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September 04, 2006
In this earlier post I mentioned the common distinction between art criticism and art reviewing. This enable us to make a break from just talking about critics.
There's an implied hierarchy here, which would have criticism as the more complex and specialised activity and reviewing the more day-to-day. Criticism is done in when writing an essay for an art magazine or a book, whereas reviews are written for the (mostly broadsheet) newspapers. How is the distinction understood?
Luke Morgan in his Australian Art Criticism and Its Discontents" in the Australian Book Review says that we usually encounter:
diametrically opposed, if equally trenchantly expressed, viewpoints. On the one hand, we have an image of the newspaper art critic as a buttoned-up, perhaps elaborately moustachioed and truncheon-wielding policeman-pundit, laying down the law wherever he goes. On the other, there is the academic critic, whom we encounter behind a wall somewhere, probably a sandstone one, emitting a steady stream of baffling dissertations.
It is different voices for different publications because the same people can, and do, write art criticism and art reviews. Thus art critics for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Canberra Times and The Australian are often academic. Morgan makes no mention of blogs---presumably, we bloggers would be seen as amateurs---at this point. They come up latter under hopeful possibilities.
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