arts & culture criticism in the united states—book manuscript in progress.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
— Susan Sontag
How did writing about the arts and culture develop in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century to the age of the Internet? While many studies touch on particular genres, no book yet explores the broad story of writing about the arts and culture in America across multiple forms: literary criticism, the visual arts, the performing arts, music, film, television, and more.
This book uses case studies to explore diverse critical responses to artistic expression in the US. What did it mean to write about the arts in an American key? How was this endeavor connected to developing formations of national culture? How does it fit into a transnational or international history, not only in relation to Europe, but also to the African diaspora, Asia, and a Pan-American vision of arts and culture writing? How did more specific regionalisms within the United States matter to the development of arts and culture criticism in the country? How does the story of criticism relate to the history of journalism and publishing and the emergence of mass media and mass entertainment? What can we better understand by comparing different genres of art in the United States by way of how their particular modes of criticism emerged? How, in responding to the arts, were critics also responding to other factors in US history: politics, economics, and the very nature of individual identities and communal, civic formations? To understand more clearly how arts criticism developed in the United States is to see the nation’s history from a different vantage point as issues of aesthetic value intersected with questions of power and culture.
Starting in mid-nineteenth century, figures and events included in the book include:
- the emergence of annual exhibits; the writings of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Margaret Fuller, Ned Wilkins, William Winter, and Henry Clapp;
- into the early-twentieth century, James Huneker, Brander Mathews, Henry Krehbiel, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Constance Rourke;
- literary criticism not only as it emerged among famous academic theorists, but also as seen through the founding and subsequent evolution of the New York Times Book Review, founded in 1896, expanded by editor J. Donald Adams in the 1920s, and then changed once again by editor John Leonard in 1970;
- into the post-World War II decades, figures such as Manny Farber, Robert Warshow, Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Rexroth, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Susan Sontag, and Lucy Lippard;
- dance criticism’s development as seen through the writings of H.T. Parker, Carl Van Vechten, Louis Horst, Mary F. Watkins, John Martin, Edwin Denby, Clive Barnes, Arlene Croce, Joan Acocella, and Jill Johnson;
- the rise and development of jazz criticism by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Herbie Nichols, Nard Griffin, Eunice Pye, Joy Tunstall, Phyl Garland, Ralph Gleason, Martin Williams, Leonard Feather, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, and others;
- rock music criticism by Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Greg Tate, and others
- and more recent modes of arts writing online that respond to the changing nature of publishing itself as well as to new development in the arts
- the book also pays special attention to the question of regional scenes, styles, and critics in Los Angeles and Chicago, in particular the criticism in local Los Angeles newspapers as well as the Chicago Tribune dance critic Ann Barzel and Chicago Defender arts editor and journalist Earl Calloway.