Metropolis M — Video criticism: An exploration

By Loes van Beuningen · Metropolis M, no. 6, December 2017

Art criticism is still largely a child of Gutenberg: in most cases it is written, conceived in terms of printed paper, even when it appears online. But that is changing under the impact of social media and the improved quality of smartphone cameras. Video criticism is gaining ground. An exploration.

The traditional art critic has acquired competition. From websites run by art lovers, such as Culty Pleasure, Kunst Kieken, Ik Kijk Kunst and Kunst Kijken met Ko & Kho, to Trendbeheer and Lost Painters, founded by artists, and four young art historians writing about exhibitions under the name Kunstmeisjes: on the internet, everyone is an art critic. These forms of art criticism often remain firmly rooted in a written culture, but in recent years we have also seen video criticism grow popular, prompted by the rise of social media, faster internet upload speeds and good-quality, relatively inexpensive recording equipment. This produces, for example, reviews by secondary-school pupils on YouTube that nobody but their teacher watches. But there are also more professional and popular initiatives. Art criticism now seems accessible to anyone with an opinion and an internet connection.

This so-called democratisation of art criticism began in the late 1990s with the rise of internet blogging: writing personal, diary-like texts on one’s own website, sometimes accompanied by images. Blogging peaked in the mid-2000s. At that point, the vlog also appeared: the video version of the blog, mainly published on Vimeo or YouTube. Vlogs are characterised by makers often recording everyday activities: getting out of bed, making breakfast or going to the supermarket, as in the well-known case of the nuisance vlogger from Zaandam. Not everyone uploading a video to YouTube is a vlogger, however. In vlogs, the maker often appears on camera and is, at least partly, the subject. The maker offers a glimpse into his or her life, as it were. Moreover, vlogs are often a marketing tool and therefore journalistically unreliable.

Within art criticism in the broad sense, we find both “ordinary” videos and vlogs. To begin with the first category: De Snijtafel, by writers Kasper C. Jansen and Michiel Lieuwma, first appeared on YouTube in September 2012. Seated at a table, the two men dissect pop music, television programmes and films in uncompromising fashion. Lieuwma stopped in the summer of 2015, after which Jansen continued the video series with guest analysts. Last summer, Jansen was given a spin-off at Omroep Brabant, De Cultuurwetenschappers, in which he and Youri Dingemans examine and assess art in public spaces in North Brabant.

A comparable series is that of photographer Hans Aarsman, who has been analysing press photographs humorously for de Volkskrant since 2004. Initially this took the form of a weekly column, but since the summer of 2016 it has appeared as short videos on the newspaper’s website and social media pages. Then, in the performing arts, there is De Zendelingen, a Flemish art criticism collective founded in 2013 by theatre critics Filip Tielens and Bregt Van Wijnendaele. They bring makers, spectators and critics into dialogue and use this to create a YouTube video, a podcast or an installation at festivals. De Zendelingen employs different formats that serve as a bridge between maker, performance and audience, without inserting its own opinion. It provides a platform for art criticism with the aim of enabling “more people to express more opinions about more performances”.

Over the past few years there have been several one-off experiments in video criticism. Take Hoog Bezoek, a project by performing-arts critic Wouter Hillaert at the 2012 Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. He visited eight performances, each time with a different expert, for a short conversation afterwards about their impressions. These were edited into short video montages published online. Comparable projects include Blog Beton, by Domein voor Kunstkritiek, in which a team of bloggers and filmmakers covered Festival Cement in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2014 and 2015, and Cross Critique, by Laboratorium Actuele Kunstkritiek: a five-day laboratory at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2017 in which nine critics and video artists experimented with video criticism. This yielded various forms, from teasers with quotations from different visitors to support a text elsewhere, and visual essays, to video tweets and a filmed conversation between critics. Unfortunately, all these initiatives were one-offs.

What about vlogs? Browsing YouTube, we come across ARTVLOG by artist Janine van Veen, who takes viewers to exhibitions in short videos. Sometimes she supplies explanations of the works herself; sometimes there is only a visual impression. Wilma Lankhorst, who calls herself an “online art influencer”, also posts visual impressions of exhibitions she visits on YouTube. Her blog carries accompanying texts describing her experience of those visits. There are also “incidental” art vlogs, such as those by de Volkskrant’s regular vlogger Lisa Koetsenruijter, who, for example, goes to a fashion exhibition at the Centraal Museum for her topic of sustainable fashion. But there are not many specialist vlogs devoted to art criticism.

