Art Review Criteria

A review of an art exhibition should be at once informative and also somewhat vague.  It should explain what is on display, but require the reader to become a viewer at the venue of the show.  The main theme of the show should be communicated with limited descriptions of works that catch the writer's eye.  In reading reviews in the Washington Post, the NY Times and even the Los Angeles Literary Journal, I discovered most of the reviewers comments were affected by who was paying them to write.  Ideally this is not the case.  However, in our economic system, the personal opinion of the art reviewer does not hold too much sway.  So, to break it down a successful art review should be:

unbiased
informative
enticing
descriptive
opinionated