Koh, Dong-Yeon
고동연 高東延

The Writing Subject—The Devoted Critic

 

September 28, 2026
Dongyeon Koh

 

This essay will naturally move toward the question of anonymity and the absence of a name in order to consider how authorship affects what post-interpretive criticism understands as the critic’s self. I suspect that the same question applies not only to the act of writing but also to the way a text operates for the reader. My interest in and interpretation of the names “Dorian Gray” and “Vale” was, to some extent, intended to demonstrate just how important the authorial identity of the writer can be to the reader, regardless of whether that identification is right or wrong, a misunderstanding or not. The process through which I actually interpreted the surname Vale and eventually associated the name “Dorian Vale” with the famous fictional character Dorian Gray is, of course, not entirely logical. Yet reading is a process in which a certain degree of “justifiable misunderstanding,” shaped by social conventions and common assumptions, continues to unfold within the reader’s mind. In that sense, it is not only legitimate but also inevitable.

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What matters is that, regardless of the writer’s intention in choosing a pseudonym, this imaginative process is deeply significant for the reader. I once told you during one of our Zoom meetings that I did not want to see your face. At least while working on this project, I said, I wanted to exercise some restraint in that regard. Under ordinary circumstances, I consider it very important to look into someone’s eyes or see their face when speaking with them, but this time I did not want to do so. Partly because seeing your face might disrupt a certain fantasy I had constructed around the pseudonym, and partly because I was afraid that it might lead me to develop particular preconceptions. But more importantly, imagining is always pleasurable from the position of the reader. It may or may not be useful, but from the reader’s perspective, the act of imagining—and inevitably mis-imagining—the author and the author’s intentions is ultimately meaningful.

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Let us leave anonymity and the absence of a name here for the moment and turn to the writing self. I would first like to consider the condition of the writer. Whether or not one puts one’s name forward, I believe that the writer is inevitably performing. As anyone who writes may have experienced, when writing, one often hears a kind of voice internally and tries to grasp hold of it. I would like to compare this process to a performance. To elaborate, the writer experiences many different states: one can be narcissistic while also trying to conceal oneself; one can be afraid, while at the same time moving beyond all of these states with an entirely sincere intention to explain something to the reader, or simply to communicate. At such moments, different performers seem to move through the writer’s mind. I use the words “performer” and “performative” because the many selves involved in writing pass through different emotions and states of self, and, above all, because the writer’s condition is remarkably fluid and varied.

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There are many reasons why a writer might need anonymity—or, from this point onward, I would rather use the word independence—but perhaps one of them is the desire to perform these different roles with greater freedom. A writer writes in a state of fear and uncertainty, sometimes out of sheer necessity, and sometimes with a genuinely devoted intention. The desire to conceal one’s identity from the reader, whether or not that concealment is successful, can provide a degree of psychological security that allows the writer to perform these different roles more freely and with fewer apparent constraints. Above all, when one becomes excessively absorbed in writing, one inevitably becomes somewhat narcissistic, even when the intention is entirely sincere. Anonymity may be useful in concealing this condition. Readers, of course, will attempt to find various clues and may arrive at misunderstandings, but that is beyond the writer’s control. From the writer’s perspective, when one wishes to write in a more independent and liberated state, apparently less constrained by preconceived judgments, anonymity can certainly provide psychological assistance.

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Let us now turn to art criticism and ask whether the critic can ever be independent. The answer, of course, must basically be negative. We might formulate the question differently: as long as an art critic continues to write about art and its various phenomena—artists, artworks, exhibitions, policies within the art world, or art-historical positions—is it really possible to write in complete independence, without taking into account one’s relationships to these things? Above all, the critic also exists within various institutions. In practical terms, for criticism to be published and circulated somewhere, the critic inevitably has to establish relationships with the social systems, and more specifically with the systems constructed by the art world. Critics often function as a kind of intellectual laborer who supplies writing to institutions—including museums and galleries—that require descriptions and interpretations of artists and artworks.

