By Anna Zhila
Galleries ask it before a show opens. Artists ask it after two years of steady work and no coverage. Brands ask it when a commissioned installation needs to be read as art rather than as marketing. The question is always some version of the same one: how do you find an art critic, and what happens if you do?
The honest answer is less glamorous than the mythology and more useful. Critics are not a promotional service, and treating them as one is the fastest way to be ignored. But independent critical writing does something no amount of paid promotion can, and it is worth understanding exactly what that is before you write to anyone.
Who actually commissions a critic, and why
Galleries want a show to exist in the record. A private view fills a room for three hours; a review keeps the exhibition legible for years, to curators, to funders, and to anyone searching the artist's name afterwards. Commercial galleries also know that a serious review changes the conversation with collectors from taste to argument.
Museums and public institutions rarely need to find a critic in the same way, because critics come to them. What they do need is writing for catalogues and for the interpretive layer around a show, and that work is frequently commissioned from the same people who write reviews.
Companies and foundations commission cultural projects and then discover that a press release cannot explain them. A critic writing independently about a commissioned work gives it a place in a conversation about art rather than a place in a marketing campaign, which is the only way such a project earns attention beyond its own launch.
Artists need the thing that is hardest to arrange for yourself: someone unconnected to you, writing about the work because it interested them. That single condition is what makes the text worth anything, and it is why the transaction cannot be a transaction.
What a critic gives you, and what they do not
A good critical text does four things. It places the work in a lineage, so that a reader who does not know you can see what tradition you are arguing with. It describes what is actually there, which sounds trivial until you read a hundred artist statements that do not. It takes a position, which gives other people something to agree or disagree with. And it creates a citable record: a dated piece by a named writer in a publication with its own editorial standards.
That last point matters more than it used to. Institutional processes now ask for it explicitly. Arts Council England, when it assesses applicants for endorsement, looks for evidence of independent critical recognition and checks who wrote the piece and where it appeared. Grant panels and residencies work the same way. A review is not only reputational; it is documentary.
What criticism does not do is sell work directly. Nobody buys a painting because a critic approved of it. What changes is slower and more valuable: a serious text alters how a work is read by the people who advise buyers, sit on acquisition committees and programme spaces. Collectors and private art investors are not persuaded by praise. They are reassured by the existence of an independent argument about the work, because it suggests the artist is part of a conversation rather than a one-off purchase. Anyone promising you sales in exchange for coverage is selling something else.
Four times a critic changed an artist's position
Ruskin and Turner. In 1843 John Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters anonymously, as "a Graduate of Oxford". He had begun it as a defence of J. M. W. Turner against hostile reviewers who found the late work formless. The book did not merely rescue Turner's reputation; it supplied the vocabulary in which Turner has been discussed ever since.
Roger Fry and London, 1910. Fry organised "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" at the Grafton Galleries, coining the term Post-Impressionist for the occasion. The show was ridiculed in the British press and the public queued to be scandalised by it. Within a decade Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin were fixed points in British taste, and the shift is traceable to one critic deciding which pictures Londoners would argue about.
Greenberg and Pollock. Clement Greenberg reviewed Jackson Pollock's first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1943 and kept writing about him. Greenberg's advocacy did not create the paintings, but it built the framework in which they were understood as major rather than eccentric, and that framework carried an entire generation of American painting with it.
The present. Authority has dispersed. Jerry Saltz, senior art critic at New York magazine, won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018 while writing for a readership he also talks to daily on social platforms, and Holland Cotter won the same prize in 2009 for work at The New York Times. The pattern is that a critic's reach is now the sum of a publication and a personal following, which is worth knowing when you decide who to approach.
How to approach a critic without wasting the chance
Go through the publication, not around it. Most critics who write for a title have a commissioning editor. An approach that lands with the editor is an approach that can turn into a scheduled piece. An approach that lands only in a personal inbox competes with everything else in it.
Invite rather than pitch. The workable version is an invitation to a private view or a studio visit, sent early, with a date and an address. Critics plan weeks ahead. An invitation that arrives three days before an opening is a note that arrives after the diary closed.
