I was out recently and ran into a colleague, who confronted me about an essay I had written earlier this year on the state of art criticism, in which I griped that art news and opinion had replaced art theory at the center of the contemporary discussion. "the problem I have with that essay," my colleague said, "is that you are trying to tell people what to think, as if there's a right way to approach art."
Without some kind of theory to ground artistic debate, I find, the sense of art's importance recedes and gossip and snark fill the gap. But my colleague argued that it all is, unavoidably, ultimately subjective: "In the end, it's all just 'thumbs up and thumbs down' — that's it."
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