NO JUDGMENT

TWO THOUGHTS immediately sprang to mind when I read the title of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster’s recent book of conversations, Exit Interview (no place press, 2024). First and perhaps most obviously, I thought of the procedure, currently mandated by roughly three-quarters of American companies, in which an employee is asked about their work experience when leaving a job. But in quick succession I also thought of an exit poll, used to collect demographic data from voters. If Foster’s questions to Buchloh are closer to the latter type of interview (“Can you tell me a little about your family?” “How do you see the academy in the trajectory of your work and life?”), Buchloh’s answers align more with the former (“Maybe I should simply give up my claim on judgments and canons”).¹ More to the point, these two very different types of interview suggest the opposition that drives so much of Buchloh’s practice as a critic and art historian: free-market capitalism on the one hand versus participatory (leftist) politics on the other, the former bad perpetually subsuming the latter good. 

The bulk of the three-part book comprises Foster interviewing Buchloh about his life, intellectual formation, and work as a critic. What begins as a series of questions and answers in “Part 1: Biographemes” becomes, in “Part 2: Schisms” and especially in “Part 3: Dissensus,” much more of a back-and-forth, particularly toward the end of the book. There, Foster’s questions to Buchloh become increasingly direct, even pointed. And in this we see not only their evident mutual respect, but their shared view of what it means to be a critic and critical art historian. The dissensus that ends the interviews is thus not just a record of Buchloh’s sundry agreements and disagreements with art criticism and art history, but of Foster’s sundry agreements and disagreements with Buchloh. This pushback and occasional calling to task not only makes for compelling reading, but serves as an apt rejoinder to those who would collapse their differences into some kind of monolithic Octoberite orthodoxy. The book concludes with a short essay by Buchloh, a coda of sorts, in which he provides a more rigorously formulated claim about the (dismal) state of contemporary art criticism and the plight—indeed, the demise—of the contemporary art critic. More on that in a moment.

Toward the end of their final conversation, Buchloh notes how, under pressure from younger scholars, he has recently made a greater effort to recognize “that modernism and modernity were formed under conditions of colonial history . . . under conditions not only of a repressive class culture but also of an exclusionary, racist society.” Grappling with these concerns has led him, he continues, to become “critical of the doxa of modernism to which I had adhered for all too long.”² That warranted an emphatic red mark in the margin of my copy. Partly because, with exceptions that can be counted on one hand, almost all of the many artists mentioned by Buchloh and Foster up to that point had been white. Buchloh’s effort to course-correct his career-long intellectual investments thus also serves as a kind of corrective to the book, both coming late in the game. And in a certain sense, all the more admirably so as a result. For it is rare indeed that a critic and art historian of his stature would voluntarily relinquish their hard-won critical authority by so actively embracing the criticisms, if not attacks, of a younger generation. If the essence of modernism, as Clement Greenberg famously put it, is to use “the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself,” it’s striking that most modernist critics, notorious for not being able to take what they so readily dish out, so rarely extend the same rigor of self-examination to their own practice.³

And so, Buchloh asks: “What do I do with a [Kerry James] Marshall painting in relation to a [Robert] Ryman painting? Do I think there’s a real loss between Ryman and Marshall? To my mind there is. But is it a necessary loss? Yes, it is.” Or again, as he describes the work of Jordan Casteel: “Aesthetically speaking, it’s opportunistic, without any interest. . . . And yet, as I make that judgment, I’m horrified by my own disciplinary violence.” At issue is less the loss between Ryman, a white abstract painter whom Buchloh endorses, and Marshall and Casteel, both Black figurative painters whom he does not, than the loss between Buchloh, who cares little about race, and a new generation of critics and art historians, who care about it a lot. All too often, Buchloh laments, modernist criticism has become little more than a series of rote applications, lapsing into a form of “disciplinary control that many of us practice.” He continues:

I’m very critical of it, but I’m doing much the same when I say that Marshall will be judged in terms of painting, right? That’s the rigorous—or narrow-minded—judgment that . . . I still enforce. I know it’s deeply problematic, but it has been hard for me to give up because I feel I might be depriving myself of certain concepts of truth that have defined much of my thinking. That’s a very difficult step to take.⁴

Caught between a fear that in changing tack he could miss out on “certain concepts of truth” and an equally powerful worry that his critical rigor has morphed into unbending narrow-mindedness, it’s time, Buchloh suggests, to leave the stage. It’s time to exit. 

It is rare indeed that a critic and art historian of Buchloh’s stature would voluntarily relinquish their hard-won critical authority by so actively embracing the criticisms, if not attacks, of a younger generation.

