Why Has Criticism Always Been Such a Good Side Gig for Artists?

There might not be a more natural, if also more fraught, complementary profession to artistry than criticism. Who, after all, would have a better perspective on the necessary background and unique challenges of making art than some-one who does it themselves? But—considering everything from personal bias (if you don’t do it the way I do it, it can’t be worth doing) to the prospect of blowing up personal relationships (and maybe future commissions)—it can be deluded or even dangerous to offer your opinion for public consumption.

If we blur the line between philosophical aesthetic theory and popular critique, artists have been moonlighting as critics since the earliest days that the former category congealed. Plenty of Greek and Roman philosophy treats what we’d now call aesthetic theory as a crucial component of our conception of the world, although its overall project doesn’t really line up with our conception of what constitutes art. Those philosophers are better considered the forebears of the more august tradition of criticizing stuff without doing it first. (Which I wholeheartedly support, I must say, at least when you’re willing to think deeply about it.)

The earliest artist-critics we know about tend to come from outside Western traditions. The author of the Nāṭyaśāstra, which gave us the Indian concept of rasa—the emotional essence of a piece, the je ne sais quoi that moves us—is unknown, and might have been multiple people across many years, but that text was written in a distinctly poetic form that suggests it was the work of a practitioner.

There is and has been considerable tension about the extent to which criticism is a serious consideration of art and its effect on the soul—the extent to which it is an art in and of itself—and its place as a sort of de facto Consumer’s Guide.

Xie He was a sixth-century Chinese painter and writer whose only surviving work is The Record of the Classification of Old Painters, which includes his framework for understanding painting, the Six Principles. More than a millennium before Western aesthetic theory caught up, this engaged with the debate about craft versus art: “Even if the artist is skillful, he will not be able to elevate himself above an ordinary craftsman. Their art will be called painting, but in fact it will not be a true art. The Spirit Resonance is a gift of heavens, a natural talent one is born with. It pours straight out of one’s soul.”

The Arabic prince and poet Abdallah ibn al-Mu’tazz wrote a consideration of poetry, Kitab al-Badi, in the ninth century, some time before his one day reign as leader of the Abbasid Caliphate. (He was strangled to death, though it was a political matter, not the vengeance of an angry poet.) Both of those works, though, were more pure exercises of the mind than ways to make ends meet: Xie would have been painting only as a function of his post as civil servant in the Confucianist tradition, and al-Mu’tazz’s only worldly concern was political enemies.

Our more modern and cravenly capitalistic criticism has its strongest roots in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Richardson the Elder apprenticed under John Riley, the court painter of English king William of Orange, and made a fine living as a portrait painter of various nobles and notables throughout the first half of the 1700s. He struck gold, though, with several books on how to appreciate painting written in the 1710s and ‘20s, most notably An Essay on the Theory of Painting and An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism (the latter is one of the first recorded uses of the word “criticism”).

Though somewhat prosaic, even compared to Xie’s work—Richardson detailed his own eighteen-point scale in seven separate categories to determine the “worth” of a painting—it proved hugely popular with the burgeoning middle and merchant classes, who had enough money to buy paintings, just like the nobles they were trying to emulate, but not necessarily enough to hire experts and advisers.

There is and has been considerable tension about the extent to which criticism is a serious consideration of art and its effect on the soul—the extent to which it is an art in and of itself—and its place as a sort of de facto Consumer’s Guide. In the early days, it was a pretty pure creature of commerce. In England and France, with the rise of pamphlets and papers that spoke expressly to a middle class audience, criticism became a decent way to earn a living for anyone who knew a bit about painting and could string a few words together.

As with modern criticism, it didn’t hurt if you also knew how to play to your audience: the earliest surviving critique of the Parisian Salon, the annual exhibition of French Royal Academy painters, is an anonymous pamphlet that includes a fairly lengthy denigration of the nobles who attended and praises the general public for being far more savvy about good art. Not that nobles weren’t also interested in help with their taste: in his later life, the French polymath Diderot sustained himself partly on reviews of the Salon in the 1760s and ’70s for La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. The fact that reviews in general and the Correspondance in particular were banned in France and so sent abroad also helped raise his international profile, eventually leading to sustained support from Catherine the Great.

But it was newspapers and periodicals that gradually became the main outlet for artistic criticism, and once the practice became established enough that writers ceased using pseudonyms (to limit blowback from negative reviews) and stopped accepting “gifts” from subjects, criticism of various forms of art became a reliable way to make a name and a crust.

He blew through it quite quickly, and the rest of his life was a cycle of waiting for semi-lucrative writing work to come his way, moving to avoid creditors, and begging his mother for money.

