Replace "art" with "literature" --

-- and you get all the insights you need about literary criticism, litblogging and the state of book reviewing. It's Adrian Searle's wise yet acerbic essay in the Guardian about how art criticism has fared against the flood of money in the art world:

Some critics think that the fact that there's so much bad art around means that it is a great time to be writing about art, which is like saying that because of the plague, what a great time the 14th century was to be an undertaker. Critics aren't doctors. We can't fix things. We are not here to tell artists what to do. They wouldn't listen anyway. Maybe the word criticism has become part of the problem. Or the problem is that we are asking the wrong thing of the critic: critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren't any). Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable. Criticism might blow the whistle on overhyped art, flabby curating, moribund institutions or the odd fly-blown administrator, but that is because you cannot divorce art from its context....

Being iconoclastic, slagging off artists and institutions, gets a critic noticed. Anger, undeniably, is also a good motive for writing in the first place. Controversy, the smell of blood, the whiff of scandal - this makes careers. It also sells newspapers and magazines. Of course it is the duty of the critic to be iconoclastic, and to be reckless; but critical terrorism is no good as a long-term strategy. It becomes predictable, and the adrenaline buzz soon wears off. It is also disingenuous, and ultimately a false position. There is such a thing as bad faith, and lousy opinions....

Writing about art only matters because art deserves to be met with more than silence (although ignoring art - not speaking about it, not writing about it - is itself a form of criticism, and probably the most damning and effective one). An artist's intentions are one thing, but works themselves accrue meanings and readings through the ways they are interpreted and discussed and compared with one another, long after the artist has finished with them. This, in part, is where all our criticisms come in. We contribute to the work, remaking it whenever we go back to it - which doesn't prevent some artworks not being worth a first, never mind a second look, and some opinions not being worth listening to at all.