Last month, art critics Blake Gopnik and Christian Viveros-Fauné reprised their series of performative art criticism and frequent debates for Artnet’s Strictly Critical, in front of a crowd of Ringling College students, faculty, staff, and community members. Strictly Critical began as a series of filmed debates in 2014. The duo visited exhibitions, from the Frieze Art Fair to the New York subway stations, for filmed reviews.
Blake Gopnik is an art critic for The New York Times and the author of the 2020 biography Warhol, an exhaustive examination of the late pop artist. Most recently, he authored The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream, about a philanthropist and modern art collector whose egalitarian ideals inspired a desire to take art out of the hands of the elite and make it available to the average American.
Christian Viveros-Fauné is an art critic for The Village Voice, curator-at-large for USF Contemporary Art Museum, co-founder of The Brooklyn Rail, and author of the 2018 book Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art from Zwirner Books.
The duo is notorious for turning the critiques into debates, forming hard and opposing positions on topics and works of art, but with a fun energy and mutual respect. Their visit to Ringling offered a night of the critics’ usual banter and provocative opinions.
They debated a Caravaggio painting, depicting a young man in drag, who bears a slight resemblance to the artist, with one critic crediting the 20th-century revival of interest in the artist to advances in cinema.
The two disagreed on the sexualized work of figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage, an advertisement featuring Andy Warhol, and a recent exhibition of early portraits by Amy Sherald.
In a rare moment of unified thinking, they shared their mutual love for the 2016 documentary Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death by Arthur Jafa, screened in its entirety, leaving the whole room transfixed.
The event was presented by Ringling College Galleries and Exhibitions, the Fine Arts Department, and the Liberal Arts Department, and emceed by Liberal Arts faculty member Tom Winchester.
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