The straw man fallacy as a problem of art criticism

A “straw man” argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. (—Wikipedia, for lack of a more concise definition)

It is an all-too-common strategy found in art criticism: the subversion of an art historical “telos” by (mis)representing then disrupting the linear model that has thereby been established in order to move the discourse in another direction. While the outcome can be positive, the method is suspect. There are numerous examples of the seemingly willful misinterpretation of works of art or the blatantly reductive explication of an (already reductive) art historical narrative intended to propel an argument in the other direction or substantiate claims one might be tempted to make about certain (other) artists’ works.

I want to catalogue some of these fallacies here because they are a common aspect of a certain type of critical discourse, with which I am engaged and with which I am often frustrated for its inability to reconcile itself to the lived reality of artists’ practices. These fallacies are perhaps a by-product of the academic imperative to create categories and movements, and to articulate periods of history (which, I dare say, can come to resemble a kind of free-floating “brand identity.”) One might just as easily acknowledge these enterprises to be fraught from the get-go, belonging to a self-replicating system that is on some level profoundly ill-equipped to honestly and directly address works of art. If not, why has the discipline of art history changed so little during a period (say…the twentieth century) when art itself has changed so dramatically.

Some common fallacies—which have been transformed into “received ideas”—that I see regularly in the art press:

- The idea that Conceptual Art was somehow anti-material because of its critique of the object/art as commodity (see: the profoundly materially based practice of Lawrence Weiner, so called “founder of Conceptual Art”)

- The idea that artists associated with Abstract Expressionism intentionally reinforced a certain heroic, patriarchal, and transcendent individualism (moreso than other art movements before or after? look at the art market today!)

- The idea that the “theatrical” critique of Minimal Art (à la Michael Fried) and any discussion of the notion of its “presence” or “immanence” are mutually exclusive (why must so many essays on Minimal Art begin with a refutation of Michael Fried?)

More and more, I am feeling that the entire enterprise of writing about art needs to be reinterrogated. In the 70s, and 80s, coinciding with the translation into English of many key texts, much art-writing was taken up with the emerging literary and linguistic fields of structuralism and semiotics and, later, deconstructivism. Perhaps we could envision a new moment where the discourse surrounding art looks to the writings of artists themselves for new forms and a way out of the current critical impasse. (See Paul McCarthy on Dan Graham elsewhere on this blog or Dan Graham on anything.) Just a thought.