Where We’re Headed

When we started The Public Review two years ago, I set up a Google Alert for “The Public Review.” I didn’t expect to receive anything, nor did I think much about it, but it seemed like the responsible thing to do, should we at some point, aspirationally, become relevant beyond our own circles. I very quickly realized that we had not fully considered the name’s immediate, bureaucratic associations. I began receiving daily summaries of the many mentions of “The Public Review” across the internet, most of them from local newspapers reporting on review periods and processes for various municipal projects: Jefferson City News Tribune, “Levee project teams seek feedback, consensus”; Fresno Bee, “CEMEX wants to blast a 600-foot-deep pit along San Joaquin River. We must stop them”; KPAX, “Open house planned to discuss Highway 93 Missoula to Florence corridor study.” Occasionally the alerts are from more unexpected sources; for instance, I received one from Sportskeeda (“a global sports media platform”), which reported on “The Golden Bachelorette Star Joan on Dealing with Trolls,” in which Joan (?) “revealed her take on the public’s review of her love life and journey.” I was delighted by these unintentional connections and the glimpses they gave me into hyper-local, public exercises in direct democracy.

I still receive these emails daily. I often delete them without opening them, but often enough I read them and take pleasure in their weirdness. Two years in, I think that this coincidence says a lot about this publication—The Public Review does indeed have something in common with the spirit of the public review process. Like such public forums and collective decision-making processes, The Public Review aspires to present proposals—propositions, even provocations—that elicit responses from readers, entering and sustaining a dialogue with our public. Unlike these municipal political rituals, however, our project is not in the business of establishing the final, definitive word on a matter. Rather, we strive to initiate thoughtful debate that is oriented toward discourse-production, not consensus-building. In the last two years, I think we have managed to do some of that.

Any success we’ve had thus far is indebted to a grant we received shortly after starting The Public Review. It allowed us to begin commissioning and publishing texts regularly, because it gave us the money we needed to pay authors for their work, which is, for us, nonnegotiable. (We state this outright because so many publications don’t pay authors, or severely underpay them). From the start, we wrote that it was our intention to fund The Public Review through public sources, which includes grants from private nonprofit organizations that receive public funds, as well as grassroots support from readers. From the start, we recognized that this would be difficult—that it would mean much of our time and energy would need to be invested in applying to grants, and that we would need to calculate for periods during which we weren’t receiving money. We have also always been aware of the problems—historically, politically—associated with public money. We also know as well as anyone else that there is no such thing as clean money. Private money comes with its own, often more nefarious if obscured, problems. But if the dominant, private models for funding art criticism have left the genre this impoverished and politically compromised, we thought it’s worth trying something else.

In the last few weeks, however, we’ve had to rethink our approach to funding. Since assuming power, the new presidential administration in the US has enacted sweeping executive orders withdrawing federal funding from any project or agency that does not align with the administration’s extremist right-wing ideology. In the administration’s words, “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars.”1 This not only affects the arts and humanities (which, it must be noted, had already been gutted decades ago, and have long received only abysmal federal funds) but the sciences as well. With that funding, countless related government webpages have disappeared, too.2 If the Google Alerts I’m newly beginning to receive—from outlets like American Greatness, “the leading voice of the next generation of American Conservativism,” advocating against public reviews—are any indication, the US is entering a period in which the already degraded notions of the public having any meaningful say in politics, or of there being any sense of public solidarity, are being completely eroded. “Public” is being made derogatory.

Similar developments have been unfolding in Germany, where I lived for the better part of the last decade and where The Public Review’s cofounder Carlos is based, along with many of our readers. The German model of public cultural funding was long an exemplary case of public investment in the arts. Funding sources at federal and local levels enabled many artists to sustain their practices without conforming to commercial interests or relying on full-time employment. Public funds also supported a thriving scene of community-oriented and artist-run spaces and initiatives. However, since Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza began, the German government, with its unshakeable unconditional support for Israel, has pursued a violent campaign of political repression, which has included revoking funding from organizations and individuals—in the arts and beyond—who express any kind of solidarity with Palestinians.3 This has ushered in an era of widespread censorship in Germany’s cultural landscape. It has also inspired an important movement among cultural workers in Germany to reject public funds or collaborations.4 In any case, the once-exemplary independence and plurality of public arts funding in Germany seems to now be a thing of the past.

The logics of these policies don’t represent a radical departure from the status quo in either country, but they are a frightening acceleration and exacerbation of decades of austerity politics. In this extreme environment, so hostile to the public—its health, its speech, its rights—we have to reassess how The Public Review can continue. What does it mean for us to be invested—fiscally, politically, rhetorically—in the public right now? What do we mean, and what do readers understand, when we refer to the public? Can a scrappy, little-known publication make meaningful contributions to or influence public discourse? These are questions we’ve discussed internally since conceptualizing and naming The Public Review, but they demand more attention in this environment. Whatever their answers, and at the risk of repeating an empty cliché, the work we’re doing feels more urgent than ever.

That work—criticism—has been derided similarly to the notion of the public. And I think one can’t underestimate the extent to which the disregard of criticism is related to the shrinking and demonization of the public sphere. Both are consequences of private, market interests increasingly taking priority over public good. It’s no wonder that the two have simultaneously fallen out of favor. The question for us, as the custodians of The Public Review, then becomes, how can the criticism we publish challenge and recuperate political power—potential, influence, solidarity, mobilization? Why art criticism at all, now?