Send five images and one page. Not a folder of forty files. Five works that hold together, with titles, dates, dimensions and medium, and one page saying what the exhibition is about in language a stranger can follow. If the work needs three paragraphs of theory before it becomes interesting, that is information about the work.
Say why this critic. One sentence showing you have read them is worth more than any amount of biography. Critics receive a great many round-robin emails and can identify them instantly.
Do not ask for a positive review, and do not offer to pay for one. A commissioned puff piece is worth nothing to an institution reading your file, and paid coverage that presents itself as independent is the single fastest way to devalue every other piece of evidence you hold. Paying a publication for a placement is an ordinary commercial arrangement when it is disclosed as such. Paying a critic to praise you is not the same thing, and the difference is visible to anyone who checks.
Accept that the answer may be no, or unflattering. A critic who cannot say no is not a critic, and a review that could only ever have been positive carries no information.
Where to start: critics by city
Below are public professional pages, not private contact details. Each of these writers can be reached through the publication they write for, which is also the correct route. The list is a starting point for reading them, which should come before writing to them.
London
Jonathan Jones has written on art for The Guardian since 1999 and judged the Turner Prize in 2009. Combative, historically minded, and read well beyond the art world.
Waldemar Januszczak was art critic of The Guardian before taking the same role at The Sunday Times in 1992, and has twice been named Critic of the Year. He also makes television documentaries, which gives his attention a different kind of reach.
Tabish Khan covers the London gallery scene at a volume almost nobody matches, writing for Londonist and FAD among others, with a stated commitment to making art accessible. He is the realistic first read for a small or mid-size London show. In the interest of disclosure, he also contributes to our sister title Creativity's UK.
Maria Bregman writes art and literary criticism and works as a curator, with pieces published in Cosmopolitan, Glamour, ELLE and Esquire, solo exhibitions curated including Zurab Tsereteli, and international art festivals organised in the United Kingdom, Tunisia and Israel.
New York
Jerry Saltz has been senior art critic at New York magazine since 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018.
Holland Cotter has written for The New York Times since 1998, won the Pulitzer for Criticism in 2009, and is credited with bringing contemporary Indian and Chinese art to a wide Western readership.
Roberta Smith spent four decades as a critic at The New York Times and remains one of the most consequential voices on contemporary exhibitions in the United States.
Paris
Philippe Dagen has written the art column in Le Monde since 1985 and is professor of contemporary art history at Paris-I Pantheon-Sorbonne. He also curates, which makes him unusually direct about what an exhibition is trying to do.
Harry Bellet covers art and the art market for Le Monde, and is the more reliable read of the two on how a show sits commercially.
Berlin
Kito Nedo writes on contemporary art, cultural policy and the market for frieze, Artforum, Monopol, Suddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, and received the ADKV-Art Cologne Prize for Art Criticism in 2017. His Monopol page collects the German-language work.
Catrin Lorch has been responsible for contemporary art at Suddeutsche Zeitung since 2009 and won the Art Cologne prize for criticism in 2006. Her work is also collected on Monopol.
Elke Buhr is editor-in-chief of Monopol, the German magazine of record for contemporary art, and the person whose desk a German-language pitch realistically reaches.
Los Angeles
Christopher Knight was art critic of the Los Angeles Times from 1989 to 2025 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2020. His archive remains the best single account of three decades of the city's institutions.
Carolina A. Miranda writes independently on art, design and cities, with work in The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books, and holds a Rabkin Prize and a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Matt Stromberg is a freelance visual arts writer covering Los Angeles for Hyperallergic, the Guardian and Contemporary Art Review LA, and is among the most consistent readers of the city's smaller spaces.
One last thing worth saying plainly
The reason to find a critic is not to be praised. It is to be read carefully by someone under no obligation to like you, and to have that reading exist afterwards in a form other people can cite. Everything useful that follows, from institutional attention to the confidence of a buyer, follows from that and not from the praise.
Which means the practical first step is not writing an email. It is making sure that when someone does come and look, there is a body of work that rewards the visit.
