Why the Best Art Criticism Does Not Care About the Canon

There is a particular species of art critic who believes their job is to stand guard at the gates of Culture with a clipboard, checking IDs. You know the type. They can quote Clement Greenberg in their sleep but haven’t felt genuine surprise at a painting since 1994. They write about “the conversation” — always “the conversation” — as though art were a polite dinner party where only certain guests deserve a seat. The canon, to this critic, is sacred: a curated list of Important Works that must be referenced, revered, and regurgitated ad infinitum.

Here is what I think of the canon: it is a guest list written by dead people, for dead people, and the party has moved on.

The Canon Is Not a Mirror. It’s a Weapon.

Let’s be clear about what the canon actually is. It is not some organic accumulation of the “best” work, selected by time and consensus like sediment forming into limestone. The canon is constructed. It was built by specific people with specific interests — mostly wealthy, mostly Western, mostly male, mostly straight, mostly uninterested in anything that didn’t reflect their own image back at them. When someone tells you they’re “defending the canon,” what they’re often defending is their own right to decide what counts.

The canon doesn’t just exclude. It actively shapes what we’re allowed to see. For every Caravaggio or Pollock elevated to canonical status, there are hundreds of artists — brilliant, strange, uncomfortable artists — buried under the weight of institutional neglect. And the criticism that upholds this structure? It’s not criticism. It’s cataloging. It’s museum label copy dressed up in intellectual drag.

The best art criticism I’ve ever read doesn’t give a damn about the canon. It doesn’t ask whether a work belongs in the Great Conversation. It asks a simpler, more dangerous question: does this work make me feel something I haven’t felt before?

What Good Criticism Actually Does

Good criticism is not a syllabus. It’s not a map of what you “should” appreciate. Good criticism is an encounter — messy, subjective, and alive. The critic who writes about a painting with their whole body, who allows themselves to be confused or repulsed or giddy, is doing something fundamentally different from the critic who positions a work within a genealogy of influences and movements.

I’ll take a thousand words about how a piece of street art made someone cry on their commute over ten thousand words about its relationship to Abstract Expressionism. Not because context doesn’t matter — it does — but because context without feeling is just a morgue of information.

The Low Is Already High

Here’s what the canon-obsessed always miss: the boundary between “high” and “low” culture has always been fiction, and the most interesting art has always known this. Shakespeare wrote for groundlings. Opera was popular entertainment. The novel was considered a degenerate form. Every category we now treat as sacred was once considered trash by the gatekeepers of its time.

So when I read criticism that treats a manga with the same seriousness as a Matisse, or that analyzes a K-pop video with the attention traditionally reserved for Godard, I’m not seeing a “lowering of standards.” I’m seeing someone who actually understands how culture works. The Baffler has been publishing this kind of criticism for years — writing that refuses to pretend art exists in neat little taxonomic boxes.

The best critics have always been smugglers. They bring the energy of the street into the gallery and the intensity of the gallery into the street. Walter Benjamin understood this. Susan Sontag understood this. The fact that both of them were often dismissed by the academic establishment as not being “serious” enough should tell you everything you need to know about who the canon actually serves.

Why Canon-Loving Criticism Fails the Art

When criticism treats the canon as the only legitimate framework, it fails even the art it claims to champion. Here’s why:

It flattens surprise. If you approach every work expecting it to speak the language of the canon, you’ll only hear what you already understand. The strange, the foreign, the genuinely new — these will be translated into familiar terms and stripped of their power to disorient you.

It protects power. The canon is not neutral. It reflects who had the resources to preserve their work, who had the institutions to display it, and who had the critics to argue for its importance. Centering the canon means centering existing power structures and calling that “taste.”

It’s boring. And I mean this as a serious critical judgment, not a throwaway insult. Writing that exists primarily to position works within an established hierarchy is writing that tells you nothing about what it’s like to experience something. It’s criticism as filing system.

The Critics Who Got It Right

The criticism that has stayed with me — the pieces I return to again and again — shares one quality: it was written by someone who clearly needed to write it. Not to advance their career, not to demonstrate their expertise, but because something they encountered demanded a response.

Think of the way the best New Yorker critics write about television — not as a lesser form that happens to be popular, but as a visual medium that deserves the full force of their attention. Think of the fan forums where someone writes 4,000 words about a single episode of a show the academy hasn’t noticed yet. Think of the blogger who reviews every horror film released in a given year with more care and insight than most film professors bring to their syllabi.

These people are critics. They’re doing the work. And they’re doing it without the safety net of canonical approval.

A Manifesto for Unruly Criticism

So here’s what I want from art criticism, and what I think the best practitioners are already doing:

• Start with the encounter, not the context. Where were you? What did your body do? What surprised you? The context can come later, or not at all.
• Refuse the hierarchy. A video game can be as formally complex as a symphony. A meme can carry as much cultural truth as a novel. Treat works on their own terms, not on the terms of a system built to exclude them.
• Write like it matters. Because it does. The way we talk about art shapes what gets made, what gets seen, and who gets to participate. Canon-reinforcing criticism says the same things to the same people about the same objects forever. Unruly criticism opens doors.
• Be wrong. The worst criticism is criticism that’s afraid to risk a bad judgment. If you’ve never defended something you later realized was garbage, you’re not taking enough chances.

The Canon Will Survive Without Your Help

Here’s the funny thing: the canon doesn’t need defending. It has museums. It has university departments. It has auction houses and foundations and endless books written by endless scholars. The Mona Lisa is not going anywhere. The Waste Land will still be taught. Beethoven’s Ninth will still be performed.

What won’t survive without help is the work that falls outside the canon’s gaze — not because it’s lesser, but because no one with institutional power bothered to look. That’s where the best criticism directs its attention: to the margins, the cracks, the places where something alive is happening that the gatekeepers haven’t noticed yet.

If your criticism begins and ends with the already-validated, you’re not a critic. You’re a docent. And the art deserves better than docents.

FAQ

Does rejecting the canon mean rejecting all traditional art?

Absolutely not. Some canonical works are canonical for good reason — they’re extraordinary. The point isn’t to stop engaging with Michelangelo or Morrison or Monk. The point is to stop treating them as the only things worth engaging with, and to stop using them as the standard against which everything else is measured. Love the canon if you want. Just don’t worship it.

How do you write good criticism without referencing art history?

You don’t. Context matters, and art history is part of that context. But context is not the same as hierarchy. You can reference Abstract Expressionism without treating it as the summit of human achievement. You can discuss a work’s influences without treating those influences as sacred texts. The goal is to use history as a tool, not a cage.

Isn’t this just an argument for lowering standards?

This is my favorite bad-faith argument, and I hear it constantly. No. Refusing to let the canon dictate your standards is not the same as having no standards. In fact, it requires higher standards — because you have to decide for yourself what matters, rather than outsourcing that judgment to a list someone else made. Thinking for yourself is harder than following a syllabus. But it’s also more honest, more interesting, and more alive.