Art Writing, and What It Might Mean in the Midwest

Art writing works like the hands of a clock: it runs late, on time, or strikes early. Art writing works within history, alongside it and incongruously too. Sometimes farsighted and other times myopic, art writing covers territory narrow and wide, academic and vernacular. Encompassing many different things, it includes today’s online reviews and medieval treatises about how to paint. Art writing refers to words written by the first Western art historian Giorgio Vasari, French critics Diderot and Baudelaire, Rosalind Krauss or Roberta Smith and Cleveland’s own Douglas Max Utter. Mainstream and niche, art writing includes both art criticism and academic writing about art and its history. Some might say that the best academic art writing is rigorous, carefully researched and accessible or conversely, that any truly meaningful criticism analyzes art and its history with brevity and accuracy to illuminate new perspectives on the present. Still others hesitate to embrace the electric frequency with which art history and art criticism wade into each other’s waters.

Recently an exchange online at The Brooklyn Rail between Ivan Gaskell, Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at the Bard Graduate Center, and philosopher of art David Carrier (former Champney Family Professor in Case Western Reserve University’s Art History and Art department throughout the early 2000s), considered the shared boundaries of art criticism and art history—what might be called art writing’s Janus-faced nature. In an essay this spring for The Brooklyn Rail titled “Art Criticism and Art History Writing: What’s Happening?” Carrier spelled out marked differences between these two forms of writing (long since an interest of his)¹ with Gaskell responding to distinguish between art history and history, nuanced disciplines, he reminds us, with fundamentally different agendas.² Art historian and critic James Elkins, another scholar with marked interest in art writing and the stakes of art criticism, might be pleased, as over the years he’s urged more conversation between critics, lamenting the lack of polemics and yes, opinions or strong commitment, as he calls it.

I return to some of Elkins’ ideas below but first let me introduce a third, slightly more imprecise category of art writing that within recent years appears to influence the landscape of contemporary art ever more acutely, namely how artists, galleries, and museums (not to mention museumgoers) self-describe their stake within the larger art world. This latter category might be called performative art writing, and it grows especially powerful today—think omnipresent artist statements accompanied by images online; curatorial statements, exhibition descriptions, and the universal, well-worded press release (e.g. the Member Reports on the back pages of our own CAN Journal, wherein galleries discuss their own projects in their own words); or the ubiquitous, social media post on which many artists and institutions rely to solicit audience. Each of these modes, in fact, qualifies as writing about art—perhaps art writing in its most egalitarian, uncensored (if highly orchestrated) form. In the museum world, for example, the introduction of “community voice” labels in lieu of (or as meaningful compliments to) traditional wall text and object didactics now appear with some frequency. Such narratives beg the question: who establishes meaning and who interprets it? Are stable meanings possible or even desired in an (art) world where nearly everyone with a keyboard or voice becomes a commentator or critic too?

As Zachary Cahill wrote last fall in his Editor’s Plaisance, The United States of Criticism,found in the front pages of the University of Chicago’s Portable Gray journal, “thumbs up or thumbs down, the ability to render Ceasar-like judgement has never been so democratic.”3 And while most audiences—critics, artists, the lay public at large, and even academics—cast at least a cursory glance in the direction of this third, often deeply personal form of art writing, such sources do not replace the writing of criticism in its classic sense. A few years ago, when New York art critic Jerry Saltz tweeted “a good critic always puts more into writing about art than the artist put into making it,” he was roundly excoriated, with many making clear that critics serve artists, not the other way around. Saltz ultimately deleted the comment but not before defending the idea that criticism actually produces a thing in and of itself, something with a life of its own that lives and breathes alongside works of art.4

Like art history, art criticism is not the object of art (nor does it want to be); art criticism is indeed secondary, sometimes incidental but also often inevitable and sorely necessary. Like butter to bread, art criticism is essential but also expendable, often the first to be cut. Knowing its place in the order of things, art criticism opens to assessment and reassessment time and again.It serves many communities and many kinds of readers—artists, curators, museum leaders, gallerists, collectors, “thinkers,” the public, and of course, the art market, as well as editors and writers themselves. Like a moving constellation, interactions between these actors changes continuously; and the internet especially inflects and amplifies the role of each. Never before has so much information been available freely online.

