If you happened to be at Jupiter Artland, a private sculpture park just outside Edinburgh, last summer, you might have heard a peculiar sound. If you’d found the circular swimming pool designed by the installation artist Joana Vasconcelos, the sight would have been more peculiar still. Five art critics, swimming in circles, singing the Lord’s Prayer to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, à la Cliff Richard. There was a good explanation, I promise. Yet in spite of the frivolity and apparent privilege of the scene, it illustrates more than anything else the entanglement of patronage and precarity that characterises contemporary art criticism.
The mystique that allows critics to get flowery prose past subs is mirrored in bemusement from media senior management as to the utility of arts coverage. That means cultural criticism is first in line for the axe when newspapers slash budgets. In the United States, The Washington Post recently followed The New York Times and The New Yorker in scaling back its criticism, laying off the Pulitzer Prize-winner Sebastian Smee.
The opening nights, fancy meals and trips to far-flung biennales can all seem rather glamorous. But rates of pay are often lower than would be acceptable in other areas of journalism and rarely compensate for the time spent travelling, looking and thinking. Few art critics can make a stable living from criticism alone, and many depend on other jobs, retirement or inheritance to make it work. All of this leaves the discipline increasingly dependent on personal privilege and art world patronage. It remains male-dominated and broadly inaccessible to anyone outside the upper and upper- middle classes. The future of art criticism hangs in the balance. Is it worth saving?
Western art criticism was born in Enlightenment France. In his new book The Connoisseur (Reaktion Books, June 2026), Peter Burke argues that the philosopher Denis Diderot established the genre through his reviews of the Paris Salons. He emphasised, Burke says, the “drama of the compositions, his personal response to them and their effect on the emotions of the public”. This captures the critic’s distinct role. While the art historian seeks to understand history and the development of artistic practice through pictures, the critic evaluates the art displayed and created in the present day and considers what it says about the world we live in now. Some believe the role of the press is to report the facts, others to agitate for social change, others still to maintain the social order. The critic can play a role in any of these functions, using the aesthetic material a society produces to communicate with readers and help them better understand that society.
The critic reached his – and it almost always was his – zenith in the 19th century. In 1866, Emile Zola, aged only 26, reviewed the Paris Salon for L’Evénement. He savaged the dominant and fashionable school of painting on display and used his writing to champion the unappreciated painter Edouard Manet. In the 1870s, critics such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé championed Manet’s followers in the “open-air school” – in the face of others who dismissed their work. These painters were identified for a time as “intransigents” before they settled on the moniker they are known by to this day: the Impressionists.
Zola, however, does not appear to have reviewed any Paris exhibitions for the French national press between 1868 and 1879. Thanks to the scholarship of his biographer FWJ Hemmings, we now know that this was thanks to a product of the precarity of art criticism and political censorship. “The short explanation,” Hemmings writes, “is that no paper would contract with him to write one.” He suggests that editors were reluctant to entrust the salons to Zola because of his reputation as a firebrand.
In spite of the apolitical nature of most of the Impressionists, the bourgeois governments of both the Second Empire and the Third Republic recognised that artistic intransigence could give way to political intransigence. Especially from a writer who connected artistic success so concretely to material and market conditions, as he later did in his 1886 novel The Masterpiece. Zola continued to champion Manet, from 1875, in the St Petersburg newspaper Vestnik Evropy. But translated into Russian, his work operated at a safe distance from French society and politics.
The rise of the modern art museum accelerated and accentuated the critic’s role, as national galleries opened across major European and US cities at a steady pace in the 19th century. But the boom in the popular press ensured that criticism developed primarily as a conduit between art and the people. That began to be challenged from the second half of the 19th century onwards, with the rise of art history as an academic discipline – first on the European mainland, and then in Britain and the US. A more theoretical form of art criticism began to take hold, rooted first in formalism, and then in critical theory in the interwar years.
Migrants bring art publishing to London and New York
In the 20th century, the art critic would frequently occupy an ambiguous space between academia, journalism and the art world. In Weimar Germany the Communist artist Herwarth Walden became a publisher of art criticism, gallery owner and patron, while the feminist pioneer Rosa Schapire navigated the roles of critic, art historian, collector and model. In Britain, Herbert Read combined editing the specialist Burlington Magazine with teaching posts, organising the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, and writing books. As Owen Hatherley has catalogued in The Alienation Effect (Allen Lane, 2025), art publishing was revolutionised from the 1920s onwards – first in central Europe, then in Britain and the US, following the forced migration of many of its key players. An exciting modern art scene, the wealth of US collectors, and the rise of a culturally-oriented press made New York a centre of art criticism from the 1940s.
But the continued success of print media made sure that criticism was not subsumed by academia. Television allowed the likes of Robert Hughes and John Berger to take their analysis of art and society to prime-time audiences of millions at a time when it was accepted that even high art could inform and entertain as well as educate. Unlike Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which sets out a linear narrative of cultural production from the fall of Rome until the 60s, Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and Hughes’s The Shock of the New (1980) are focused primarily on situating art in relation to society – once again distinguishing the art critic’s role from the art historian’s.
