The truth is – the work of a critic is seldom written to be read. Once published, this currency is converted into a line on an artist’s resume, a page in their press packet, a post on their instagram, and a hyperlinked stamp on the gallery’s website. The review shouldn’t be damning (and they rarely are), nor must it be glowing. There are no regulatory standards for quality control in the art industry, and thus, no ratings. A review simply needs to acknowledge that the exhibition exists, that the work within it is a part of art history, that art history is valuable, and that we are all valuable, thereby demonstrating to collectors, curators, and faculty search committees that the artist is a worthwhile collective investment.

You’ll always find critics at the invite-only dinners after gallery openings. The gallerists need them there to legitimize the paintings. It doesn’t matter that the critics drink too many Negronis at these dinners and then do too much ketamine at the after-parties. It doesn’t matter that, when the critics return to the galleries the following afternoon to reflect under the vivid fluorescents and the ostrich-glares of the sales directors because they, per usual, weren’t able to see the art at the openings, they’re morbidly hungover and can’t even begin to comprehend the exhibition texts. It doesn’t matter because these texts are usually written by other critics contracted as anonymous mercenaries, or others who, like the critics, have MAs in something vague, something that encourages them to overstate and overexplain artistic intent. Because with these single sheets of paper tucked into their Kunstverein totes, the critics have everything they need to write their own versions once the fog clears.

But for now, the critics have to rush home and pack, as they’re all due for flights to impending openings of biennials and foundations funded by oil barons, arms dealers, and shipping magnates. And on these flights, the pilots will announce that the cabin crews consist of representatives from thirteen different nationalities who together speak twenty-four different languages, and as the critics look out on our earth’s vast horizon, they’ll remember there’s a whole world out there, and they’ll yearn for it, hoping they’ll find it in these foreign lands. Instead, they’ll spend their three days toggling between fitful sleep in their Ibis Hotel rooms and dissociative fugues in which they try to comprehend liminal acts of sonic resistance and piles of ostensibly dead children’s shoes at previews, openings, talks, tours.

Suddenly, their reviews are due, and in the more difficult, diffuse ones about noise and children’s shoes that can’t be pilfered from the exhibition texts, they’ll try to close the gap between the world they thought they had perspective on from the sky and the artifacts of artistic ideas in the exhibitions. They’ll open these reviews with references to the carbon footprint of airline travel (“Challenging the Art World’s Material Waste,” Frieze, 2021), isolationist hard-right policies (“12th Shanghai Biennale: 禹步 Proregress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence,” Art Agenda, 2019), oil production (“Experiences of Oil,” Artforum, 2022), sexism at the US Open (“9th Busan Biennale, Divided We Stand,” Art Agenda, 2018), and knife crime (“The Many Meanings of Home,” Frieze, 2019). Everyone knows the gap is too wide to bridge, that the shoehorning of historical context is an all-too-often-taken shortcut to imbuing art with historical legitimacy. But they can’t afford to not take shortcuts. For the review of the noise and the shoes of ostensibly dead children they’ll be paid pennies per word, if for some Italian magazines, a year later.

On their flights home, they’ll leaf through inflight magazines and think about the rates those writers must get paid to write about “Four Must-Visit Pinot Noir Producers In New Zealand’s Central Otago Valley,” “Dior’s Junon and Venus Gowns,” and “Three Perfect Days in Dubrovnik.” They’ll think about how they’ve published texts about radical hospitality, art at the intersection of fashion and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and decolonizing biennials, and wonder how they ended up in their bind, this UBS/Deutsche Bank-sponsored ghetto, this childproofed iPad play version of society, and not the other. What is it about art?

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This text appears in Spike #80 – The State of the Arts under the title “What Is It about Art?” To read the other 7 answers, you can buy your copy in our online shop.