Johanna Fateman
This text was performed as part of the event MANIFESTO!, held on March 19, 2025, at KGB Bar in Manhattan.
Johanna Fateman at the MANIFESTO! event.
Criticism, as a genre of writing and as an institution, such as it is, may survive for some years yet—in some form—as a pastime, a “side gig,” and as a death doula for empire and the nation-state while Pluto journeys through Aquarius, as it did some two hundred and fifty years ago. However, criticism as a profession, in terms of both its viability as a form of paid work and its reputation in the larger culture (again, such as it is), is likely already unsalvageable, even if we were to agitate for a number of stopgap or transitional measures (for example, a 300 percent word-rate increase in pay for freelance critics or targeted campaigns against our nemeses at the so-called paper of record and legacy magazines).
Because even if these initiatives were to succeed, which they won’t, we would still find ourselves, as critics, in the abject position of providing a kind of intellectual decoration, itself threaded through with advertising, for the apparatus of shopping and mass surveillance. No different than any other kind of writer for periodicals in this regard, except for that we are generally less read, we voluntarily atomize ourselves further with our newsletters, each in our own lifeboat that will nevertheless—not individually, but collectively, en masse—get sucked down with the ship when it finally sinks. But, as I like to say, when a window closes, a door opens, eventually. In the meantime:
The ascendant, triumphant techno-utopianism of our time must not be answered by a technological determinism of our own, a blanket anti-this-ness, which would be a barrier to our own potential counter-weaponization of these tools (hacking, maybe, as an ancillary activity to modes of sabotage more intuitive to the critic). Criticism must now hedge its bets, anchoring itself more self-consciously in pre-digital networked cultural practices—the oral tradition of gossip, the supernatural traditions of telepathy, even soothsaying—and should formally, stylistically, tonally reflect this shift even while it remains online. Simultaneously, neo-Nazi neo-neoclassical / blockbuster-cinema AI-image tweeting should not distract us from our vigilance against the resurgent middlebrow nostalgias for bygone white male–dominated avant-gardes. We must be ruthless and unflinching, not sentimental, students of history. Related—somehow, it’s hard to explain—“trying to be funny” (as distinct from simply being funny) must now be regarded as a reactionary aesthetic rather than an innocent failure or flaw.
I have for the purpose of this polemic thus far treated the fate of criticism as separable from that of art, which it is not. Being artists ourselves, or sharing with artists our various abilities to summarize, synthesize, represent, exalt, destroy, critique, et cetera, we will find ourselves—as ever—in the same boat, all together, called upon to funnel our skill sets into the disciplines, working groups, and cadres more urgently needed until Pluto enters Pisces, until, approximately, 2043–44.
Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and co-chief art critic for CULTURED magazine in New York.