‘American-type art criticism’. Review of: Art Criticism and Modernism in the United States by Stephen Moonie, Routledge, 2022, 206pp. 10 colour and 30 b. & w. illus. ISBN: 9780367565411, £120.

Abstract

This essay reviews Stephen Moonie’s book Art Criticism and Modernism in the United States (2002), which contributes to the steadily growing field of art-historical research into art criticism. Until recently, art criticism has received scant attention partly because such writing is often considered ‘literary’, ‘unacademic’, or constitutively defined by ‘subjectivity’ in comparison to its siblings art history and aesthetics. Moonie’s book focuses upon North American art criticism from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, particularly the writings produced in and around Artforum in dialogue with Clement Greenberg’s difficult legacy. Such criticism dovetailed with developments in contemporary painting, sculpture, and film, but also presented itself as avowedly more intellectual, philosophically engaged, and self-reflexive than other forms of art criticism current at the time. This review, therefore, examines how Moonie elucidates this emergent mode of art criticism, particularly in light of its recourse to philosophical concepts as interpretative aids.