Anyone who has written art criticism focusing on art galleries and art museums knows it's not easy to do so.
For starters, in any fair to midlins-sized city, an art critic has to visit a dozen or more art shows a week just to write one review. Theatre, dance, performance, music, and other cultural critics generally just pick a show to attend, or a movie, and then write about that one event.
So it's no surprise, with perhaps the notable exception of New York, that most newspapers and other mainstream media usually only have one person writing about the galleries and sometimes a second body to write about museums.
In the nation's capital, incredibly enough, with one of the largest gallery scenes in the world, plus a sizeable number of museums, visual art critics are rare, and art criticism for local galleries and museums scant. For example, the Washington Post employs one freelancer to cover all of the Greater DC area art galleries and she pens a column every two weeks — that's right: about 25 reviews a year to cover around 1,200 possible shows. The paper's Chief Art Critic (Blake Gopnik) does not cover local galleries and instead only writes about museum shows everywhere and a random review of NYC art galleries. The Washington Times' coverage is even more scant, with their Chief Art Critic (Joanna Shaw-Eagle) usually writing about museums, and every once in a while about local galleries. On the other hand, the alternative weekly Washington City Paper (WCP) does an exceptional job. Under the leadership of Arts Editor Leonard Roberge, this weekly has picked up (somewhat) the slack and apathy shown by the two main dailies.
Art criticism usually needs more than one look to get a true view of what's going on.
Let's take our current exhibition: Compelled by Content. Joanna Shaw-Eagle, the chief art critic of the Washington Times delivered a major review of the Compelled by Content II exhibition in the Washington Times last Saturday. Shaw-Eagle (who has been writing about art since I was a kid) provided yet more evidence of how "healthy" it is to have more that one critical voice look at an artist or a show and offer a different perspective or opinion. I used the recent multiple reviews of the Connie Imboden show at Heineman-Myers as such an example. Now our show adds more evidence why it is important in most cases (and whenever possible) to have more than one set of eyes and more than one pen on paper to deliver an opinion.
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