Criticism and Internet

In 2019 you published Art Criticism Online: A History. What are the main changes and renewal in art criticism with the digital era? My book describes the history of art criticism from print to digital. In the introduction I provide an overview of the history of art criticism itself and the debates that rage over whether this or that approach—or this or that technology—has finally killed off the practice or genre. In the early 2000s some people thought digital forms of art criticism were poor quality or hard to find, although later more people acknowledged quality critique was freely accessible online. Either way, what we often see in digital forms of art history are reflections of much earlier approaches to responding creatively to art. For example some of the earliest forms of art criticism like the pamphlets that accompanied French salons in the 1800s were very much like the kind of user reviews and staring systems we see online today for consumer products on Amazon for example. While ‘art critics’ can be just as likely to perform a critique as write one. But regardless of whether digital formats add or detract, the biggest issue is that with digital platforms there’s an attention economy and writing about art is perhaps increasingly becoming niche. And yet even as I say that, we have to