By Jonathan Shih
When the generation that built the foundations of Philippine art criticism began to fade from regular practice in the late 2010s and early 2020s, figures like Alice Guillermo (1938–2018), Cid Reyes (retired from regular column writing around 2021), Leo Benesa (1949–2021), and Marian Pastor Roces (still active but no longer holding a regular newspaper post) - the country lost not just voices but an entire model of institutionally-supported critical practice that had never been truly stable.
The critic and curator Marian Pastor Roces, who began writing criticism in 1974, once estimated there were perhaps a dozen positions nationwide where someone could be paid primarily to write about art: at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine Star, the now-defunct Manila Chronicle, Mr. & Ms. Magazine, and a handful of university publications. By 2010, that number had shrunk to "maybe five." Today, after the folding of dedicated arts sections in mainstream newspapers and the absorption of criticism into lifestyle pages, there are effectively zero full-time art critic positions left in Philippine media.
The story of this decline is not merely one of economics. It is a story about what a society chooses to remember, and what it allows to be forgotten.
The Generation That Built the Archive
From the 1970s through the 1990s, Philippine art criticism was shaped by a small but formidable group of writers, many of whom worked simultaneously as critics, curators, and academics.
Alice Guillermo wrote for Mr. & Ms. Magazine and later the Philippine Star. Her weekly columns created a written archive of exhibitions that no longer exist shows at the legendary Indigo Gallery, early group exhibitions of the Social Realists, and the rise of the Kaisahan artist collective. As a professor at the University of the Philippines, she brought theoretical rigor to art writing, insisting that "art, culture, and politics are inseparable"—a stance that took real courage during the Marcos years.
Cid Reyes, a lawyer who subsidized his writing practice with his law practice, was for decades the voice of abstract art in the Philippines. His reviews in the Philippine Star provided consistent coverage of artists working outside the figurative mainstream.
Leo Benesa, who also ran a gallery, wrote extensively about the intersections of contemporary art with indigenous traditions and craft practices .
Marian Pastor Roces charted a different path, moving between criticism, curation, and museum directorship. Her writing from the 1970s to the present collected in Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture (2019) has consistently argued that criticism cannot exist without a shared language of analysis, something she believes the Philippines has never fully developed.
What united this generation was not just talent but institutional grounding. They had university salaries, gallery affiliations, or newspaper positions that allowed them to see consistently, write regularly, and build relationships with artistic communities over decades.
The Blind Spots of the Old Model
Yet for all their contributions, the old generation's perspective was irreparably limited. Manila-centrism was baked into the model. The major critics lived in the capital, wrote about Manila galleries, and rarely ventured to the regions except for major events.
The art historian Flaudette May Datuin, in her work on feminist criticism, has noted how the old guard often excluded women artists from the canon. The critic Lisa Ito once publicly observed that Guillermo "never reviewed a single show in Taguig's informal artist-run spaces" before they became fashionable.
These were not failures of individual will but structural limitations of the newspaper critic model: one voice, however brilliant, cannot cover a country of 7,000 islands. And when that voice belonged almost exclusively to Manila-based writers from elite academic backgrounds, entire artistic communities remained invisible to the official record.
The Collapse of the Institutional Base
The 2010s saw the systematic dismantling of whatever remained of the old model. In 2017, the Manila Standard laid off its entire culture desk. When CNN Philippines shut down in 2024, years of cultural criticism and reportage were wiped from the internet almost instantly.
Ringo Bunoan, the artist and writer, has documented how art periodicals flourished during martial law under Imelda Marcos's patronage, then declined precipitously after the People Power Revolution. By the end of the 1990s, she writes, "Philippine art publications became extremely limited and almost a rarity." The high cost of production and small readership made it financially challenging to sustain art criticism of any kind.
The migration from print to online held the promise of digital permanence, but as more newsrooms close without warning and more culture writers are replaced by influencers, access to quality criticism grows increasingly rare. Today, as one writer observed, "mainstream commercial publications more often feature promotional writings prepared by galleries rather than critical reviews".
What the Retiring Generation Taught Us
What can be learned from this history?
First, the crisis is in publishing, not criticism. In the United States, Christopher Knight, the retiring Los Angeles Times critic who won a Pulitzer for his criticism observed that "every few years there seems to be a flurry of worry about a 'crisis in criticism,'" but that "the crisis is in publishing, not criticism." The Philippine case bears this out: the problem is not that young critics cannot write, but that there is no longer any institutional structure to support them.
Second, consistent looking matters more than individual brilliance. The critic as consistent witness showing up, seeing the show, filing the review creates a primary source for future historians. Alice Guillermo's columns, for all their limitations, provide documentation of 1970s and 1980s exhibitions that no other record preserves. The same will not be said of the 2010s and 2020s, when much of Philippine art production went unwritten.
Third, we need a different model. As Roces argues, "you can't really be a critic in the Philippines up to now because we don't share a common language of criticism". The old model, a handful of Manila-based critics writing for newspapers cannot produce a critical discourse capable of engaging with the full complexity of Philippine art across regions, languages, and traditions.
The Fragments of a New Beginning
If the old model is dying, what is emerging in its place?
The Iloilo Critics Circle, founded in 2023, represents one alternative. Composed of writers from the academe and social media, the group published the maiden issue of Iloilo Art Review, an independently published art journal supported by local businesses, galleries, and SM City Iloilo. The initiative aims to "occupy the space allocated by the ecosystem for art criticism" and "sustain the initiative under the conditions of inclusivity and diversity".
Independent digital publications have also stepped into the breach: SINEGANG PH, Kinoise PH, and MARG1N offer critical coverage of film and visual arts outside the framework of commercial galleries. Art+ Magazine, founded in 2008, has sustained print publication as "the only magazine in the country dedicated to covering the Philippine art community". Ctrl+P , an online journal initiated by artists Judy Sibayan and Varsha Nair and feminist art historian Flaudette May Datuin in 2006, explored the possibilities of digital platforms for critical discourse .
These initiatives are precarious, often volunteer-run, and reach smaller audiences than the old newspapers. But they also offer something the old model never could: multiplicity. Multiple voices, multiple regions, multiple platforms. A critic in Iloilo writing about Ilonggo artists. A digital journal covering artist-run spaces in Taguig. A feminist critic recovering the work of women artists the old canon excluded.
The Work That Remains
The loss of full-time art criticism in the Philippines is real, and it is permanent. No major newspaper is likely to reinstate a dedicated art critic position. The old generation will not be replaced.
But the work of criticism—patient, local, multiple can survive if it stops waiting for newspapers to save it. This requires abandoning certain illusions: that criticism requires a single authoritative voice, that it must be centered in Manila, that it needs a commercial publishing model to matter.
What remains is the slower, harder work of building a critical culture across regions, platforms, and communities. As Roces insists, "you can't be creative without being critical". The same might be said of a culture: it cannot sustain a serious artistic practice without a serious critical discourse.
The retiring generation showed that art writing matters not because it sells newspapers or validates markets, but because it creates the archive from which future art histories are written. Whether that archive will exist for the Philippine art of our own time depends on whether a new generation of critics can build the institutions humble, fragmented, and independent that the old model never managed to sustain.
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