At stake too is how the role of the contemporary art critic’s subjectivity changes in a world where the who, what, when, where, and why are always already available. In small to mid-size Midwest art communities including Cleveland, platforms focusing only on art and culture struggle to survive; and most legacy media outlets have lost their ability to support critics. None of this is new news, but seldom do we acknowledge that this scenario in turn creates an incestual system where art writers (including artists, curators, and critics) work, live, and socialize in very near proximity to exactly the artists and institutions whom they intend to critique, further complicating the task of art criticism. It was perhaps beneficial for all involved that Steve Litt, the Plain Dealer’s former long-timeart and architecture critic, did not run in the same circles as the artists and institutions about whom he wrote, i.e. distance presumes perspective. The decline of news media and Mr. Litt’s retirement in Cleveland leaves a gap that isn’t likely to be filled soon, creating demand for exactly the kind of members’ reports we find in CAN—the performative kind of writing that slips quietly and sometimes awkwardly into the seat news reporting once occupied. Yet in such a small ecosystem like the one CAN helps organize and keep running, skepticism how to remain authentically objective, let alone critical, lingers.

Often referenced in such writing as mine at present, phrases from Elkins’ iconic 2003 text What Happened to Art Criticism? are worth rehearsing, especially because this “crisis in criticism” pops up like clockwork every decade or so.5 Authored more than twenty years ago, Elkins began his slim treatise with the contention that, “art criticism is in worldwide crisis.” Its weakened voice, he continued, was “dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism.”6 But back then the state of US-based art criticism was healthy, as Elkins conceded, and it was everywhere. Galleries produced glossy catalogs and brochures, and art magazines proliferated; Artforum was available for purchase at Borders and nearly all newspapers churned out weekly art criticism columns. The internet now too had its hands in the game. Criticism, though, was “dying” at the turn of the millennium according to Elkins, through its irrelevancy and inability to interact meaningfully with other forms of writing, namely art history, art education, the philosophy of art, and/or aesthetics. Like oil to water, art criticism was “massively produced” and also, “massively ignored.”7 In 2003, Elkins predicted:

Art criticism is diaphanous: it’s like a veil, floating in the breeze of cultural conversations and never quite settling anywhere. The combination of vigorous health and terminal illness, of ubiquity and invisibility, is growing increasingly strident with each generation.”8

This question of where art criticism might land appears to grow especially pressing today. And whether this inflamed worry about the state of criticism across years boils down to a mere flesh wound or authentic, shapeshifting changes to which art criticism must adjust, dialogues about the issue are alive and well today. Elliptical and sometimes redundant, last autumn a spate of roundtables, live streamed dialogues, and articles about the matter positioned critics as a dying breed. “Art Criticism Is In Crisis. These Three Writers Aren’t Giving Up” screamed a headline in Los Angeles/New York City-based Cultured magazine.9 And in his article for The Critic, “The end of art critics,” Pierre d’Alancaisez noted that now, an “uncritical” turn positioned just such art writers as “lackeys” within networks of socially and politically connected curators, artists, and institutions¹⁰ Critics “propped up” the ideas of others, he said, and negative criticism was equal to an act of treason.

Although the contemporary art scene might be said to begin and end on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Midwest is as susceptible to the larger art world’s conditions as anywhere else, if not more intensely. Certain truths hold. The Midwest is flush with thriving artistic communities, but collectors and donors frequently invest elsewhere. We have scores of established higher-education institutions and great civic museums, but the commercial gallery scene suffers. And while everyone loves a fresh new art-writing platform—we rave about its good work “in the community”—these outlets fold time and again. Little more than a year ago, readers and writers bid farewell to Ruckus Journal of Louisville, Kentucky (2017-2023). In 2022 Kate Mothes, an Upper Midwest art writer, curator, and current editor of Chicago-based Colossal, relaunched Dovetail Magazine (2020-2024) with a generous grant from Arts Midwest. An elegant take on how art and writing might make “pathways” between “places and people,” the now-put-to-bed site (it promises to one day return) featured the contemporary art scene in places like Bogota, Columbia; New York City; and Sheboygan, WI. The Midwest Art Quarterly too, founded in 2022 by Troy Sherman out of St. Louis, MO, plans to shutter after its next issue.

