The Ends of Criticism

<p>Tasked by the time-bound phenomena of the recent and the new, criticism—specifically, art criticism—often traffics in endings. Especially from the nineteenth century onward, these endings became something of an inevitability. Chasing an ever-advancing avant-garde, the art criticism of the modernist period repeatedly confronted the limits of its existing forms and conventions. Hence, the ever-present “crisis” that is the hallmark of modernist criticism. Yet if each crisis precipitated an ending, these endings always spelled a new beginning—a new criticism for a new art. Not so in the context of American art of the 1960s. Here, crisis became less of a motor and more of a wrench. Rather than provoke a new phase of modernist criticism, the decade’s new art seemed to suggest that modernism itself had run its course. As Leslie Fiedler had it in 1969: “To describe the situation of American letters at the end of the sixties is difficult indeed, almost impossible, since the language available to critics at this point is totally inappropriate to the best work of the artists who give the period its special flavor, its essential life.” Fiedler notably characterized that period as holding “the death throes of Modernism and the birth pangs of Post-Modernism.” Aligning criticism with the dying and art with the living, his 1969 essay “Cross the Border—Close the Gap” imagined a postmodernist criticism that would meet that fledgling art where it was…</p>