Anxieties of the art critic in a ‘mentally malnourished country in love with its pain’

What are the stakes in this conversation?” asked Sean O’Toole. “What is at risk?” His questions were directed at fellow art critic Ashraf Jamal. The two men sat in front of an eager audience gathered in the atrium of the Keyes Art Mile in Rosebank on Wednesday night; they were there both to discuss Jamal’s book, In The World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, and (we’d been told) to talk about “being a working art critic”.

With this as a premise, it was inevitable that beneath the surface of O’Toole’s opening gambit lay another line of inquiry: a 21st-century twist on the perennial question: “What is the function of criticism at the present time?”

For a while now, arts critics have felt an existential anxiety. Do we have a purpose? Does what we do matter?

When the video of Childish Gambino’s This is America slapped an unsuspecting world across the face earlier in May, delighting and confusing viewers everywhere, Wired magazine’s Rowland Manthorpe bemoaned how critics were not up to the task of engaging with the work – analysing it, judging it, interpreting it, evaluating it and telling people what it means.

That was the role of the “traditional cultural critic”, a figure who has (in Manthorpe’s gloomy opinion) been replaced by “the internet phenomenon known as fandom”. People don’t read reviews any more, according to this logic. Instead, they read posts on social media; they read listicles and celebrity blogs; they read churnalism and hot takes by influencers.

There is something to be celebrated in the democratisation of opinions about cultural products. In the days when a coterie of critics were understood to be the arbiters of public taste, and their authority dictated what was worth seeing and what was not, they arguably had too much power – even if their views were often at odds with the popular and the financially successful.

In SA, arts journalism fulfills a need beyond assessing aesthetic value or pursuing intellectual-ideological debate.

Some of the most important arts writing in this country over the past two decades has been investigative – exposing corruption, mismanagement and abuse in state and private institutions that are supposed to support artists but in fact undermine them and damage the arts sector more broadly.

O’Toole, one senses, has a more phlegmatic view than the woe-are-we brigade of arts writers and readers who think “the internet killed the cultural critic” or fret about how this global problem is compounded in SA by a lack of basic literacy, presenting an even greater barrier to arts critics having widespread influence.

Of course, as a veteran critic, O’Toole must believe what he does matters; but he knows it matters within a limited sphere.

Jamal, as his answer to O’Toole’s first question – and every question thereafter – indicated, is less modest in his sense of the critic’s purview. He, too, is a veteran; as O’Toole noted, Jamal was there at “year zero” of post-apartheid art.

He is thus the possessor of tremendous “institutional memory”, which In The World demonstrates alongside the fireworks of his multifarious intellectual and pop cultural points of reference.

Yet Jamal is vehemently opposed to institutionality in the art world. He is not an iconoclast for the sake of iconoclasm (although admirers of William Kentridge might disagree on this score – Jamal has long insisted that he is simply “bereft of understanding” when it comes to the value ascribed to Kentridge’s work).

But he carries a firm conviction that South Africans, in response to art, are too “reverential”, too “didactic, dogmatic and Lutheran”: we are “prescriptive”, we “frame, name and box”.

If South African art and arts criticism alike lack “radicality and innovation”, this is because as a country we have been unable to escape our “pathologies” – “the only thing we know and love is pain”, and so we are bound to the “hateful toxic cant” and “mental malnutrition” of identity politics.

For Jamal, criticism should be an act of empathy.

This requires being “raw” and “open” in responding to a work; and then, instead of trying to be “clever”, undertaking “a gesture of sharing knowledge”.

It is not a job for pacifists. Jamal sees himself “fighting through the trenches of a very divided … political schema”. The critic, for now at least, is alive.