Brian Sewell, who died last month, was not popular with his fellow critics. He accused them of kowtowing to power, of puffing up every trendy artist put forward by the galleries and collectors. Of ‘arse-licking’, to be precise (see for example this exchange with Matthew Collings). They could brush off this charge easily enough: Sewell just didn’t get modern art, they said; he hankered for the clear hierarchy of value of the old days. And so he couldn’t really fulfil the function of a critic: to help the public to make sense of the art of our day.
Fair point: he was insufficiently sympathetic to contemporary art. And yet he was also right that most art criticism is excessively sympathetic. It is in the interest of a critic to enthuse about most of what he sees, to seem in touch with it.
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