Statue to a Critic

Greg Thorpe

‘Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been a statue erected to a critic.’

– Jean Sibelius

Here is my last article for the Fourdrinier and it seems a fine moment to reflect on my time here, on my writing career at large, and on art writing in general. Who needs it? Who reads it? A look at our website analytics tells me that 5,112 people have landed on my articles and videos since I began here in 2019. If that was you, thank you. I wanted to end my Fourdrinier tenure with a piece of meta-writing. I’ve chosen this ‘collage and found object’ approach to tell a story about my work, with reflections on art criticism along the way. ‘Collage’, because I’ll let emotion, contrast and memory dictate the structure. ‘Found object’, because some of these thoughts are mine, some belong to other people, and some might even be yours. So, thank you for reading.

‘Not so long ago I participated in a public discussion meant to address the state of art criticism, during which a fellow panellist – a critic who was also an artist – pre-emptively declared that criticism was completely superfluous. Art would continue to exist without it, he maintained, whereas without art there would be no criticism. Point taken – and yet, as artists like Marcel Duchamp have long pointed out, an artwork is hardly a complete statement or self-contained proposition. Works of art do not convey specific messages in and of themselves. But while they do not mean anything in particular, we can nevertheless find meanings for them. Interpretation, in other words, is part of the work that an artwork generates.’

– Ralph Rugoff, Fifty Years of Great Art Writing

In the autumn of 2018, I was struggling with motivation, procrastination, lack of inspiration and confidence. I enrolled for some sessions with a creative coach and together we figured out two reasons why I was deliberately allowing so many interesting opportunities to sail by. One reason was the fear of failure, and the other was the fear of success. The first of these is the feeling that rejection will confirm all of our worst anxieties about our self-worth. The second is the suspicion that any success will turn out to be an anomalous and fraudulent win which proves impossible to repeat, therefore the truth about our mediocre nature will unavoidably emerge. These fears are, of course, two sides of the same coin; the common currency being: I’m just not good enough. 

‘I enjoyed portraits by Modigliani, Picasso, Max Beckmann, wonderful Chagal’s “The Green Donkey”, and clean and minimalistic design of the Tate’s building. … Most of the modern art on display in the galleries made me laugh – if this is art, I don’t know what is not.’

– TripAdvisor review of Tate Modern, London

As a practical exercise in combatting my negative thinking, my coach invited me to focus pro-actively and constructively on the very next opportunity that came my way. When that opportunity arrived, we put our heads together and broke down all of the hopes, possibilities and anxieties represented by this latest creative prospect. Such as: Why me? But also: Why not me? As part of this fairly tortuous but highly motivating process, I also, simply, had to write the damned application and submit it. That’s how I came to be selected for ‘PAPER Magazine’s Critical Writing Scheme’ (working title Torn, and soon to be the Fourdrinier). Now, after almost three exciting years of art, words, edits, crits, videos, visits, and one curated exhibition, it’s time for me to move on.

Letters to the Editor

Dear Fourdrinier, in ‘Magic and Fear: “Looking In” at Casa das Histórias Paula Rego’ your (somewhat hyperbolic) reviewer seems reluctant to ground Rego’s practice in anything at all that came before her. While I concede that women’s art has been historically under-examined, to imply Ms Rego somehow fell out of the sky like a mysterious egg is deeply misleading. She is primarily a Surrealist and as such belongs in a tradition that is, like it or not, male. (Something ought also to be said about a woman of her stature and age who is still using pastels). You might urge your writers to seem a little less like they are stakeholders in the gallery, and more like they have a stake in Art itself? 

– Adam Pain, Peckham, London

Before I wrote about art I wrote about the theatre. My most-read article turned out to be the first review to hit the stands of Sarah Frankcom and Maxine Peake’s much-anticipated Hamlet, at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. I adored their interpretation and wrote this about it:

‘In her Chairman Mao suit and David Bowie hair, Peake uses every part of the stage, every prop, every poise of the body to deliver a four-hundred-year-old script as if the words have just come to her.’

My controversial tactic as a theatre reviewer was that if I didn’t enjoy it, I simply didn’t review it. This can be tricky when press-night-to-copy is such a tight turnaround – and there are only so many evenings in a week – but surely nobody needs to read the ins and outs of a dull show? Better to direct the people where they really need to be. As it transpired, this strategy has not escaped the attention of all of my readers. A now sadly deleted comment underneath my Hamlet review said something to this mortifying effect: 

 ‘Must all your reviews be so breathless? It sounds as if every trip to the theatre is your first one.’ 

Ultimately, I took this to be an enormous compliment. I hope my ability to be moved by small simple dependable joys just as much as great aesthetic leaps forward stays with me all my life. 

‘Museum was awesome, though a lot of hype around the Mona Lisa when it's not even that big of a painting.’ 

– Google Maps review of The Louvre, Paris 

I was interested to see what my fellow critics had made of Peake’s Hamlet so I read Susannah Clapp’s four-star appraisal in the Observer one week later. These were her opening lines: ‘Her face gleams keenly under an immaculate, straw-coloured David Bowie barnet. She wears a dark blue trouser suit that might have been imagined by a fashion-conscious Chairman Mao.’

I knew this was not Ms Clapp’s first time at the rodeo, and a lowly regional hack like myself was surely beneath her radar, but two identical references left me somewhat taken aback. I felt aggrieved and overlooked. Upon enquiring, the Press Ombudsman assured me that Ms Clapp had never seen my review and to take comfort in the fact that great minds like ours must simply think alike. (I was fired from my theatre reviewing job a few weeks later, but that’s another story…). 

Letters to the Editor

Dear Fourdrinier, for many hundreds of years women had no space to reflect on their creative practice, much less have it taken seriously, so it pains me to see that male art writers now have free reign to roam around our work and critique it at will. Paula Rego, Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Hardacre, Rachel Goodyear, Lady Skollie, Gillian Wearing, even feminist revisions of women artists as featured in Katie McCabe’s fantastic book, all reviewed by the same man. Can’t he find any male artists to write about? 

–  Petra Fayed, Levenshulme, Manchester

 ‘Do not go unless absolutely 100% into Michelangelo. It’s just too busy, too many people allowed in at once, ushered through like cattle. No opportunity to stand and wonder at what you see. Would Michelangelo want people to view his work in this way? I think not.’

– TripAdvisor review of the Sistine Chapel

I believe in ripples. As I was reading and discussing Katie McCabe’s fantastic book, More than a muse: Creative partnerships that sold talented women short, it became more apparent than ever that the impact of art is not fixed or even measurable; and also, that its meaning and import has to sometimes be generated beyond anything an artist is capable of in their lifetime. Whose job is this? Art that doesn’t serve the status quo especially may never find its way into its journals and galleries, let alone its history. Somebody somewhere must believe that anything worth making is also worth reflecting upon; and since art is as much about status and power as it is about anything, the nature of that reflection matters. What we say about art now creates a dynamic that helps to ensure that art will continue to matter. Those ripples will continue into a future with or without us. We have to make them. There is nothing scarier than sending work into a void. Any and all art writing means: We are listening. Things matter. Toni Morrison once defined art as that which “makes another thing possible.” For a long time, I didn’t understand what she meant, but now I think I do. And for art to continue to find a way, there needs to be a culture ready to receive it and let it grow. Art needs to know we are looking, we are listening, we are reading, we are writing. 

A huge thank you to Sara and David, to Teresa, to my fellow writers at the Fourdrinier from 2019 to the present, and to every artist who made what we do possible and worthwhile in the first place.