Much as they seemed like intransigent interventions at the time, these programmes were also the last hurrah of both popular cultural criticism and an analysis of art grounded in material conditions. In the subsequent decades, academic art history would become increasingly dominated by postmodernism. The popular press and broadcasters, meanwhile, found a surer recipe for successful cultural coverage in celebrity news. From the 90s, the historian Simon Schama made art films for the BBC, while The Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak continues to present such programmes, though these are now on Sky Arts rather than terrestrial channels. These presenters combine popular – perhaps populist – appeal with historical context and close looking. But unlike Berger and Hughes, who sought to break down the barriers between art and society, they present artists as mystical creatures on another plane.
New print players – Art Monthly (founded 1976), The Art Newspaper (1990) and Frieze (1991), to name but three – created demand for critics to write for more specialist audiences. And a new discipline emerged: “art writing”, writing as art as much as about it. A more multi-disciplinary contemporary art practice demanded more accompanying texts. Sometimes these were – and are – written by critics. But crucially, they are commissioned by artistic institutions rather than independent organs of journalism. An institution might encourage critical engagement with a work, but it will do so within certain parameters. Rather than meeting the needs of society – uneasily filtered through the commercial news business as these might be – such works instead assess art on the terms of a museum, festival or gallery. Is this really criticism at all?
The art writing model has then been imported back into art criticism. Critics maintained a precarious existence even in the headiest days of print, but the compensation for success could be big. With the erosion of the traditional newspaper business model thanks to the internet, staff jobs have become even harder to come by, while freelance budgets have been slashed and expense accounts dissolved without trace. Yet unlike the many modern journalists who never leave the office, art critics remain a well-travelled bunch. It is museums, galleries and festivals that pick up the tab through their PR budgets.
The same internet that broke the model that allowed critics to make a sustainable living has also created new opportunities, from start-up online magazines to individual blogs, now open to monetisation through Substack. Having access to international press trips means small independent voices can compete with major publications in exhibition coverage. And it makes the sacrifices of a financially unrewarding vocation worth it. As one critic told me, press trips are the only foreign holidays he gets.
Where should the line be drawn? If publishers provide free copies of their books to their reviewers, why shouldn’t galleries facilitate trips for theirs? This has long been the accepted model for travel pages. Tourist boards provide itineraries and expect positive coverage in return – often without acknowledgment that they paid for it all. In feature writing, however, it’s generally frowned upon for a newspaper to fail to pay its own way. As the case of Zola testifies, the art critic can be a witness to history as much as the war reporter. Are they likely to do so without a basis for their work that is independent of its subject matter?
It’s not that critics are told what to write. Even when they’ve had fare, bed and board paid by a gallery, they could still be critical of an artist or work without fear of rebuke. But they might be less willing to question the whole premise of an exhibition. In other words, like the art writer working directly for the gallery, the critic taking their subsidy is writing, consciously or not, on someone else’s terms.
Humpty Dumpty suffers for Nelson’s art
Requests for “copy check” – “copy approval” is rarely said out loud – are commonplace from higher-ups in museums, galleries and festivals. PRs usually know better, and I admire them for staying professional in often testing circumstances – and helping out daft journalists. One diligently rescued my overnight bag from a closed gallery last summer, and I was extremely grateful. I happened to like the shows we visited that day, and even if I hadn’t, I don’t think she would have leveraged this incident. But it’s conceivable a critic might feel obliged to repay the kindness. It takes professionalism on both sides to make sure friendships and favour don’t stand in the way of honest coverage.
For all that, there are brilliant art critics still casting a questioning eye on institutions and society as well as individual works. Some are drawn from other disciplines, such as the social historian Hannah Proctor. Writing for ArtReview last year, she used Mike Nelson’s Humpty Dumpty exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery as entry point for a critique of how art can render destructive acts as a “natural process”. Katie Tobin’s recent assessment of Tracy Emin’s Tate retrospective, published in Tribune, raised pertinent questions about the celebrity artist’s role in high politics. And the many others who succeed in bringing works to life on the page are equally important. Sometimes the most powerful writing simply aims to inspire the reader to see for themselves – and draw their own conclusions.
The only solution is for publications to properly resource art criticism, with an acknowledgment that, like investigations or war reporting, each word will be a little bit costlier than agency copy. The philanthropic foundations that recognise the public interest case for funding journalism would do well to recognise that both a civilised society and a lively politics demand writing about art that goes beyond PR puff and AI slop.
Perhaps the problem is that art critics do not think of themselves as journalists – and many journalists probably agree. It’s a rarified vocation that seems a world away from court reporting, doorstepping or the morning news conference. In the best traditions of Keats’s “negative capability”, art criticism sometimes complicates the world before it makes sense of it. But done well, it has the power to reshape understandings – and change lives. If we can accept that audiences like and need a balanced diet of news, features and comment, surely there’s room for some criticism too.