And yet, if journalists write the first draft of history, as the adage goes, art critics could be said to author the first version of art history. Exhibition reviews and the criticism of today are like archives still in the womb—these are the sources (art) historians will later seek, ones especially meaningful now in the Midwest. The question, then, is this: how might art writing from the Midwest region retroactively and contemporaneously establish a cogent, specific and holistic history of Midwest contemporary art, one that runs from roughly 1975 until now—a task possible, well-timed, and necessary, though admittedly far beyond the reach of these words at present. Surely, scouring available archives and conducting focused interviews with key players would shed considerable light not only on artists and art making in the region but also on how larger circumstances within the art world uniquely affected the production and reception of art across the past fifty years here in the Midwest—a book yet to be written. The splintering effect of post-modernism, the rise of academia’s New Art History (think Marxism and semiotics), and the art market boom and museum building spree of the 1980s naturally articulated changes differently here than on either coast; not for nothing do we have such sayings as “Cleveland’s a plum” in comparison to New York City as the big apple. Indeed, decades surrounding the turn of the new millennium witnessed the birth and death of many Midwestern art writing platforms—primarily print magazines and online outlets but also valuable small-press, in-house publication in and around the Great Lakes—some yet to be (re)discovered.

Founded in Akron in 1978 by Cleveland-based artist Don Harvey and former Artforum editor John Coplans, Dialogue (1978–2002) emerged as a powerhouse of Midwest art writing, containing history, criticism, conversation, and connectivity between communities across distance. Authored and published during an analog, pre-internet era, Dialogue linked regions across Ohio to the east, west, and south of the heart of it all. In Chicago, the New Art Examiner printed its first issues in 1973 (its tagline, without fear or favor, was borrowed from The New York Times publisher Adolf S. Ochs). Originally founded by former Chicago Tribune Art critics Jane Addams Allen and Derek Guthrie, the magazine has a complicated history but today remains online and in print after a hiatus, reorganization, and relaunch. Founded some years later in 1986 by Brian and Jan Hieggelke Newcity, a Chicago-based media company, remains healthy today both online and in print.

Though Dialogue and the New Art Examiner enjoyed robust circulation throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, both suspended publication by July 2002; a small article in Art in America announced, “Midwest Art Mags Struggling,” citing changing economies and dwindling financial support. A year or so later Cleveland’s beloved Angle magazine, co-founded by the late artist and critic Dan Tranberg; poet, writer, and editor Amy Bracken Sparks; and artist and writer Douglas Max Utter; began publishing what some might call the most handsome Midwest art-mag of all; four years later in 2007, however, the magazine ceased publication. (Now smartly solving a problem for posterity, CAN Journal’s quarterly print issues since 2011 have now been archived in at least five local libraries; resulting from that process, Cleveland Public Library now has a full collection of Angle, but not yet Dialogue.)

Perhaps the thing about the Midwest art scene and the writing that sustains it is, of course, that it’s not of interest to anyone until it is. Jacob Wilson’s article, “The Midwest ain’t mid,” in PLASTER magazine last fall outlined some of these stakes in an in-depth chat with the aforementioned Troy Sherman, founder and editor of the soon-to-sunset Midwest Art Quarterly (2022-2024)¹¹ Here Sherman expounded on what he’s been writing in his editor’s introduction each quarter for several years, essentially developing a theory about the relevance of a regional history of Midwest contemporary art; for Sherman, the logic of such an enterprise does not subscribe to the insecurities that dawned as global contemporary art history descended some decades ago across this grand fly-over zone.