Which sounds simple enough. But bowing out is not quite as straightforward an option for Buchloh as it may seem. Not that he can’t retire—he has—or pass the mantle to a younger generation. For when Buchloh says that “there’s a real loss between Ryman and Marshall,” he’s not making an aesthetic claim grounded in taste or a keen eye for pictorial quality. He isn’t making a disinterested (Kantian) aesthetic judgment; he’s making a disinterested historical judgment. The loss that he sees, in other words, is not premised on his opinion, on what he considers good or bad, but on what history deems valid or invalid, viable or obsolete, legitimate or illegitimate, productive or ruinous, to use some favored terms from his rhetorical toolbox. As a result, when artists engage in figuration, as Marshall and Casteel do, there are only two very broad evaluative options for Buchloh: They either allegorize the obsolete, moribund, dead, retardataire (etc.) nature of its historical outmodedness, or they simply are obsolete, moribund, dead, retardataire (etc.). What applies to one artist thus applies across the board to an entire swath of artists who are, again in a very broad sense, deemed similarly historically valid or invalid. It matters little that when Buchloh states that, “in general, figurative referentiality only appears to me as valid when it enacts its own historically deeply fractured, ruinous status,” he’s talking about Jeff Wall’s “manifestly obsolete culture of the singular photographic image”; he could just as easily be referring to Marshall and Casteel or any number of other figurative painters.⁵ And in short, that is the nature of the loss that Buchloh sees between Ryman, who is historically legitimate, and Marshall and Casteel, who are not.

Or put it this way: When Foster says to Buchloh, “You’re famous—for some, you’re infamous—for your criticism of artists who insist on painting after the historical point at which, for you, it has become invalid,” he is pointing to the way in which artists such as Marshall and Casteel are, de jure, ruled out of court by Buchloh, consigned to (or for his detractors, lumped into) the category of “invalid.” And yet, Foster continues, “at the same time, privately, you often talk about painting with great enthusiasm,” suggesting a sharp distinction between Buchloh’s public criticism, in which individual taste is downplayed as much as possible, and his strictly private admiration of paintings that would otherwise stand condemned as illegitimate.⁶ Seen this way, the loss that occurs in the move from Ryman to Marshall and Casteel is not just a shift from valid to invalid forms of painting, but a shift from the suppression of the individual to its celebration. For once that happens, as Buchloh remarked almost twenty-five years ago, we move into “a terrain where every voice claims instant competence and authority,” which is clearly bad.⁷ So why the equivocation? Why is this loss deemed “necessary” by Buchloh, however begrudgingly, and therefore (on measure) good? Well, one reason would be that the first two volumes of his collected writings contain a total of thirty-one essays in which not a single artist discussed is Black, Asian, or Indigenous.⁸ So yeah, pretty necessary.

AS I READ BUCHLOH’S self-criticism, and thought again of the book’s title, another not entirely intuitive image sprang to mind: George Brecht’s 1961 Fluxus event score Word Event. A simple linguistic proposition typewritten on a card, Brecht’s event score aims to focus an audience’s attention on a particular action or moment in time. I thought of this particular piece not simply because Exit Interview enacts the same dual structure as Brecht’s text—“word event” and “exit”—but because of how the event score reflects Buchloh’s understanding of avant-garde critique, Fluxus being a prime example, back onto the work of the critic. Like a series of corrected proofs being passed from editor to editor, the avant-garde in Buchloh’s telling is pushed ever forward, as if toward some distant, always incomplete final draft. And as Buchloh makes clear in his concluding essay, the same dialectical process of critique and correction that drives the avant-garde also drives its criticism. 

But this is more than just an inside-baseball story of disciplinary dialectics. Equally important for Buchloh is the way the avant-garde reflects the logic and structure of capitalism by “emulating the regime of domination.”⁹ This can be seen, for example, in another work by Brecht, his 1961 Exit. By reworking John Cage’s reworking of Duchamp’s readymade, Exit exemplifies what Buchloh elsewhere describes as Fluxus’s overall refusal “to conceive of the work of art as being anything but fully identified with the conditions of the industrially produced multiple object and the economic order of value produced by commodities.”¹⁰ On an artistic level, then, Exit enacts Buchloh’s favored avant-garde strategy of “deskilling” to “dismantle privileged forms of vision” while allowing for a more expansive, democratic conception of the artist.¹¹ But on a political level, this process of artistic de-skilling also mimics capitalism’s progressive de-skilling of labor as the traditional skills of the working class give way to the Amazon warehouse.¹²