There is one very conspicuous exception: Keeping It Real Art Critics, KIRAC, founded in spring 2016. KIRAC consists of artist Stefan Ruitenbeek and his girlfriend, archaeologist Kate Sinha. With their art criticism series, they want to address the “socioeconomic context in which artists operate today and how this is expressed in the art they make”. In the videos, which usually take the form of a vlog but sometimes that of a documentary, as in KIRAC #8, we see Ruitenbeek and Sinha, together and sometimes with others, reacting to exhibitions, artworks and issues in the art world. They do not mince their words. Their motto is “keeping it real”: talking about art as you do among yourselves when you disregard conventions and listen to your feelings, in the manner of PowNed. In that sense, the influence of vlog culture is very clear. The story is personal, concerned with their own experience, and they film themselves in bed, in the shower, on the balcony while stroking a cat, or in the exhibition space they are visiting. As in vlogs about subjects other than art, KIRAC’s videos are often accompanied by inserted text and images clarifying the context of the subject.

The comparison with PowNed is not plucked from thin air: they say their work stems from the same impulse. Sinha, in an interview: “There is a need not to respect things, because that form of respect in the art world has gone too far. For us, it is important to get to the bottom of everything. We take the artwork seriously.” Yet their approach itself has attracted considerable criticism. They film conversations without permission, threaten artists and art professionals — “We are going to destroy people like you”, KIRAC #5 — and use populist rhetoric. There is shouting and interruption, and the language is crude. They go into discussions studs first. They are always against things and make their point at the other person’s expense. Is this serious art criticism?

Ruitenbeek answers that question himself in an interview: “It is a game, a sport. The art world is an arena. You can practise. Nobody dies when we take an artist to task. KIRAC is art.” So the ambition turns out to be an artistic experiment rather than a finished piece of art criticism. More vlog, with all the conventions of vlogging that go with it — entertainment, deliberate provocation, ego-tripping, amateurism — than serious video criticism: constructive, expert, discursive. They have a double standard: KIRAC is dismissive of “subsidy ideas” in KIRAC #2, yet itself receives support from the Mondriaan Fund. They want to expose the art world’s inauthenticity but actually belong to it themselves. Sinha: “Our society is based on the freedom to criticise. For us, it is a need and an asset we possess as ‘weak outsiders’. It is a way of working our way inside. At the beginning of KIRAC we were marginal figures, but now we are less marginal.”

It therefore seems that we need not take KIRAC all that seriously as art critics. Their attempt to expose the “bullshit” in the art world is certainly interesting, perhaps even urgently needed, but they invalidate themselves through their double standard. Ultimately, vloggers are mainly in love with themselves, their own opinions and jokes, and are not particularly self-critical. Perhaps, then, the vlog form is not really suited to art criticism, in which positions are weighed discursively, the primary concern is not the author but the subject under discussion, and feeling is accompanied by rational consideration.

Loes van Beuningen is an art historian.

Stills: KIRAC #10, The Bad Breath of Mondrian Specialist Hans Janssen; De Snijtafel #13, Dat ik je mis, with Kasper C. Jansen and Michiel Lieuwma; De Snijtafel #42, La La Land, with Kasper C. Jansen and Simon Weeda; KIRAC #3, The Art Subsidy Debate, with Stefan Ruitenbeek; KIRAC #1, Indignation at De Appel, with Kate Sinha.

References: youtube.com/user/kaspercjansen; volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2014/AarsmanCollectie/index.html; youtube.com/user/zendelingen; domeinvoorkunstkritiek.nl/activiteiten-items/bloggen-en-filmen-voor-cement-2015; artgloss.nl/artvlogs; wilmatakesabreak.nl/musea; rektoverso.be/artikel/cross-critique-kunstkritiek-in-beelden; rektoverso.be/artikel/rektoverso-academy-naar-een-nieuwe-kunstkritiek; keepingitrealartcritics.com.