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The same is true when the critic does not write directly for an institution but works through a particular area of expertise. Universities and academic journals, for example, foreground expertise and operate through systems of peer review before any direct exchange of financial benefit takes place, yet they too remain inseparable from forms of social influence and the economic rewards generated by them, whether directly or indirectly, through such things as grants and citation counts. More importantly, every critic ultimately has to establish relationships with people in the art world. Human relationships naturally develop into forms of collaboration and, eventually, into reputation. Even when we set aside immediate financial exchanges, it is through these social relationships that an ecosystem of the art world is produced, allowing critics to carry out the work available to them and, ultimately, to survive. It is therefore difficult to speak of the critic’s independence, and of the freedom that might supposedly follow from it. Whether positively or negatively, the contemporary art world is itself a social system, and it is difficult for the critic to exist permanently outside it.

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For this reason, the word “devotion” in your writing on the writing subject seems particularly important to me. In contrast, I previously used the word “atonement,” which, although it is not logically the exact opposite of devotion, was an indirect confession of my own past: writing with a sense of reckoning with what my criticism had sustained, what it had enabled, and what I myself had benefited from within the art world. I chose a stronger word such as “atonement” partly because of a certain cultural difference. This does not mean, of course, that I believe it is inherently wrong to write for money, nor do I think that the opposite position is necessarily more moral. Rather, I am a critic who believes that we should understand the writer as a much more realistic and social subject than we usually do.

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What makes the concept of devotion important, however, is that it offers a way of thinking about independence and freedom that are otherwise extremely difficult to secure. At first glance, devotion appears unrelated to independence. To devote oneself to a person, institution, art, or community means accepting a certain relationship and a certain degree of responsibility. Once one becomes devoted, therefore, it becomes difficult to remain a completely external observer. A critic cannot stand entirely apart from artists, museums, or exhibition systems with which they have maintained relationships over a long period of time. Yet a critic or researcher who adopts a devoted attitude may also establish a more productive tension with the art world as a system—the very system to which they are connected—as well as with the organizations, institutions, and individuals situated within it.

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This is a more idealistic and difficult concept, because devotion precedes criticism. To put it another way, it is a concept that exceeds criticism. Therefore, being both devoted and critical requires a range of mechanisms. Before one can be critical of an artist, institution, or issue, there needs to be a less critical and more devoted attitude toward the possibility that the object of one’s criticism might be resolved, develop, and flourish. One of the common mistakes we make as researchers is the continual extension of one statement into another, allowing criticism to reproduce itself indefinitely. There is nothing inherently wrong with criticism itself, but criticism without a prior devoted attitude can easily become an expression of the critic’s narcissism or the policymaker’s self-display. This does not mean that such criticism has no positive effects, but the moment it gives that impression to a particular system or to another person, its effectiveness is significantly diminished. Devoted criticism, therefore, means an attitude that is neither criticism for the sake of criticism nor a passive acceptance of the discourse supplied by institutions, the reputation of artists, or fashionable theories. It requires maintaining a certain distance.

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This makes the object of devotion important. To understand the labor and dedication of an artist while also making an honest judgment about the work within the authority given to oneself, and to consider the effects that criticism may have on the artist: this is what I mean by devoted criticism. Of course, it is far from easy. To achieve it, we may need to reduce, and therefore restrain, the repeated act of writing or researching excessively on behalf of someone else. Abstract aims often require us to begin by changing very simple things. This is also a particularly difficult concept because one must approach the artist and the artwork as distinct objects. As an art historian, this is an attitude that is always required, yet, paradoxically, it is difficult precisely because reaching this level requires knowing both extremely well. Thus, in order for the critic to preserve a degree of independence, the answer is not to abandon the seemingly contradictory concept of devotion, but rather to remain conscious of the distinction between human devotion and responsibility toward one’s writing. And one must continue to ask: what, exactly, should one be devoted to? It is genuinely difficult.