If Buchloh understands a work like Exit as a means “to challenge, to critique, to revise, [and] to reform”¹³ the social effects of capitalism by mimicking those effects (as he writes of Brecht’s Fluxus colleague Robert Watts), this resistance always runs the risk of simply imitating, or worse, advocating or endorsing, the very conditions that it seeks to subvert. Does avant-garde de-skilling critique the conditions of industrialized labor, or does it replicate them? Far from being an act of resistance, could de-skilling actually grease the wheels of avant-garde acculturation, facilitating the movement of capital into every last nook and cranny of cultural production, even the most seemingly resistant? The problem—the despair—for Buchloh, on display throughout the book, is the inevitable slide of the resistant former into the complicit latter. “There’s always a moment of betrayal,” laments Buchloh, as once-radical artistic practices give way to the “more or less blatant affirmation of the underlying ideological and economic principles of the culture industry—that is, the legitimation of spectacle and the status of the artwork as a commodity for speculative investment.”¹⁴ A Fluxus event score, it turns out, looks pretty cool on a tote bag. 

Just as most sectors of white-collar management have proved more recalcitrant to de-skilling than manual labor, so too the intellectual work of the art historian and critic has taken somewhat longer to de-skill than its avant-garde counterparts.¹⁵ But for Buchloh, that moment has come. “Under present circumstances,” Buchloh asks, “how could we not consider the functions of the critic to be obsolete, especially when the critic—myself in this case—claims privileged authority over the vision and judgment of others? On what grounds would that claim be sustained?” Traditionally the answer to that question has hinged, he explains, on “historical expertise,” which “provided the legitimacy to judge before, above, and for all others.” But, he argues, “with the advent of democratization, who could credibly hold onto those claims—all the more so since the best artistic practices of the last fifty years or so, if not since the beginning of modernism, have declared authentic collective access to vision to be one of their primary ambitions? Again, this was one of the compelling arguments that the principle of deskilling mobilized.”¹⁶

Buchloh fleshes out this claim in his concluding essay, tracing a genealogy of art criticism from Pierre Restany and Greenberg (“all flair” and “abstemious arrogance”) to the anti-interpretive claims and gestures of Susan Sontag and Lucy Lippard. By the mid-1970s, Buchloh argues, the critic’s “paternalizing intentions to speak to and for others” had given way to the “innate self-evident communicability”—the transparent, unambiguous transfer of meaning from artwork to viewer—in the art of the 1960s and ’70s.¹⁷ Who needs critics when art speaks for itself? But if “we have been living in a time without critics,” Buchloh asks, reasonably enough, “then what, now, are the criteria of this condition without criticism?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is bleak. Into the critical void has stepped “a system of investment and the financialization of the art market [that] not only no longer require any critical input but quite explicitly disqualify it.” Contemporary art criticism, a farce by any other name for Buchloh, has no purchase, and thus no place, in a world where “the stock market and the art market have become assimilated to such an extent that only market expertise, as the prognosis of profit maximalization and growth potential, is the central question of professional comment.”¹⁸ The de-skilled art critic gives rise to the skilled art adviser—to “market expertise”—such that art becomes just another financial instrument. Making matters worse, the current “globalization of cultural practices,” along with the “universal politicization of artistic practices,” disqualifies all forms of critically “invested speech” that attempt to “differentiate and secure viable practices and positions from mere political posturings.” As a result, “what currently appears as a revolutionary distribution of universal cultural access and assets” is in fact “a phantasmagoria.”¹⁹

All of this reads very much like the Buchloh of old, who had no qualms whatsoever about voicing his opposition to this kind of misbegotten, viewer-knows-best politics of universal value. The old Buchloh knew where he stood: Some art was valid, some art—most—was not. But the new Buchloh isn’t quite so sure anymore. Suddenly, “horrified” by the “disciplinary violence” of his judgments, fully “willing but unable . . . to bracket [his] own criteria when it comes to both local and global artistic production,” Buchloh 2.0 “sees [him]self as this arrogant white male, a fossil really, who doesn’t grasp that such criteria are no longer the primary ones.”²⁰ So what’s a fossilized old white male critic to do? Because at the end of the day, whether we like it or not—and right now we most adamantly do not—some kinds of art, regardless of where or by whom they are made, are, in fact, better than other kinds of art, even in cases where, uncomfortably, the not-so-good kind has been produced in a historically marginalized part of the world or made by an artist whose demographic group has faced persistent social and aesthetic injustice.²¹ For all the differences in our evaluative criteria—call me old-fashioned, but I stubbornly cling to a qualitative spectrum from superlative to outright crappy—on that much we most certainly agree.

Who needs critics when art speaks for itself?

