Are art critics a western construct?

Do other cultures have art critics? do they critize western art too? Is art a universal thing?

Are art critics a western construct?
This is a great question, but a really difficult one to answer. There have always been critics of various kinds, but it's only in the early 19th century in Europe that the field of art history becomes embodied as an academic discipline.





Since the word 'art' applies to so many types of objects and texts, it would be impossible to give an account for each. Certainly there have been writers who critique written work and dramatic performances for a long time. And there have been biographies of visual artists at least since the Renaissance (probably the best-known work of this kind is "Lives of the Artists," where Giorgio Vasari gives not only an account of the facts about the subjects but also describes - and critiques - examples of their respective works).





As Western art evolved from the purely religious to a combination of the religious and the secular, there were always de facto art critics; namely, the people who bought, sold, commissioned, and collected work. Curatorship is an important part of the art historical world, and the people with the means and the interest certainly play a huge role in what does and does not get produced. And this quiet but effective criticism is at work in any culture where the purpose of art has moved away from serving only as a point of reference for devotion to the supernatural and has taken on a more fluid aesthetic purpose.





That's pretty dense stuff; let me see if I can give you an example. If I'm carving a statue of Jesus for a church, there are two ways in which I might be critiqued: on the one hand, if you're a Christian, you could critique me for not using suitable materials, or for somehow straying from accepted boundaries of what a religious statue should look like, about whether or not the sculpture falls within canonically accepted doctrines and tastes. That's all within the context of a believer who has preconceived notions about what should and shouldn't be represented. This is a valid form of criticism that informs the way art gets made.





The other kind of criticism would seek not to argue simply that a work does or does not fulfill its stated purpose (helping people pray, for instance), but to show the ways in which it expresses all kinds of formal and historical (and sometimes psychological) possibilities that intersect in the work itself. This kind of criticism tries to gain a broader understanding of a work of art by putting it into a larger context. It doesn't always succeed. Any critic will find it impossible to escape the latent assumptions of his or her time and place, the preoccupations of politics and the taint of prejudice, not to mention the limits of personal knowledge, to give a complete account of the work of art in question. That's why there are always new things to say about old works. As our perspective changes, and as new art comes into the world, the old ways of seeing become inadequate.





That being said, I think that much of what we call criticism today comes out of a 19th-century urge to turn every discipline into a science. This is a Western phenomenon, but I'm not sure that there is really anywhere that has a written culture that hasn't taken up some version of art criticism in the last 100 years.





I'd like to recommend an essay to you, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot. In it he describes a theory about the relationship of art and artists to the past. I think it touches on some of the questions you have. It's also a very fine example of general literary criticism which applies equally well to the visual arts.
Reply:Critics are a western construct. In the east they are called "infidel" or "jew" and killed.

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