Critics once mocked styles that later became badges of honor
Art criticism weighs visual work against beauty, meaning, or history, yet time routinely overturns the verdict. Impressionism and Cubism began as critical insults; artists still need reviewers to sell work while knowing only later generations may understand it.
Judging pictures is as old as making them: Plato, Vitruvius and Augustine all left early critical remarks, and from the Renaissance onward rich patrons paid go-betweens to scout commissions. The English phrase itself came from the painter Jonathan Richardson, whose 1719 Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism tried to make taste objective by marking seven qualities, among them drawing, composition, invention and colouring, on a scale from 0 to 18. Status-conscious middle-class buyers took the idea up quickly.
Regular free exhibitions created the modern critic. In France, Jean-Baptiste Dubos won Voltaire's praise with his 1718 reflections on poetry and painting, and La Font de Saint-Yenne's commentary on the Salon of 1746 was read as quietly anti-monarchist. Denis Diderot's account of the Salon of 1765 turned such reporting into literature. In England, Society of Arts shows in 1762 and 1766 provoked anonymous pamphlets, columns multiplied after the Royal Academy opened in 1768, and in the 1770s the Morning Chronicle became the first paper to review exhibitions systematically.
By the nineteenth century criticism was a profession with rival camps. In 1820s Paris, Étienne-Jean Delécluze defended polished neoclassical finish while Stendhal dismissed it as formula without feeling and championed Romantic emotion. In England William Hazlitt believed art could enlarge human generosity, yet grew uneasy as Turner's landscapes drifted toward abstraction. John Ruskin's Modern Painters of 1843, which echoed ideas from the American critic John Neal, was hailed by Gombrich as the most ambitious attempt at scientific criticism.
The job carries a hidden risk. Reviewers who sneered at the early Impressionists are now remembered mainly for being wrong, and labels coined as insults became proud names. Theories multiply, from formalist to mimetic to postmodern, because every verdict blends description with the critic's own eye.
Source: Art criticism
