ARTONTRIAL

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The Courage of Art Criticism

Sky Goodden

In the work of art criticism, courage sits somewhere near the top of the job description, or at least it should. But the kinds of courage we reach for, and in response to what – these are myriad, and I believe some are abiding where others are generational. As recently as five years ago, I thought our best courage-taking in criticism would be to slow down our looking and to resist a sped-up, rapacious market that was eating art’s real-world presence, just as a junked-up, cranked-out publishing metabolism was doing the same to writing online. Each mechanism was more deleterious of generative thinking and unparanoid debate than the last and I couldn’t tell what we were holding between the dripping listicles and theory lashings. I think we’ve too often twinned the idea of courage with speaking up, with stepping out, with claiming something for ourselves. Even this past six months, how many voices have we heard tell us about their privileges, at length, before issuing an anti-racist mea culpa? I am coming to better appreciate the courage it takes to share space, extend power, and also to sit down and sit back, even as one solicits new voices. It’s courageous to continue drafting the room in which we all get to stand up and speak.