ritchie’s works, in the words
of Artforum, “elegantly bridge a rift in the art-science
continuum”…
canopycanopycanopy.com
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk

28. Disrupting the Alignment at Cooper Gallery is Naiza Khan’s first
major solo exhibition in Scotland. A filmic installation that
incorporates the histories, myths and the ephemeral but always
recurring spirit of a place, this exhibition is set to depict and re-
inscribe the “interrupted geography” of Karachi and the nearby
Manora Island.
Comprised of three films, watercolours, prints and photographic
works, Disrupting the Alignment is a re- affirmation of a lost firm
ground that gives legibility to the storm of social and economic
changes ravaging the contemporary world.
artforum.com/uploads/guide.002/id18013/press_release.pdf
GILES SUTHERLAND
The Art Critic?
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
The University of Dundee
February, 2015
gsutherland@dundee.ac.uk