The United States of Criticism

No matter how much some may bemoan the so-called sorry state of criticism today, now more than ever the old adage “everyone’s a critic” is true. Some form of the practice of criticism can be found in nearly every facet of society. It would appear that anyone with a mobile phone can now instantly weigh in with their opinion on seemingly any subject matter and become a published author or a broadcaster or influencer. Thumbs up or thumbs down, the ability to render Caesar-like judgment has never been so democratic. This phenomenon might be construed as an unruly riot of opinion. And yet while this seemingly obvious state of affairs tends to elicit easy dismissals, the situation is uneven. The critics of criticism are half right. Criticism is flourishing and withering at the same time. The world is changing, and fast. So, too, are the modalities of criticism.

With the epoch-defining change in communications and information technologies, the shift from print to digital media, the death of the fourth estate, and the seemingly inevitable ascension of social media, we are not so much at a loss for criticism or critics as we find ourselves without an editor. Or, more accurately editors have been replaced with the tech bros of Silicon Valley, whose conquest over old media has been ruthless and nigh total. Move fast and break things, indeed. Done sadly with our elected officials’ approval.

Provoking this writer to wonder, why the U.S. government, who was so willing to bail out the auto industry (2008) and the airline industry (2001) or the banks and the housing market (2008), seems unwilling to register, let alone intervene, in the titanic calamity facing the print media which had been the home of the free press for centuries. Arguably far more important for the functioning of democracy than cars or airlines, people just seemed to shrug when newspapers across the country shuttered. “They were mismanaged,” it was said. Really? Worse than the (2008) housing market? “They didn’t understand the internet,” some have berated periodicals. As if early on anyone truly understood the life-changing effect it would have on nearly every corner of the globe?

It cannot be overstated that criticism is integral to a free press, a functioning democracy, and a constitutive element of the public sphere, as social theorist Jürgen Habermas has long argued. In his classic, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he makes this connection between criticism and periodicals clear throughout 18th-century Europe when he notes, “These constituted the public that had long since grown out of early institutions like the coffee houses, salons, and Tischgellschaften and was now held together the medium of the press and its professional criticism. They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself.”¹ Rational-critical debate … It almost feels like an archaic concept. Yet this, for all their shortcomings, is the function served by criticism and independent press and what many of us in the changing tides of media are struggling to preserve.

If this editorial introduction seems vexed, it is.

That vexation itself might be the binding agent of the united states of criticism featured in the issue.

Serving as inspiration for the entire issue, Chicago Critic’s Table is featured in an edited transcription of the culminating discussion for the Arts+Public Life critics residency program for Black and Brown writers. Introduced by the program’s founder, UChicago Professor Adrienne Brown, five members of the inaugural cohort, Meralis Alvarez-Morales, Rikki Byrd, Zaria El-Fil, Britt Julious, and Regina Victor engaged in insightful conversation with archivist Saroop Singh about Chicago’s critical scene across the arts from fashion to music, food to theater and visual arts. In their conversation, Talking Shit and Making Meaning, skateboarders and critics, Ted Barrow and Sam Korman take us into the burgeoning world of skateboard criticism, which has many parallels with art criticism both in its salutary effects and challenges for its immediate community of skaters and broader public.

For Material Empathy, artist and writer Joel Kuennen shares a brief expository essay and a portfolio of their artwork which gives us a chance to think deeply about a kind of long non-anthropocentric form of eco-criticism that places an emphasis on a hands-on relationship to our planet and material world in an age when technology is driving us further away from connection. In our next feature, Two In One, we talk with art critic, former editor at Artforum, and a founder of the magazine November Lauren O’Neill-Butler about her life as an art critic and the crucial role judgment plays in a vital critical discourse. In her conversation Against the Written Word, curator and writer Stephanie Cristello talks with punk polymath Ian F. Svenonious about his book of the same title, a tract that claims to be anti-literacy and, as with much Svenonious’s writing, challenges us to take his seemingly bombastic claims seriously; for all his humorous diatribes there is always a cogent argument and even a bit of wisdom.

On Criticism: Studying How We Are Together chronicles an expansive conversation convened at, with, and through Stateville prison between art historian and Director of the National Public Housing Museum Lisa Lee; activist, educator, and writer William Ayers; Adam Bush, educator and co-founder of College Unbound; Michael B., a graduate of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) program; and theorist and poet Fred Moten. The conversation centers on the role and significance that education and criticism can play in the lives of incarcerated people and what that can teach us about justice and education in society. In Art as a Tool to Confront Reality, the artist Thomas Hirschhorn answers our nine questions about the critical role art plays in culture and his relationship to art criticism. The Selma, Alabama-based text and art undertaking, Our Literal Speed, shares Our Literal Speed, a seeming work of art historical-ficto-criticism with a Southern Gothic air that tells the story of a road trip through Alabama to visit artists and artworks with students and artist Robert Rauschenberg.

German painter and poet Paula Kamps gives a poignant account of making a new life for oneself in a foreign city (Chicago) in Chicago, mon Jardin d’Amour. With Needle in A Haystack, Director of Chicago’s Frequency Musical Festival and former Chicago Reader music critic Peter Margasak shares his perspective on the state of music criticism—where it is going and where it has been. In Gaming Islam, gamer Ashlyn Sparrow talks with fellow gamers Alireza Doostdar and Ghenwa Hayek about their love of gaming; they discuss Doostdar and Hayek’s project that examines representations of Islam in video games—both the problematic, often racist, stereotypes and the potential for more accurate depictions of the broad and varied Islamic world. We close our issue with curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete’s appropriately cranky essay, THE FUNCTION OF BITCHING, AT THE PRESENT TIME.

Two final notes:

Our readers will notice a change in our layout. Instead of PGR (our reviews section) occupying the back half of our issue as is customary, we felt it was appropriate for this issue to have our reviews sprinkled throughout. Writing for PGR we have Thomas Love, who reviews the John Boskovitch exhibition, Rude Awakening, at Bodenrader, followed by Matthew Metzger on Fire!’s album Testament, recorded with the renowned music producer (and recently deceased) Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio facility in Chicago. Jennifer Smart reviews Chicago’s Museum of Post-Punk and Industrial Music; Regina Victor reviews a recent performance of Lana Dancers at the Royal Thai Consulate-General Chicago; and Erik Wenzel reviews the cats in Nicole Eisenman’s recent survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Lastly, we are thrilled to welcome Stephanie Cristello to Portable Gray as our Editor-at-Large!

—Zachary Cahill