As if by divine intervention, a copy of Craig Owens: Portrait of a Young Critic found its way to me the same week that the new administration in the US took office and supplied some much-needed affirmation.5 The book is an edited interview from 1984 between Owens and Lyn Blumenthal in which Owens shares how he came to be an art critic and how he thinks about art and criticism. Much of the last fifteen pages of the book can be read as a kind of manifesto of art criticism, or a defense of a certain practice of criticism, and its potential in a particular political context—one that resonates in some ways with our present. In the midst of Ronald Reagan’s first term, Owens asserts that, “The work with which I find myself in most sympathy is the kind that is involved in an analysis of its own relationship to the institutions it relies on. And the terms by which it’s presented” (85). He continues,

I look hard at this work and take it very seriously and say, “What is this work talking about? What is this work asking me to focus on? What is this work trying to make a statement about?” And then if I feel some kind of solidarity with that work, then I feel that the critical task is to bring in other terms and materials to extend, develop, and amplify what that work is talking about. If I’m going to talk about work, it’s got to be work that’s about something and attempts to engage with the culture in a way that I feel is essential at this moment. In our present historical circumstances, I feel it’s entirely irresponsible to make work that does not engage with the culture. (90)

The critical methodology Owens describes resonates with what we’ve attempted to produce at The Public Review: texts that think about artworks, exhibitions, and their institutions in relation to the moment in which they appear, and take seriously the ways in which they engage (or don’t) with the present.

Central to this approach, as we’ve tried to practice it, is accounting for the political and economic interests involved in an artwork, its exhibition, and the hosting institution. This is where criticism about art can open onto political stakes and exigencies. In Owens’s final words in the interview, he articulates the urgent need for this kind of situated thinking in criticism, which not only feels just as urgent now but also seems never to have taken root, at least not in the mainstream art press:

It seems to me that we live in a period of time—despite what the Reagan administration specifically wants to do with culture—when we have to deal with the paradox that there has been this unprecedented proliferation of cultural activity under capitalism. There is more cultural activity and a much larger apparatus established to support and sustain this cultural activity than at any time in history. […] We have to begin to investigate the status of art and culture and the political and economic interests that it serves. That’s certainly a change in criticism. There is a tendency that we inherited from Clement Greenberg that characterizes art as an endangered species. This seems to me to be so blind and so contrary to the facts, to this extraordinary proliferation of cultural activity. We ought to ask the real questions about why capitalism promotes this and what it gains from it, and how its interests are vested in it. (100–101)

Owens doesn’t talk anywhere about the public, but the questions he raises here are deeply public, concerned with understanding the political and economic complicities of an art world subsumed under and sustained by capital. This is work that still needs to be done, and it has enormous implications for the role art can play in public civic life, beyond decorating the halls of power, especially in the absence of any public infrastructure.

Yet, despite the political relevance criticism can have, there’s a large contingent of cultural workers—including self-identifying art writers—who disdain criticism, writing it off as an elitist and authoritarian genre of judgment-making and negativity, of distinguishing “good” art from “bad.” We maintain that, at its best, art criticism can create and sustain a public sphere. It can hold art’s institutions accountable as their increasingly narrow proximity to private power and capital negates their stated civic missions (on which their tax-exempt status depends). It can reclaim an independent place for art in public social and political life. But, in order to do so, criticism cannot be corporately sponsored or paywalled or otherwise gatekept. For the kind of public discourse we want, criticism must be public. For us, for now, it might mean that the public we’re making is just a handful of people, and it means that our financial footing remains unsteady, but the fact that what we publish is read by anyone makes the endeavor worthwhile.

This work does, of course, also require money. That first grant we received was awarded by Humanities New York, New York State’s affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is (was?) a federally funded agency for humanities research. As we spend the last of these funds, we’re working on new grant applications and strategizing other sustainable sources of income. In the meantime, under these exacerbated political conditions and with their consequences for public funding, we hope that you will continue reading The Public Review, and that you might be inspired to donate to us. Any donations we receive will go entirely to paying authors for their writing.

When we were naming The Public Review, we knew we wanted to situate our work in the traditions of publications like the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books—in the tradition of the review form. But location had nothing to do with the project; The Public Review is not situated in any single place, and our primary concern is not bound or defined by a shared locality. What characterizes the work we do—and hope to continue doing—is a commitment to and a critical engagement with the public sphere and art’s place within it. We hope it resonates with you.

1 Tom Hals and Andy Sullivan, “Explainer: Trump’s Funding Pause and Its Legality,” Reuters, January 28, 2025; See also the original document from January 27, 2025, uploaded by the New York Times.

2 The New York Times has been tracking and recording these developments: The Upshot, “Which Federal Programs are Under Scrutiny? The Budget Office Named 2,600 of Them,” New York Times, January 28, 2025, and Ethan Singer, “Thousands of US Government Webpages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday,” New York Times, February 2, 2025.

3 There is an open source spreadsheet, the “Archive of Silence,” documenting the instances of this political repression. See also Hanno Hauenstein, “Germany Is Known for Its Heavily Funded, Thriving Art Scene. But a Slew of Cancellations Is Threatening That Reputation,” Artnet, December 21, 2023, and Eliza Levinson, “Inflamed by the War in Gaza, Germany’s Art Scene Is Tearing Itself Apart,” Artnews, April 4, 2024.

4 See Strike Germany, https://strikegermany.org/.

5 Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Craig Owens: Portrait of a Young Critic (Badlands Unlimited, 2018). Many thanks to Paul Chan for making copies available to us.

Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov is a cofounder and editor of The Public Review, and an art historian and critic.