William Hazlitt spent his twenties as a portrait painter, and though he grew frustrated with his self-diagnosed lack of talent and unwillingness to paint more flattering portraits of the rich people who were paying him, his studies helped him immensely when he was hired as a reporter. He transitioned quickly to critical reviews of painting, then literary works, indulging in both throughout his eventual career as one of the more celebrated essayists in the English language. (I worked for a time for an outlet that bears his name, although I hadn’t heard of him before they hired me. Apologies to William and all involved in my hiring.)

Perhaps the person who had the most lasting impact on both criticism and his preferred art form, though, was Charles Baudelaire. Presumably no one who gets adjectivized needs too much of an introduction, but luckily for our purposes, in addition to being hailed as an age-defining genius of criticism and poetry, he was absolute shit with money, which seemed to contribute to his critical output almost as much as his burning desire to explain why everyone else was wrong about the world.

Born in 1821, Baudelaire came from a fairly well-off family. His father died when he was only six, and his stepfather eventually became an ambassador, which set his mother up for life. Some part of Baudelaire’s lifelong free-spending and indolence seems to be a direct rebellion against the man, if not outright Freudian jealousy—Charles was an unabashed mama’s boy. He was encouraged to go into law or diplomacy like the step-old-man but decided to be a writer upon getting the 1800s equivalent of a trust fund when he was twenty-one.

He blew through it quite quickly, and the rest of his life was a cycle of waiting for semi-lucrative writing work to come his way, moving to avoid creditors, and begging his mother for money. She didn’t love that: “Oh, what grief,” his mother once wrote. “If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather … he would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier.” Might put your own mother asking how that screenplay is coming into a little more perspective.

Baudelaire’s first works to attract serious attention were reviews of the 1845 and 1846 Salons, which besides being both vivacious and occasionally vicious, preceded (and arguably inspired) the Impressionists’ critiques of the Academy by about thirty years—not that he would live to see them born out. In these reviews he established his method of responding viscerally to the work, rendering literal description of the paintings secondary to the feelings and thoughts the work evoked in him.

Though these tendencies would flourish in his later criticism—especially 1863’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” a consideration of his friend Constantin Guys which was published in Le Figaro and in which he invented the term “modernity”—the template he provided for modern criticism was established basically from the hop.

He published criticism more or less continuously from then on—when he was in the mood to write at all—but a decade later his reputation as a critic was overshadowed by the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal (ironically, the same year his stepfather died), parts of which he had been working on since his money first came in. An unsparing but vividly beautiful look at sex, mortality, melancholy, and the bleak harshness of then-modern Parisian life, the poetry book thrilled artists almost as much as it offended the general public. Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted and fined for offending public morality, and several poems were outright banned, removed from later editions. This didn’t hurt his reputation as a bold new voice, but it definitely didn’t help his ability to not hold on to money.

Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable.

Baudelaire died a decade after Fleurs du Mal’s release. He was witness to some of the impact it would have—Victor Hugo came to his public defence—and his reputation grew posthumously to the point that Rimbaud, Proust, and Eliot all credited him as the finest poet of his era. His increasing notoriety did not help his finances or his work ethic, though he had a brief period of security and relative productivity when his mother allowed him to move back in with her in 1859. Besides criticism, prose poetry, and translation, he wrote a consideration of being an opium and hashish user, and he decided to live that life more fully, mixed in with heavy drinking and a light wallet, when he moved to Brussels in 1864.

Less than two years later, he suffered a debilitating stroke, and he spent the last year of his life semi-paralyzed and unable to speak. Upon his death, his mother settled his rather voluminous debts and eventually came to peace with his place in literature.

However scattered his life, Baudelaire’s professional work has a gem-like unity. There is profound sympathy between his criticism and his poetry—including an almost fanatical obsession with drawing out the beauty of this thing in front of him, life or art, regardless of prevailing opinion—but his ability to push both of those forms in new directions seems almost impossible, with the vantage of hindsight. Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable, and as Baudelaire himself shows, a sharp and careful eye, a historical knowledge, and a gift for descriptive detail, in whatever medium, serve both very well.

With that said, the base impulse of art is to capture this spirit without necessarily explaining it, to reveal the energy that vibrates through the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; criticism is more concerned with pinning down the butterfly and figuring out how it works. Both can help you feel the full extent of what a butterfly means, but arriving at the same place doesn’t mean taking the same road.

