‘Eileen Cowin has the visual sense of a lug wrench,” wrote the critic Richard Maschal in his 1984 assessment of the American mixed-media artist. “Her sense of space and composition is nil.” It’s one of 150 verdicts in a book called Bad Reviews, edited by the artist Aleksandra Mir and curator/critic Tim Griffin. In 2015, the pair “spammed the whole art world” to ask artists to submit the worst review they have ever received. Over the next few years, artists ranging from Cindy Sherman to film-maker Alix Lambert shared their most stinging criticism. Sherman dug out a 2012 panning from New Republic that described her work as “the biggest artistic ego trip of all time”, while Lambert offered a selection of trolling Twitter posts including: “You a bitch alix kill yourself.” Art criticism stands revealed as a broad church – much like art itself.
Mir was inspired by a terrible review she received from Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times in 2006, when she was in a group show of young American artists at the Royal Academy in London. “This is a generation of paint-happy know-nothings brought up on hamburgers and porn, a talentless bloom of post-pop trailer trash,” the critic declared. Mir was delighted as it seemed to her to sum up the British view of Americans. “There was a superiority about it that just rang so beautifully true.”
A few years later, she caught up with her former teacher Marilyn Minter, whose graphic paintings of sex acts are now regarded as landmarks of feminist art, but are described as “Fuzzy views of orgiastic moments, which have been stripped of their erotic power”, in a 1992 Village Voice piece Minter excavated. “I was like, well, look what it actually takes to have a life in the arts,” Mir says. “You have to have ups and downs, you have to endure when you’re not fashionable, you have to accept criticism because there’s always something to it and I think this awareness and confidence only comes over a long career.”
The idea for Bad Reviews was born. Ninety per cent of the artists Mir initially approached told her to get lost, suspicious of how their savagings might be used and unwilling to revisit pieces that had hurt them. “Half the YBAs were weirdly humourless about it,” she says. Yet as the project progressed, more and more artists decided to share their terrible notices. They included such good sports as Robert Longo, who contributed a 1989 review by Roberta Smith of the New York Times which he said “single-handedly derailed my life”. The piece is headlined: “Once a Wunderkind, Now Robert ‘Long Ago’?”
The reviews are presented in chronological order, beginning with the late Carolee Schneemann, who contributed a 1963 piece in which her glass assemblages – currently on show at a retrospective at London’s Barbican – are dismissed in passing as “unforgiveable”. Most of the reviews are scanned from the original newspaper cutting, giving the book a fanzine air, though it is also a feat of meticulous research – five people worked on the captions, and the whole project took so long that four of the artists who contributed reviews have died – Schneemann, Ulay, Lawrence Weiner, Chiara Fumai and Susan Hiller. Mir and Griffin have managed to pull out a zinger from every review. “She paints with the brush in her ass,” observes critic Mats Nygren of Marianna Uutinen, while Roberta Smith (who appears in the book an impressive 10 times) asks of Josephine Meckseper’s oil rig sculpture: “How much did this thing cost?”
In the course of making Bad Reviews, Mir discovered that there are two kinds of artist: the first being self-styled geniuses “who need constant approval and if they get a bad review they tend to be crushed by it”, all of whom ran a mile from the project. Instead, the book is made up of more pragmatic artists “who participate in public life, their work looks at society and delivers some kind of critique, so for them getting a bad review isn’t such a big deal, it’s being part of a conversation where someone might not agree with your position but it doesn’t bring you down.”
The book also demonstrates that having your work scrutinised, properly thought about, set into artistic context and then (hopefully) beautifully written about by someone with great expertise is a privilege, even if the conclusions hurt. Mir relishes the work of Brian Sewell, who used to excoriate all comers from his perch at the Evening Standard. Bad Reviews reprints his pasting of the 2001 group show New Labour at the Saatchi gallery with some parts redacted – not everyone he lambasted wanted his words to enjoy a second life, though Grayson Perry allowed Sewell’s assessment of his pots to stand (“objectionable as art … gaudy … vulgar”). “Someone should just reprint all Brian Sewell’s criticism,” Mir says. “It’s hilarious and when you look back you feel like it’s some kind of blessing because it’s so fabulously written.”
It’s also something that happens less often, with the decline of print media and arts sections often feeling the squeeze. The growing scarcity in art critics is a loss to the whole arts ecosystem, Mir says, especially to emerging artists who are now less likely to receive the benefit of being assessed in print – in terms of exposure and the substance of the critique. “I’ve been shocked at the response to this book by the younger generation,” Mir says. “There’s an enormous hunger out there for a healthy conversation. The younger artists don’t have reviews to contribute to this book, which is a tragedy.” In the essay at the end of the book, she and Griffin wryly quote a young dealer she approached who said none of the artists in his gallery had ever had a bad review: “To which one could only answer: ‘Sorry. Maybe one day you will be relevant enough to get one!’”
Despite the enormous amount of unpaid labour that went into Bad Reviews, Mir and Griffin are unable to sell the book because of the impossibility of getting the rights to reprint every piece. Instead, they’ve sent it to the artists who contributed and are distributing the rest to art schools around the world. In the meantime, curious readers are encouraged to bootleg the book: “Contact each other and network – that’s how we shared culture in the 90s, everything was torrented and downloaded,” Mir says.
But what of the critics in Bad Reviews? Though their reviews may have lingered in the minds of the artists, most of the reviewers will have forgotten writing them – certainly that was the case with Laura Cumming of the Observer, whose 2008 review of Ryan Gander features. While the book would not exist if the reviews had not had an impact on the artists, Cumming says that she’s not thinking about the way her words will be received by the person whose work is being written about. “I write entirely about the art and entirely for the reader. That is the job. If I wrote with anyone else in mind, I would just be a courtier.”
Now 55, Mir says she is grateful that she came of age during the rough and tumble 90s, when heated debates were the norm in the arts. “We are now in a moment where social media likes, not even constructive positive arguments, are determining people’s credibility and significance, and of course anything negative is associated with hate.” The artists in Bad Reviews have taken their criticism on the chin and moved on – even Richard Kern, of whom Time Out’s critic Sarah Kent inquired: “Should this man be walking free?”
Bad Reviews is published by Retrospective Press and is not available to buy.
