The Double Challenge of Eco Art Criticism
Art critics evaluate merit and assign cultural/historical contexts to art. They have based their analyses upon multiple forms of judgment, focusing on material, aesthetic, thematic, expressive, biographical, historic, theoretical, and/or ethical criteria.
Eco art critics add a second basis of evaluation. While acknowledging art theories and aesthetics, eco art criticism also reflects the ecological principles associated with protecting the planet’s life-sustaining conditions. Managing two disciplines simultaneously more than doubles the complexity of their task.
The ‘eco’ part of their mandate expands the concerns of the art critic to include the actuality of peoples’ lives, corporate policies, technical science, and government regulations. Such considerations unsettle the long-held determinants of artistic “success,” “excellence,” “integrity,” “originality,” and “significance”.
Constructing an alternative system requires creative problem-solving. Like eco artists, eco art critics strive to resolve planet-wide infirmities and vulnerabilities and search for meaningful forms of innovation.
The disruption of conventional systems of assigning merit to art is also being instigated by artists.
They may, for example, reject rarity, craftsmanship, authenticity, stylistic consistency, and aesthetic appeal.
They may choose to create art that is materially unstable or or divorced from object-making altogether in order to adopt nature’s material cyclicality.
Eco artists may disregard or reject the accelerated time frames that characterize contemporary media and technology in order to harmonize with gradual evolutionary events, growth and decay, weather, and geological cycles.
Furthermore, eco artists often reject the Renaissance technique of creating an immutable, hierarchical, geometric framework for composing imagery.
In order to envision the vibrant interconnectedness of all living beings, this static arrangement of discrete objects is replaced with decentralized networks of interlaced fields devoid of identifiable patterns and geometric clarity.
Finally, art critics must contend with the fact that eco artists are often more concerned for the welfare of others, overwhelming the artistic impulse to engage in self expression.
Thus, eco art critics participate in the quest for the subject, style, medium, and process that constitutes eco-art’s criteria of merit.