In the book Bad Reviews, 150 artists have revisited their most brutal critiques – from an ‘unforgiveable’ Carolee Schneemann sculpture to the critic who suggested the artist should be jailed
‘Eileen Cowin has the visual sense of a lug wrench,” wrote the critic Richard Maschal in his 1984 assessment of the American mixed-media artist. “Her sense of space and composition is nil.” It’s one of 150 verdicts in a book called Bad Reviews, edited by the artist Aleksandra Mir and curator/critic Tim Griffin. In 2015, the pair “spammed the whole art world” to ask artists to submit the worst review they have ever received. Over the next few years, artists ranging from Cindy Sherman to film-maker Alix Lambert shared their most stinging criticism. Sherman dug out a 2012 panning from New Republic that described her work as “the biggest artistic ego trip of all time”, while Lambert offered a selection of trolling Twitter posts including: “You a bitch alix kill yourself.” Art criticism stands revealed as a broad church – much like art itself.
Mir was inspired by a terrible review she received from Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times in 2006, when she was in a group show of young American artists at the Royal Academy in London. “This is a generation of paint-happy know-nothings brought up on hamburgers and porn, a talentless bloom of post-pop trailer trash,” the critic declared. Mir was delighted as it seemed to her to sum up the British view of Americans. “There was a superiority about it that just rang so beautifully true.”