Describing the Midwest colorfully as “the fat, deep fried lump of land nestled between the Appalachians to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west, the Ohio River to the south and Canada to the north,” home to 69 million people, Wilson cautioned that, “you can’t will or write new artforms into existence.” And yet, many sources for regional histories of contemporary art have already been written and published (scattered as they may be) and hence, the story is already underway. Museums across the Midwest certainly continue the work of curating and canonizing contemporary art. In 2022, for example, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City partnered with Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center for The Regional, a curated survey show dedicated to nearly two dozen artists living and working in the Midwest; and in Madison, The Wisconsin Triennale remains a cornerstone of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Too many other such exhibitions exist to list herein, including this spring’s collaboration between moCa Cleveland and the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art on Ohio Now: State of Nature, featuring artists who examine the state’s natural histories and present-day environmental crises. And here in Cleveland, the Artist Archives of the Western Reserve –which has a regional, archiving mission–partnered recently with Buffalo’s Burchfield Penny Art Center to mount one of this season’s gems, Common Currents, an exhibition exchange between almost two dozen artists from Buffalo, NY, and Northeast Ohio; accompanied by a catalog, the show will travel to both cities. But, if no one writes about it—and if no one investigates it critically—will its legacy grow legs? And, even if critics take note of such enterprises, on what kinds of platforms might such writing be published, and who will read it? Admittedly, something about the phrase “regional art” or “regional art history” sounds decidedly unsexy, quotidian, and perhaps wholly unremarkable. But I might argue that this is only true if, to return to Elkins’ point, such criticism remains siloed, out of sync with and unconnected to the larger art world (and its history), to which it is already intimately bound. This, I think, is where contemporary art history and art criticism must lean into one another, overlap, diverge, and agree to disagree.

Of course, an oft-cited Midwest legend persists as a thorny cliché: this arena might ignite someone’s career, but one must go elsewhere to make it—a thesis perhaps illustrating our Rustbelt’s very soul, and the area’s constant back and forth battle with centripetal force, i.e. we leave, and we return. But all kinds of microhistories—dialed-in social or cultural narratives that tell a larger story through specific, first-hand accounts—offer deeply consequential and in demand points of view. In Chicago, Tempest Hazel, a curator, writer and artist advocate, co-founded Sixty Inches From Center, a collective that facilitates the publishing and production of projects about “artists, archival practice, art history, and culture in Chicago and the Midwest,” prioritizing “the preservation of culture within Indigenous, diasporic, queer, and disability communities of our region.” Hazel, who also leads this year’s cohort of Chicago Critic’s Table, has said, quite simply, “we need each other as writers right now.”12

And so, much like we make lists nearly every day of our lives to remember what’s important to do or buy, or who we need to call and e-mail, reminds us that, if we don’t write it down, we forget. This then, is in some small way a bid and an invitation to yes, keep writing—even imperfectly but specifically about contemporary art in the Midwest; later historians will be grateful. Criticism puts art under the microscope; it is an act of witnessing but also perception and analysis, one that endows art with more relevance, movement, and even monetary worth via circulation in larger systems of interpretation, evaluation, and appraisal. Emerging as we all are from a post-Covid haze, we seem to once again take stock of a new kind of (art) world order and the place of art criticism within it.

1. Get to know David Carrier via his website, davidcarrierartwriter.com; see also David Carrier, “Art Criticism and Art History Writing: What’s Happening.” Brooklyn Rail. March 2025. Carrier currently serves as editor of the Brooklyn Rail’s Railing Opinion section.

2. Ivan Gaskell, “Art Writing: A Response.” Brooklyn Rail. March 2025.

3. Zachary Cahill, “Editor’s Plaisance.” Portable Gray, vol. 7, no. 2, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025): 211- 213.

4. See a short discussion of this tweet in the opening lines of Pierre d’Alancaisez’s “The end of art critics.” The Critic. November 14, 2024.

5. James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, The University of Chicago, 2003): 2. Elkins currently serves as E. C. Chadbourne Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His hypothetical “7-headed hydra of art writing” included the catalog essay, the academic treatise, cultural criticism, the conservative harangue, the philosopher’s essay, descriptive art criticism, and poetic art criticism.

6. Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? 4.

7. Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? 6.

8. Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? 6.

9. Julia Halperin, “Art Criticism Is in Crisis. These Three Writers Aren’t Giving Up.” July 23. 2024. Cultured. Ceasura magazine also streamed a two-hour live conversation on YouTube titled, “The Crisis of Art Criticism” featuring Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review, Troy Sherman of The Midwest Art Quarterly and Gareth Thomas Kaye of Chicago Spleen.

10. Pierre d’Alancaisez. “The end of art critics.” The Critic. November 14, 2024.

11. Jacob Wilson, “The Midwest ain’t mid.” October 10, 2014. PLASTER. Available online at plastermagazine.com/opinion/midwest-art-quarterly-troy-sherman-future-of-contemporary-art-regionalism/

12. See Hazel’s full statement at artsandpubliclife.org/critics-table on the Chicago Critic’s Table homepage. See also Hazel’s personal website, tempestthazel.com.