Buchloh’s apparent exit strategy out of this authoritative impasse is to end his essay by quoting from what is arguably, for him, one of the most authoritative texts—if not the most authoritative—of the historical avant-garde: Marcel Duchamp’s “The Creative Act,” first given as a talk in Houston in 1957. “All in all,” writes Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone: the spectator brings the work of art in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” 

In a certain sense, it’s not surprising that Buchloh heads straight for the exit marked “Duchamp” to find his way out of the post-critical mess we’ve gotten ourselves into: Few artists and few texts have oriented Buchloh’s thinking as much as Duchamp and his 1957 essay. The historical importance that Buchloh attributes to Conceptualism, for example, lies precisely in its productive mobilization of “the full range of the implications of Marcel Duchamp’s legacies,” most notably “the construction—or rather the death—of the author” and the redefinition of  “the conditions of receivership and the role of the spectator.”²² Even now, as Buchloh states to Foster, when confronted with the dizzying array of global contemporary art, Duchamp remains Buchloh’s yardstick by which all others are measured: “When I’m confronted with, say, ten artists working in New York, or a hundred artists working in other parts of the world, I keep asking, How does this live up to my artistic gods? How does this live up to Duchamp?”²³ One of Duchamp’s most famous lessons, however, is that yardsticks, much like the distorted meter of his 3 Standard Stoppages, are always arbitrary. Wherein lies the rub.

As Buchloh quite correctly notes, Duchamp’s “delegation of aesthetic experience and judgment . . . to the spectator’s literal self-authorization” anticipates Roland Barthes’s later prediction that the “death of the author” results in the “birth of the reader.”²⁴ But if that’s the case—if all interpretations are equally correct and no one reader or viewer is more qualified than another—then who decides what’s good and what’s not so good? Doesn’t this just bring us straight back to Buchloh’s point, cited earlier, about how the loss of critical expertise ends up a situation “where every voice claims instant competence and authority”? 

Once we move, as we have, into a post-critical world where “the newly authorized spectatorial and readerly subject” takes the place of the critic, and we give up on the idea of good viewers and bad viewers in favor of different viewers and different viewing positions, then the only person who wins, for Buchloh, is not the artist, not the critic, not the art historian, not the curator, and not even, appearances to the contrary, the viewer: The only person who wins is the art dealer. In place of the critic, it’s the market that rushes in to fill the critical vacuum.

But if the appeal to the Duchampian spectator is an effort to empower the viewer and disempower the market, the problem, once again, is that we find ourselves right back in the very situation that Buchloh seeks to avoid. If the viewer can interpret an artwork as they see fit, then, far from resisting the financialization of the art market, this interpretive free-for-all does the exact opposite: It transforms the artwork into a commodity and its viewer into a consumer. As Nicholas Brown argues, the fundamental difference between a commodity and an artwork lies in the fact that a commodity can be used in whatever way the consumer wants, whereas an artwork cannot. Which is to say, if I hack an IKEA stepladder by using it as a towel rack or a bookshelf, I am not misusing or misinterpreting that stepladder; I am simply asserting my right as a consumer to use it as I see fit. The customer, after all, is always right, and for this reason IKEA doesn’t care one way or the other what I do with its stepladders so long as I buy them (indeed, IKEA has an entire list of helpful hacks on its website). But if I claim that Walter Sickert’s paintings prove that he was Jack the Ripper, or that Albrecht Dürer’s ca. 1498 print The Prominade conceals a code revealing the artist’s secret Jewish identity, or that the various art installations in and around the Denver International Airport contain references to the threat of an alien invasion and the coming apocalypse, as many people have, then those artists would dispute my claims as not just dumb but incorrect.²⁵ “How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?” wonders Julian Barnes.²⁶ At what point, in other words, does an interpretation cease to mean what an interpreter insists it does? Customers may never be wrong, but viewers often are. 

Which brings us back to the book’s title. The waning of the critic’s authority in favor of an endless, unbraided mass of individual consumers of art who interpret whatever they want, however they want, echoes another kind of exit: from the field of collective class politics into a neoliberal market of individual political positions, tastes, consumer habits, likes and dislikes. As the political theorist Daniel Zamora argues, in the “atomized civil society” that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War, “exit became the general mode through which people related to politics. . . . The end of history was in that sense a generalized exit from the public sphere.”²⁷ And that, of course, is the very opposite of everything that Buchloh stands for. So if it hasn’t been easy for him to give up on “certain concepts of truth that have defined much of [his] thinking,” and if coming to terms with the shift in value from Ryman to Marshall and Casteel has been “a very difficult step to take,” then, hard as this is to imagine, perhaps he and—heresy of heresies!—all of us should also consider Duchamp a necessary loss.

Gordon Hughes is an associate professor in the department of art history at Rice University.