Leo Steinberg - Critique of Formalism

Critique of Formalism

Leo Steinberg, from Other Criteria

One way to cope with the provocations of novel art is to rest firm and maintain solid standards. The standards are set by the critic's long-practiced taste and by his conviction that only those innovations will be significant which promote the established direction of advanced art. All else is irrelevant. Judged for "quality" and for an "advancedness" measurable by given criteria, each work is then graded on a comparative scale. A second way is more yielding. The critic interested in a novel manifestation holds his criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today. While he seeks to comprehend the objectives behind the new art produced, nothing is a priori excluded or judged irrelevant. Since he is not passing out grades, he suspends judgment until the work's intention has come into focus and his response to it is - in the literal sense of the word — sym-pathetic; not necessarily to approve, but to feel along with it as with a thing that is like no other.

I am aware that this second mode tends to be expatiating and slow. It offers neither certitude nor precise quality ratings. But I believe that both ways — the will to empathize and the will to appraise — have their use. There must be an ideal combination of them, and perhaps most criticsstrive to achieve it. But that achievement lies beyond individual sensibility; the capacity to experience all works in accord with their inward objectives and at the same time against external standards belongs rather to the collective judgment of a generation, a judgment within which many kinds of critical insights have been absorbed. Since mine is the second mode, I find myself constantly in opposition to what is called formalism; not because I doubt the necessity of formal analysis, or the positive value of work done by serious formalist critics. But because I mistrust their certainties, their apparatus of quantification, their self-righteous indifference to that part of artistic utterance which their tools do not measure. I dislike above all their interdictory stance — the attitude that tells an artist what he ought not to do, and the spectator what he ought not to see.