Why Bad Reviews

I have always cherished my bad reviews, compliments disguised as insults, owned with the warrior’s pride of a battle scar, lest the fragile ego gets in the way. So when art critic Waldemar Januszczak, in the Sunday Times, described my generation of “Young American Artists” exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy in 2006 as “paint-happy know-nothings brought up on hamburgers and porn, a talentless bloom of post-pop trailer trash,” I knew we were not only being treated to a well-articulated, centuries-old cross-cultural antagonism of opposing traditions, sensibilities, tastes and prejudices, a blatant provocation but also invited to class war. And since I was raised on Warholian wit and Watersesque camp, I’ll take it! I lovingly identify with lower-class culture and happily admit that my ambition is to draw as unacademically as possible, so in describing my work  as a “mustard advert,” Januszczak had nailed it. And for this ethnographic effort alone I was truly grateful, reprinting the segment in its entirety (as it also appears in these pages) on the press release for my next show.

Some years later, in 2015, I was visiting the studio of Marilyn Minter, a former teacher of mine, who was in the midst of a big traveling retrospective. As we talked about her long trajectory, her ups and downs, approvals and rejections, she showed me an old review she once treated as a precious talisman; it was carefully cut out and glued into a scrapbook. It called her irtatious, reductive, and gimmicky—at which Marilyn, her young assistant, and I—three generations—laughed in cathartic release and nostalgia. “Nobody gets these kinds of reviews anymore; nobody even writes like this!” Marilyn re ected. I could only agree. Contemporary criticism (ca 2015) already seemed distinctly different, measured and codependent. Out of this collective realization, the idea somehow bore itself: someone should make a survey that bridges time and territories; someone should explore and honor the bad review as a genre; someone should make a book! The same afternoon, as I carefully started reaching out to my friends who came of age in the 90s, Marilyn emailed her own colleagues who have been active for decades, rallying them to take part and share their own bad reviews. From that point on, there was no going back.

Our personal motivations, however, do not explain or mask anybody else’s. There are around 150 artists in this book, and probably as many different backstories and motivations. I didn’t ask, and most didn’t explain, why they wanted to be included. So if you are curious as to why, then you, dear reader, have to reach out and ask them yourself!