Elkins, J. 2003. What happened to art criticism? Prickly Paradigm Press: Chicago.

What has happened to art criticism. To be honest, I don't know. I don't have an opinion, mostly because I'm largely ignorant of art criticism, art history, and the history of art criticism -- the triple juncture that is the subject of James Elkins reflection. Besides, how positively superciliously gratuitous it would be to criticize this criticism of the criticism of art.

I didn't read this book as an entre to art criticism, though (and perhaps advisedly -- for, if Elkins is right, art criticism is in a state of sad disrepair). Rather, I picked it up because I've been taken with a notion that there needs to be something akin to art criticism (or akin to what art criticism should be) for science. We need a science criticism. Now, this is something about which I'm likely to have an opinion.

What is the reason for thinking there should be a science criticism? Science, like art (on my telling, anyway), results from a special mix of technique and substance, facts-in-the-world and their rational representational, perceptions and the theories in which they are constituted. Further, scientific theories (and not just theories -- data, technology, methods, all of it) are evaluated according to theoretical virtues: elegance, simplicity, completeness, and accuracy among others. Now, the purpose of this brief essay is not to delve (deeply) into the nature of science, its methods, or its epistemologies. Can we just agree that there is in science, somewhere, an element of art? And, in our modern technically-infused (if not strictly technocratic) society, as much as there is for the history of science, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, science policy, science ethics, and scientific law, indeed even popular science, also a place for science criticism? I think it is so.

So suppose you agree with me. What, then, should science criticism look like? It is to answer this question that I have turned, inter alia, to Elkins. In outline, the purpose of science criticism would be to pass judgments on all the different parts of science (its theories, its data, its methods, etc.) with respect to the theoretical and practical virtues good science seeks to satisfy. Admittedly, these virtues are not settled (which is to be preferred, an elegant theory or one that unifies disparate phenomena?). But isn't deliberating the relative merits of different virtues (and different virtue systems) a task suited to critical discourse? Like other criticisms, science criticism will probably be 10% global, taking the long view of science's history, and 90% local, passing judgment on just this or that part with respect to its role in the vast enterprise. For each piece of science, the critic's eye will bring to view the subtle and compelling features of a "work" while exposing incongruence, ugliness, and slapdash. Analysis will be unforgiving and our science will be better for it.

Let us see, then, what the critic of criticism has to say. Here are some nuggets. May we hope never to have the occasion where we must ask, what has happened to science criticism?

• Art criticism is not considered as part of the brief of art history: it is not a historical discipline, but something akin to creative writing (p. 8)
  
• The lack of an academic practice of art criticism... means that art criticism is unmoored. Its freedom is exhilerating, occasionally, but for a steady reader it is stultifying. (p. 8-9)
• If it were disciplinary in any sense, it would have a center of some kind against which to push. At the moment art critics feel very little resistance... An academic discipline, as fractious and contradictory as it may be, puts two kinds of pressure on a practitioner: it compels an awareness of colleagues, and it instills a sense of the history of previous efforts. Both are absent, with spectacular and fantastical effect, from current art criticism. (p. 9)

Thus, the first lesson of art criticism for science is that it must exercise discipline. It need not, I submit, be strictly academic. Of erudition and pretension we have enough already. But, it must exercise the kind of rigor that "compels an awareness of colleagues" and imbues the discourse with its own "sense of history". But, for the nascent science critic, Elkins is not all admonition. There is questioning, too, of a kind well worth considering in advance of a headlong rush into we know not what critical discourse may bring.

• Does it make sense to talk about art criticism as a single practice, or is it a number of different activities with different goals? (p. 13)
  

I have presented one goal of science criticism: to evaluate the parts of science (particularly its theories -- but I think it has other evaluable pieces as well) with respect to their objectives and criteria applied to the way in which those objectives are accomplished (scientific virtues). But, probably science criticism has other aims, too: tying scientific findings to real-world technological problems, evaluating the match between scientific knowledge and the existential questions it sometimes is posited to satisfy, weighing the gravitas of knowledge and satisfaction of airy curiosity. What else might the aims of science criticism be remains a question for science criticism, interestingly its first reflexive question.

Still, what should science criticism look like? Perhaps like art criticism, but that has its own jargony-style, with trope and tripe imported from an increasingly dated criticism of another kind -- literary. So,

• Why not try to build a new kind of writing for a new subject matter? (p. 26)

Here is an idea that has promise! What we are after is a new kind of writing. Not a new vocabulary -- probably we can cobble that together from science itself, the various science parasites (history of science, philosophy of science, etc.), and critical discourse as it exists already (art criticism, literary criticism). What we need is a new genre. Clearly, this is not a part of the scientific paper itself or the various documents that seek to publicize it. Neither is it the science writing that appears in national newspapers and weekly magazines. It is not even the popular book or article that summarizes for the uncritical reader the state of scientific knowledge. Rather, it is a self-consciously, unapologetically intellectual form of writing that seeks to evaluate, interpret, orient, re-define, reveal, triangulate, and (above all) criticize the science in all its technicality. I submit that such a genre does not yet exist, at least not in full flower.

We are becoming too somber, however. Criticism is light. It moves fast. It is timely, choosing to err on the side of unsophistication to secure relevance and bearing. This is no analytic philosophy (else it would be not criticism, but philosophy). So,

• Cultural criticism still needs to have a little laugh at the expense of the defenders of art... that, in turn, means that cultural criticism can ultimately be an evasion of some serious issues in contemporary culture (p. 28)

Okay, then. We can laugh. We do not take outselves (or our criticism) too seriously. But let us return to this judgment thing. That is a serious thing. Isn't the passing of judgment both impossible and presumptuous -- impossible that science could hope a critic, let us assume not a scientist herself, to be knowledgable enough to understand the science, let alone to offer valid judgments, presumtuous for precisely the same reason but from the standpoint of the critic herself. (And if she is a scientist, then isn't the critic too "close" to criticize). While there are variations that we could explore, in the end I see no reason why this is any more a problem for science than for art. There are artists and there are art critics. Why can there not be scientists and science critics? Indeed, what makes for an effective critic is that one has distance from the work being criticized, and scope within which to criticize. Thus, "external" judgment seems to be paramount. Where would we be if there was criticism and no judgment. We turn again to Elkins. Of the period of art criticism's decay, its "dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism," Elkins says,

• The ebb of judgment was one of the most significant changes in the art world (p. 48)

Indeed, we surmise, judgment is the essential thing.

Let us bring to an end our irreverent reflection. The opposite of being damned by faint praise -- to be worthy of critiqe, dismantling, and reconstruction -- is a noteworthy trait. It is a trait Elkins believes, evidently, to be possessed by art criticism. Where art criticism's re-building begins is where also the first building of science criticism should start. I conclude, therefore, with Elink's "three qualities" of contemporary criticism.

Ambitious Judgment

In my view, as in Elkins, it is not possible for that which is not openly ambitious to contribute to progress in those things that are, namely art and science.

Reflection about Judgment Itself

Science criticism, like art criticism, could "content itself with description". But, this would be a failure. It would be masquerading. For, always, when not explicit, descriptions are judgments implict.

Criticism Important Enough to Count as History, and Vice Versa

Science, like art, will last. It will not be the same. But it will be recognizable as a history of something, because (also like art) it does not appear without precedent from the scientific imagination. If we have learned nothing else about science in the nearly fifty years since Kuhn, we have learned this. Since science will last, its criticism also must be worthy to last.

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