Art criticism

The art critic describes, analyzes and assesses art of fine arts from the presence of an art-loving audience . But it also subjects works of older date, e.g. B. the classical art , critical re-evaluation. Art criticism is interrelated with the art market , which creates a “need for expertise ” about the works of art sold by the art trade.

Publication media

Art critics make it their business to use reviews and essays to evaluate and classify works of the fine arts according to aesthetic and formal criteria . Her art reviews have been and will be published in relevant specialist journals and exhibition catalogs , in book and brochure form as monographs and also in the feature sections of newspapers and in art magazines.

history

Art criticism (in the broader sense of art theory) was already familiar to the Greeks and Romans . For them, the artists were the “first art critics”; B. Polyklet with his famous canon . In the Renaissance , too, it was artists who wrote the most important treatises on art, such as Leon Battista Alberti with his treatise on painting (1436), who still influenced the Florentine painters in the late 15th century, and Giorgio Vasari , who wrote his biography ( Viten ) the artist (1550) prefaced a treatise on art.

France

It was not until the public exhibitions of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in the Paris Salon of the 17th and 18th centuries that professional art criticism by non-artists (so-called lay criticism) prevailed against the monopoly of assessment claimed by academy members. The writers Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne and Denis Diderot were among the earliest art critics . La Font des Saint-Yenne wrote a detailed review of the salon list from 1746, which appeared anonymously as a separate brochure a year later in The Hague. Between 1759 and 1781 Diderot wrote a total of nine salon reports for the Correspondance littéraire , a handwritten journal published by his friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm every two weeks, which was obtained in particular by aristocratic circles.

A hundred years later, the avant-garde lyricist Charles Baudelaire, as a young writer from 1845 onwards, also wrote several reviews of the Paris salons with clear support for romantic painting and a rejection of realistic and open-air painting.

Germany

In Germany, art criticism arose in the Age of Enlightenment as a cultural transfer of the French art discourse, particularly promoted by the founding of Johann Christoph Gottsched's magazines in the Leipzig book printing and book trade center . In Gottsched's review journals (from 1747) literature was the main focus, but the visual arts were increasingly thematized in the form of reviews of art theoretical writings and translations of lectures from the Parisian Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres ; but only in exceptional cases did they refer directly to works of art. During the Nazi dictatorship, Joseph Goebbels banned art criticism. The involuntary trigger for the ban was August Haußleiter , who had previously attacked a favorite of Julius Streicher's criticism .

Contemporary art criticism

Since the end of the 20th century, contemporary art criticism has been perceived as a genre in crisis.

Prices

• Prize for art criticism of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV) and Art Cologne

See also

• Art history

literature

• Walter Benjamin : Works and Estate, Vol. 3: The concept of art criticism in German romanticism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1973, ISBN 3-518-58501-0 .
• Christian Demand : The Shame of the Philistines. How art got rid of criticism . zu Klampen, Springe 2003, ISBN 3-934920-32-2 .
• Christian Demand: How does order come into art? . zu Klampen, Springe 2010, ISBN 978-3-86674-057-0 .
• Albert Dresdner : The emergence of art criticism in the context of the history of European art life . EVA, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-86572-409-4 .
• Stefan Germer, Hubertus Coal : Spontaneity and Reconstruction. On the role, organizational form and performance of art criticism in the field of tension between art theory and art history . In: Marin Warnke , Martin Gosebruch , Peter Ganz , Nikolaus Meier (eds.): Art theory and art history. 1400–1900 (Wolfenbütteler Research; Vol. 48). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1991, pp. 287-311, ISBN 3-447-03102-6 .
• Dorit Kluge: Criticism as a Mirror of Art. The art reflections of La Font de Saint-Yenne in the context of the emergence of art criticism in the 18th century (art and cultural studies research; vol. 7). VFG, Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-89739-622-7 (also dissertation, University of Koblenz 2007).
• Kunstforum International , Volume 221 (May – June 2013): On the situation of art criticism
• Harry Lehmann (Ed.): Autonome Kunstkritik (offshoot; Vol. 12), with contributions by Peter Bürger, Christian Demand, Jörn-Peter Hiekel, Hanno Rauterberg , Harry Lehmann and Wolfgang Ullrich, Kadmos Kulturverlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3 -86599-158-4 .
• Harry Lehmann: "Autonomous Art Criticism - A Plea", in: White Book Cultural Journalism, ed. v. W. Lamprecht, Vienna: Löcker 2012, pp. 358–365.
• Harry Lehmann: »Complexity and Criticism. A model analysis based on Anatoly Osmolovsky's ›Rot Front - Leftover‹ «, in: springerin. Booklets for Contemporary Art, Volume XVIII Booklet 3 - Summer 2012, pp. 54–57.
• Stefan Lüddemann: Art Criticism as Communication. From judge's office to evaluation agency . Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-8244-4565-4 (plus dissertation, University of Hagen 2003).
• Niklas Luhmann : The Art of Society . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-518-28903-9 .
• Walther Müller-Jentsch : Art criticism as a literary genre. Social conditions of their creation, development and crisis . In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie , Vol. 22 (2012), Issue 4, pp. 539-568, ISSN  0863-1808 .
• Johannes Thomas: logic of chance. Art criticism in the context of modernity, postmodernism and antiquity. Essays and analyzes (Annual Ring. Yearbook for Modern Art; Vol. 44). Oktagon, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89611-039-X .
• Lionello Venturi : History of Art Criticism (Storia della critica d'arte, 1968). Piper, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-492-01978-1 .
• Margrit Vogt: About artificial words and values. The emergence of German art criticism in the Enlightenment . De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-023318-6 .
• Tasos Zembylas : art or non-art. About conditions and instances of aesthetic judgment . WUV, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-85114-315-9 .

Web links

Commons : Art critics  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• aica.de Website of the “International Art Critics Association” - the German section of the Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art (AICA)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Niklas Luhmann: The art of society , p. 135.
2. ^ Albert Dresdner: The emergence of art criticism , p. 18.
3. ^ Lionello Venturi: History of Art Criticism , p. 95.
4. ↑ Margrit Vogt: Of artificial words and values. The emergence of German art criticism in the Enlightenment . De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, p. 35f.
5. ↑ Margrit Vogt: Of artificial words and values. The emergence of German art criticism in the Enlightenment . De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, p. 40.
6. ↑ August Haußleiter : Bayerische Rätsel - A page for August Haußleiter , brief biographical information under a picture of him in Haußleiter's guest article in Der Spiegel of October 11, 1947, online at spiegel.de .
7. ^ Walther Müller-Jentsch: Art criticism as a literary genre. Social conditions of their creation, development and crisis . In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie , Vol. 22 (2012), Issue 4, pp. 559ff.
8. ↑ kunstvereine.de ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.