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Nevertheless, such an attitude is necessary because it is ultimately central to post-interpretive criticism as well. For example, post-interpretive criticism begins from the recognition that conventional criticism has become excessively invested in explaining what a work means, or what kind of social, political, and historical context it possesses, almost immediately upon encountering it. One background to this tendency is that the amount of information available through various media and technologies has increased beyond comparison with the past, while the scale of the global art market in the twenty-first century has grown by perhaps three to six times, depending on whether one measures the market through auctions, private sales, or other criteria. Globalism has produced an abundance of large-scale international exhibitions around the world, including biennials, while at the same time generating specialized theories and “attitudes” within the contemporary art world derived from international political thought and critical theory that seek to critique this very global system. Post-interpretive criticism does not begin from the radical position of reducing all these practices to a “ground zero.” Rather, it begins with a critical awareness that seeks, at the very least, to speak of restraint.

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The concept of devoted criticism, then, can also be understood as an attempt not only to free criticism from economic dependence on particular institutions or sources of funding, but also to redirect the orientation of criticism itself. “Are we trying to understand the work too quickly?” “Are we reducing the experiences that occur before the work—the sensations, discomfort, delay, silence, fascination, or rejection—into a single meaning before they have had enough time to remain as experiences?” Devoted criticism ultimately means knowing when to stop interpreting, just as we have repeatedly emphasized restraint in our earlier discussions of what post-interpretive criticism might mean. The devotion I am speaking of here does not mean support for or loyalty to an artist, museum, movement, or ideology. Many curators in the art world, for example, tend to misunderstand theory as though it were an ideological position in itself. Instead, what is at stake here is a redefinition of the object of devotion. Limiting and restraining the role of criticism can itself be a form of devotion. Just as restraint can be a form of love.

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Let us return, then, to today’s subject, that is the self of the writer. This is also connected to where our discussion of anonymity began. It is a difficult problem. It is not easy for critics and researchers who have spent their lives sitting before computer screens, producing words almost like kings and concealing their fears, to confront it. One can imitate restraint, but writing is perhaps one of the fields in which genuine restraint is most difficult to practice. How can critics restrain the self that they have placed before artworks, armed with interpretation and explanation? It is not easy. How can they acknowledge that their interpretation of a work may be wrong, or that the work may not require such extensive interpretation in the first place? I think anonymity plays a double role here. As you suggested, anonymity may be effective in preventing praise or the accumulation of reputation, but readers will not necessarily receive it that way; they will exercise their own imagination. And ultimately, this is not simply a matter of strategy.

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From the perspective of the critic’s self—or rather, from the position of critics who have long believed that criticism is something they are particularly good at and have devoted themselves to doing—suppressing the self and restraining interpretation is extremely difficult. At the very least, it is difficult to acknowledge that what one has spent one’s life doing might become more socially useful through restraint.

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Because this essay is becoming too abstract, I would like to introduce a more unexpected experience from a recent exhibition. I want to mention an exhibition I saw at ARKO Art Center in Daehakno, Seoul, organized around the concept of the “art school,” and the current exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans. Both exhibitions, although to different degrees, dismantle or turn back upon themselves certain established theories of the art world. They raise questions about learning anew, looking back at the history of learning, and, in Evans’s case, how a self-taught artist might be incorporated into the narratives of the art world and art history.

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Evans’s exhibition is a retrospective encompassing an entire artistic world filled with forms, subjects, and techniques that, within fine art—and particularly in her time—were relatively marginalized, often appearing at once illustrative and almost comic in their small-scale formats. As a Black woman artist whose work combines dreams, visions, biblical imagery, African and Caribbean cultural traditions, and nature, Evans’s oeuvre might initially seem predictable in terms of the interpretive frameworks available to us. Yet, when I looked more closely, the extraordinary range of cultural inheritances she brings together made me reconsider whether interpretation itself was necessarily the most meaningful response. Above all, she combines biblical and Christian imagery with elements drawn from Eastern and local religious traditions. I found it remarkable to realize that a transcultural perspective does not necessarily require a gigantic international exhibition or an elaborate apparatus of cultural theory. It was genuinely fascinating.

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In any case, my honest conclusion is that the devoted “critic’s self” envisioned by post-interpretive criticism may be difficult for anyone to practice fully at this point. Yet it seems to offer an attitude and a direction that are urgently necessary.