Every day thousands of images of art are posted, liked and forgotten. Praise is easy and quick; real judgement is slow. Criticism is the practice of slowing down long enough to say why a work matters, or why it does not.
Good criticism does not tell readers what to like. It shows them how to look, gives reasons they can test against their own eyes, and keeps a record of what a culture valued at a given moment.
Slow looking in a fast world
Criticism is not the opposite of love. It is love that pays attention.
A journal like this one exists to protect that slow work: to give writers time, to have their essays read by reviewers, and to put the results in front of readers in two languages.
