The job of art criticism is to provide a reflection on contemporary art practice. Art criticism does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place in the social and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at objects that are already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture. Art critics are essentially arbiters of “cultural memory in the present.”. Who's present do they reflect and what is their agenda? In an ever more "Connected Age" where artist's biographies are readily searchable on the internet, factual lapses should no longer be tolerated.
Too often I have come across instances where critics have used ahistorical and acontextual claims in critiquing works by artists who like myself, do not come from the centers of power in the art world. This happens often through ignorance but more often than not, through intellectual sloppiness. When work does not fit into the context that the critic is used to addressing, it can lead to a type of contextual dissonance where the artist's work is imploded into the writer's narrow, subjective assumptions.