Consider this passage from “The Painter of Modern Life,” wherein Baudelaire explains what he means by modernity, and why Guys seems to embody it:

He strives, for his own part, to extract from the fashionable whatever it may contain of the poetical within the historical, to draw the eternal from the transitory…. It is easier to decide, at the outset, that everything about the modes of dress of an epoch is ugly, rather than applying oneself to extracting from it the mysterious beauty it might perhaps contain, however minimal or slight that might be. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art of which the other is the eternal and immutable.

The passage is precise, clear, and energetic. It’s convincing partly because it’s so invigorating, and there’s no doubting what it is we can or should do with the information here. It’s an argument, probably not totally rational, but on the spectrum. Baudelaire’s criticism has been accused, not unfairly, of being inconsistent, and at times it seems more like he is writing about what he wants to see—dreaming of Impressionism, maybe—than what is in front of him. Summing up the consensus, academic Sara Pappas says he “does not simply privilege the new in his art critical writings; he creates a kind of absolute originality through his writings that is not actually present in the art of the period in the way that he theorizes.”

But I think this inconsistency is not just part of the originality that made him so important; it’s part of what separates criticism, especially after Baudelaire, from a more academic aesthetic theory. Baudelaire is not really evaluating things along a framework; he’s responding to what he sees and feels in the moment; any consistency is down to the bounds of his temperament, his ideas of the world. It’s a part of the ‘spirit resonance’ that Xie He talked about, the vitality of the work. Any grander idea or narrative is emergent, not restrained to a purely rational or logical conception. His criticism is as consistent and considered as his moods and feelings—just pinned down and (often beautifully) articulated. Baudelaire’s poetry has the same tendency, without the pins.

Baudelaire had no shortage of impediments to writing, but I have to wonder if some of his slow and scattered process wasn’t due to balancing these competing impulses (or running away from them entirely when he couldn’t find any balance). As an organizing principle, the context required of good criticism is almost antithetical to good art: if the latter is about capturing the specificity of a vision or feeling, the former is about fitting those feelings in, finding their place, and weighing them against each other.

The inherent danger of spending too much time on anything other than art is that it will dull whatever sensitivity or instinct allows you to make something in the first place.

It can be utterly paralyzing to commit to your vision if you are confronted with its wider context. Comparison becomes the thief of joy: Why should you make anything when this thing and that thing and this other thing are all expressing the same feeling? What is the point of words that seem lesser than the genius who inspired you to write them? And if your work cannot find its wider place, if it does seem unique in viewpoint or execution, does that mean that you’re so far beyond the realm of sense or worth that no one else will ever get any value from it?

If Baudelaire ever felt those things, he got over them eventually (“I know that this book,” he wrote to his mother in the midst of the public backlash, in what is a spectacular act of either confidence or conciliatory bluster, “with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of Hugo, Gautier and even Byron”).

But that it took a world historical genius to overcome them is an indication of the danger of this particular gig as a sideline. The inherent danger of spending too much time on anything other than art is that it will dull whatever sensitivity or instinct allows you to make something in the first place. Maybe doubly so when your other job is examining that instinct so closely you might just need to kill it to understand it.

I don’t mean to be dramatic. Maybe I just mean to justify my own slow and laborious, though less debauched, process. Certainly plenty of people after Baudelaire have also navigated this conundrum, with (for the most part) less opium use and Freudian begging. One of the purest expressions of the Baudelairean tendency emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s in the magazine ARTnews, which hired a gaggle of poets from what would become known as the New York School to review the modern art scene.

Poets like Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery—who for the most part never made even a middle-class living publishing poetry, even in this apparently glorious age for writing-to-pay-the-bills—found a perfect subject in the abstract expressionism and pop art that came into vogue: a talent for succinct evocation, or just the inherent music of words, helped a lot when they were tasked with responding to colour fields or a repurposed bed with paint on it.

Like Baudelaire’s, these reviews tended to be, if not always light on descriptive detail, less concerned with telling you what a thing looked like and more with capturing the impression it left. In a review of a Robert Rauschenberg show, the not-yet-Pulitzer-winner John Ashbery said of one of the collages that it “does not have the ‘Step along, please’ feeling of a Schwitters collage … You also have the artist’s permission to get nothing out of looking at his paintings other than the marginal pleasure of being alive.”

That would fit right in with some of Ashbery’s purposefully poetic work, which also tends to eschew grandiose language or description for perfectly punctuated plain profundity. “The marginal pleasure of being alive” carries enough weight to justify a book, let alone a magazine. (Ashbery kept up his reviews and editing in outlets like New York, Newsweek, and the Partisan Review even after Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer in 1975, most certainly out of necessity.)

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From How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists by David Berry. Used with the permission of the publisher, Coach House Books. Copyright © 2025 by David Berry