The New Critic's Disease

A meta-review of Imhof's DOOM and the state of contemporary criticism

I am thinking about you the whole time.

There’s a common litany about the current hollowness of contemporary art. The litany is often far hollower than what the critics complain about.

I went to see DOOM earlier this month, a larger-than-life performance and installation by the German artist Anne Imhof.¹ (I had the great pleasure of interviewing the performance’s co-director and costume designer, Eliza Douglas, for SSENSE.)

For context, this is how I described DOOM in my piece.

“DOOM is hard to explain. Loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a group of performers move from SUVs to stages across the Armory as different vignettes are acted out over the course of three hours. The crowd, dwarfed by the installation, plods along, tailing the group of performers as the story unfolds. A large ticking doomsday clock looms over the murmurations of the intelligentsia as bold red numbers illuminate the face of vague acquaintances. The experience is eerie and bemusing. I let myself be carried by DOOM. Bewitched by Douglas’s voice, confused by the erratic motions of the crowd, I waited anxiously for the final grand resolution as the countdown ended over “We Can”, an original song by Douglas.”

“The play-performance-installation features a dozen youths dressed in contemporary urban clothing, somewhere between Bushwick and Berlin but animated by the tribal characteristics of the Capulets and Montagues. These aesthetic groups fight as the tragic heroes’ love-stars cross.”

Shortly after opening night, the litany commenced again.

Hyperallergic was the first to publish a review, a rather negative one, with the tagline: “‘DOOM: House of Hope’ is comically apolitical and tragically hollow beneath all the hype.” I knew this sort of commentary was coming. It is obvious we are in a crisis of criticism. Newer generations of audiences are more swayed by streamers and TikTok content creators than they are by award-winning journalists when it comes to culture. Criticism, at large, feels insular. We write essays for other critics and our artist friends who subscribe to the magazines that will eventually cover them.

I believe this position of influence was not lost to the internet but rather abdicated through an atrophy of emotion. Hyperallergic’s review is a great example of how through incessant search for overt political themes, critics have alienated themselves from the experience of the work of art itself, always looking at it at arm’s-length, checking blue cookie-cutter boxes, never fully engaging, never fully letting go, lest one may be seen enjoying something “hollow” and “apolitical”. As Susan Sontag reminds us in “Against Interpretation”, “for the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text, but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances.”

The new critic’s disease is their inability to revel in the fullness of superficiality, their rejection of “appearances”, of experience in favor of interpretation and, by extension, politics. The new critic’s only language is that of politics because they understand the world only as a place where power is exercised and not where emotions are felt. In that world, emotions should be weaponized for obvious political cookie points. But, cui bene? Not the audience.

Hyperallergic’s overall description of the set/installation is correct. But the critic loses me when they ask the reader to “trust them” when they claim that “the vibe is half of it”, without expounding on the vibe’s effect. I do not trust them because after reading the piece I know that they did not feel it.

​​After 15 years of internet social justice activism, much of which was important, we’ve seemingly installed permanent blinders on the group of people whose job it literally is to see. The new monolingual critic only sees politics and activism. What about feeling! What about emotion!

She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

The critic from ArtNews, where another negative review was published, complains that “[..] DOOM did not liberate me.” Was it supposed to? In a hopeless world, the new critic turns to the work of art in search of a call to action. Without the telegraphed talking point, they scoff and deem the work otiose, pointless. The work of art is not an Instagram graphic. Sontag again, “interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”

The new critic says “I felt nothing at all” and believes it is a negative imputation on the work. Perhaps you felt nothing at all because you approached the work with disdain, with the disgust of interpretation, because it did not rapidly satisfy some sort of loose checklist, because you did not open your heart to the work’s sensuous energy, the lovers’ embraces, the live close-ups of Juliet’s face, the beauty of ballet, because you treat the work of art as something to be decrypted, and not something to be experienced.

The ArtNews writer accuses the piece of being inscrutable. “DOOM’s inscrutability seems purposeful, especially since Imhof provided no program notes explaining the plot. The work instead appears to unfold in segments that are vaguely linear, with the plot of the Shakespeare play abstracted into moving tableaux.” The piece, first of all, is decidedly non-linear, beginning with a segment from the play’s final act, (Act 5, Scene 3) where the star-crossed lovers drink the poison. Thus we’ve already encountered the tragedy, we’re in its aftermath, from the very beginning, we are doomed!!! “But the details surrounding the characters of DOOM, their motivations, and their actions are intentionally shorn away, creating the sense that this is a work guided by an inner logic knowable only to the performers themselves.” We know the source material, we can intuit their motivations and fill in the gaps through the scenes. I am unsure what was so hermetic about it if you were familiar the original text.

The Hyperallergic critic throws out cheap jabs like calling the show a “Balenciaga ad”, a seeming dig at Eliza Douglas’s relationship with the brand. The costume design felt representative of what one may see outside a Bladee show or at Rash. It felt accurate, apropos, an astute construction, topical and thoughtful. This incessant excavation for the political is both tiresome and lazy. There are political rallies happening all over the country right now. If I was looking for a policy agenda, that’s where I would go. I came to see an artist’s perspective on one of our great tragedies, recast in our own Doomed Generation, I came to feel the slow drag of time, the apocalypse’s untimely uneventfulness, yes, it is tedious at times, but, trust me, so will the End, so will the Revolution.

“When the revolution comes / Some of us will probably catch it on TV with chicken hanging from our mouths.” (The Last Poets)

Were you dancing and moshing with the performers when the band played? Were you singing along to Jeremih? Were you sitting down when Eliza laid on the ground, performing her ritual? If not, how can you accuse a work of emotional stiffness? How can you be moved if you are not moving?

“DOOM meets a fraught moment with no answers.” Get your own answers! Why are we expecting a single German woman to provide an “answer” to the apocalyptical moment we are experiencing? This is unreasonable. From Severance to Marvel, this desire for answers observed across culture and its related relentless cravings for interpretation is sadly, in the words of Sontag, “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly and stifling.” To beg the work of art for answers is to beg the stone for milk. The work is a loose metaphor not a didactic fable. Morals are found in La Fontaine not Pollock.

Modern forms of communication understand this. For instance, you understand memes obliquely, from the corner of your mind, the synapse triggers a loose association, the smile occurs before the thought, the retweet before the comprehension, the feeling before interpretation.

The clock hits zero. Eliza is still singing. The End has occurred. I look at Kara and bring her close to me as we silently revel in the last few hours. The 0’s red glow illuminates on her face and she smiles at me. We reflect telepathically on what to do now, erring in the grandeur of the Park Avenue Armory. Where is Miles? Where is Emma? Where to go next? All things I would wonder about in the End Times. The presence of dear friends and great company.

And I would wonder about you, my love. I have my answer. I still will stay with thee, and never from this palace of dim night depart again.

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

If it isn’t obvious, the answer to DOOM is LOVE.

1. Thank you to Miles, Emma and Xandra for their comments on the piec