“This is what we do to do the work we do,” explains Jerry Saltz as he stabs and microwaves a bag of pre-washed spinach, insisting that he and Roberta Smith don’t go out to eat and never get takeout. Domestic eccentricities—spartan rituals of economy and convenience, involving massive quantities of deli coffee and Gristedes grilled chicken breasts—provide both structure and novelistic texture for filmmaker Alison Chernick’s House of Criticism, a double portrait of the legendary New York art-critic couple. Smith, for her part, is never shown doing a lick of housework in their well-proportioned, booklined mid-century Greenwich Village apartment. Icon.
If you follow Saltz on Instagram, and who doesn’t, you already know he’s no stranger to front-facing video exposition on subjects both personal and cultural, and that he’s built a social-media personality independent of his published work as senior art critic for New York magazine (his position since 2006). You also know about his coffee shtick, which he references more often than the spinach or chicken thing. When, in the film’s opening bodega scene, he lines up five large paper cups to fill, takes the crowded beverage tray up to the apartment, and pours the hot coffee over ice into 7-11 Double Gulp tumblers, it’s a sign that the film will hew closely to what’s known, and often to what’s been rehearsed.
What is new, and what you’ll have to settle for in lieu of anything really juicy, is what the documentary medium can offer: the poignant intermixing of verité footage and archival photos, for example, and the tension that can develop over time in a feature-length work. Though the wild contrasts between Saltz and Smith as people and writers are largely neutralized—somehow—by their loving and seemingly peaceful arrangement at home, there’s no escaping the self-centered torment that is writing itself. The most affecting aspect of the film is not when they hold hands or speak fondly of each other; it’s in the unremitting shared anxiety that runs in the background of even their sagest self-reflections and zoomed-out observations. The fact that you’ve done it a hundred, a thousand, several thousand times before is no guarantee that you can pull it off again. At the end of the day, they’re writers on deadline—until Smith isn’t.
An inevitably nostalgic tribute to two last-of-their-kind, late-career writers, House of Criticism builds to her 2024 decision to retire from her post at the New York Times, where she was co-chief art critic for two decades (and a contributor since 1986). So, though Chernick tracks both writers—from their Midwestern childhoods to their courtship and 1992 marriage; from their emergence as critics to their present-day writing routines, coffee consumption, and gallery-going—it is Smith’s story that, retrospectively and in the context of the film’s arc, takes on greater significance. (The announcement of her retirement comes a bit after the one-hour mark.)
Accepted into the first cohort of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1968 on the basis of a proposal to write on Minimalism and Donald Judd—and on Judd’s agreeing to be her tutor—Smith had a remarkable start in New York, with a front row seat to the operations of a major artist, at the dawn of a major art-historical shift. As consequential as her relationship with Judd, who was also a prolific critic (Smith retyped and compiled his many short reviews in the 1975 volume known as the The Yellow Book), was Smith’s discovery of his limits. Narratively, her observation of his narrow perspective (“he thought he was at the cutting edge of art… everything else he found retrograde”) sets up her development, and then Saltz’s, as critics in a time when the understanding of art as a single conversation, cultural lineage, or chain of negations disintegrated into the burgeoning pluriverse of the 1980s and beyond.
“We have to adapt to the times or we’re bullies and geezers,” Saltz says early on in the film, talking to Smith at a diner. Later, clips culled from their public appearances underscore their efforts to forge a mode of general-interest commentary parallel to the more academic strains of criticism that charted and theorized postmodernity (as well as whatever came next). Both are shown to embrace a rapidly expanding art world—gradually less white, less male, more inclusive of non-Western traditions and self-taught artists. House of Criticism is ultimately focused on how such issues are mediated by their relationship: their domestic world and intellectual exchange over Double Gulps, the way they compare notes while looking at art. (The camera trails them as they see everything from Huma Bhabha at Zwirner and Thomas Hirschhorn at Gladstone to a group show at the nomadic space Club Rhubarb.) The film is less interested in the changing field of criticism or the social context for the duo’s ascendence to such high-profile, discourse-defining perches.
Throughout, the cultural and art-ecosystemic importance of negative judgments, which Smith is particularly known for (perhaps because hers has been the bigger megaphone), is referenced—by Saltz, by Mickalene Thomas at one point—but almost always in the abstract. After Smith’s retirement is announced, we see Saltz in the field, researching a piece on her legacy, interviewing various luminaries. There’s something inadvertently comic about seeing the art world’s big winners lined up to praise her tough talk. Cindy Sherman says she’s had the good fortune of Smith’s favor over the years, but she admires how the critic was hard on other people. Larry Gagosian laughs—always on his way to the bank—paraphrasing Smith’s once-upon-a-time jab about a show: “Every sculpture in the room” was “yelling ‘buy me!’” We don’t hear from a single artist or dealer who feels they were written about unfairly, their career damaged. No one who holds a grudge or who is less than reverential is included. Overall, the film avoids conflict, skirts controversy, and appears to be under the control of its subjects. And, ironically, it’s in its praise of unhedged opinions and harsh assessments that it devolves into real sycophancy.
But House of Criticism is for fans, not critics. Only in quick moments does the end-of-an-era mood extend beyond the specifics of the couple’s careers. Alluding to the disappearance of staff art critics at major magazines and newspapers, Saltz confides, “I spend half of each day thinking about how lucky I am. Roberta and I have two of the very last criticism jobs.” When their goddaughter Lena Dunham (then in her late 30s) visits the apartment, she reflects on the publishing landscape: “Sometimes people will say to me ‘Oh, I spotted Roberta at the gallery,’ and it makes me so happy because it’s like somebody saw an endangered species in the wild.” And indeed, Smith has not been replaced at the Times since she left, nor has Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker (in a lasting way), and the list goes on.
“Well, opinions are completely, pretty much out of style,” Smith opines, a little absurdly in response to Dunham, as if Substack—or Instagram—doesn’t exist. But for better or worse, a key and consciously cultivated characteristic of the house of criticism she’s built with Saltz is a kind of tunnel vision: art galleries, chicken breasts, deadlines. It’s not on them to scan the horizon for new platforms for art criticism, to diagnose the publishing industry’s problems, or to name the business interests at play in its demise. House of Criticism is a heartwarming portrait of a deeply idiosyncratic partnership. What forces make these two critics the last of their kind? That’s a conversation for another time.
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