“Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody,” Holland Cotter told a crowd in a ballroom at the New York Hilton in Midtown last Thursday. “All you art lovers.”

There were scattered chuckles from around 200 art historians who had decided to spend more than two hours of that special day listening to The New York Times’s co-chief art critic chair a panel as part of the 101st annual conference of the College Art Association, called “Art Criticism: Taking a Pulse.”

That’s not a particularly sexy topic these days, when many believe that criticism is in a state of crisis or, worse, has been effectively neutered by the power of wealthy collectors and globe-trotting curators. But here we all were.

“This is like the lamest, most played-out theme that I can imagine,” one of the panelists, Artinfo’s executive editor Ben Davis, declared. He went on to bemoan the classic and still-pervasive idea that art criticism should aim merely to shape the course of the market. That’s the romantic notion of critic as vigilante, bringing frontier justice to the lawless art world: “It’s our job to hurt you,” as Dave Hickey characterized his vision of the dynamic between critic and artist in an interview last year.

By that fairly depressing measure, criticism is in trouble. These days, art that many critics agree is terrible is selling for outlandish sums of money. (Never mind that art dealers will tell you that certain reviews—at least remarkably positive ones from major critics at major outlets—can lead to sales.)

So what do we actually want from our critics today, and what can they realistically provide? What needs to change for them to be able to deliver the goods?

A perfectly honorable mission for them, Mr. Davis argued, is to be “ambassadors for things that are hard to explain, but interesting.” They can, in other words, strive to be honest and reliable witnesses. (“An artist needs a public,” as one audience member said during the Q&A period.) And yet many interesting shows in this town come and go without so much as a single substantive review.

“History is always in flux,” Roberta Smith, Mr. Cotter’s co-chief colleague at The Times, wrote in her review of A.R. Penck’s current gallery doubleheader last week. “Each rewriting, like each writing, will be reworked by subsequent generations.” Unless young critics—this one included—grow more venturesome in their interests, these rewrites will become more difficult. That does not mean reviewing shows at random, but it does mean ranging widely.

It also means that critics need to be willing to write and think in terms of a long view, not just using the latest trends, obvious connections and bits of gossip to make their cases. As artist Liam Gillick recently told Creative Time curator Nato Thompson in an interview of his own hopes for his practice, critics need to “Get the discussion out of the last 10 years, or the last five years, or the last Art Basel Miami art fair.”

The redoubtable Chris Kraus, sitting a few seats down from Mr. Davis, called for something far grander and potentially more fruitful for art critics than serving merely a journalistic, ambassadorial role. “One of art criticism’s grave limitations is its inability to look beyond its own context and language,” she said. Instead she spoke of art writing, which, in her understanding of it, encompasses broader forms and addresses art—sometimes even by being art itself—in new ways.

Such work is happening at the moment, but only rarely, and with too little notice. Much of it is coming from artists such as Bjarne Melgaard—whose recent book, the teasingly autobiographical A New Novel by Bjarne Melgaard (2012), could be read as a fantastical (and unashamedly sexually explicit) examination of the contemporary art world’s machinations—and the anonymous authors of blogs like Art Observations with Jerry Magoo and C-a-n-v-a-s,
who attack artists with a vicious glee that would be difficult to offer in more public formats.

Art criticism can also—and, in some rare instances, continues to—provide calls to arms, enlarging discussions by bringing in histories that are otherwise out of fashion. Mr. Cotter did so this past weekend in his largely positive review of the New Museum’s “NYC 1993,” in which he accused the museum of a failure of nerve in installing far from the front windows—its originally intended location—a text piece by the artist Daniel Joseph Martinez that read, “In the rich man’s house the only place to spit is in his face.”

“Inspire a conversation, a big one, about art and its many kinds of politics and who writes the stories, and why,” Mr. Cotter concluded. “That’s what we need from our museums and our sharp young curators on the scene today.” His words resonated. No sooner had his review gone online Thursday night than multiple colleagues emailed it to me. A discussion was already taking place.

But there is much missing in art criticism today. The lack of a viable and vocal conservative position is one thing. Mr. Martinez, as it happens, was also on the panel, and decried the fact that there is “a lot of lip service paid to progressive politics” at the moment. As in American politics, the absence of a sensible conservative position has led to all sorts of lazy thinking among almost uniformly liberal art critics and historians.

In an era that has been reduced to enduring spectacles like New York critic Jerry Saltz dueling with arch-conservative Glenn Beck, reading artist-writer Mira Schor in this month’s Artforum discussing the legacies of conservative critics Robert Hughes and (onetime Observer writer) Hilton Kramer felt positively surreal. Here were two people, once giants, who had consigned themselves to ever-shrinking marginality during their long careers by being unable to change and defending opinions on art and identity that could at best, as Ms. Schor said, be defined as “retrograde.” No one meaningful has stepped in to take up their positions in fresh ways.

Both men “mourned the passage of historically based criteria,” Mr. Schor noted, and it is here that their example seems most important, in a time when many critics have jettisoned any serious notion of such criteria for evaluating works of art. The curator and historian Amelia Jones, who was also on the panel, called on critics to think self-reflexively about their work, considering not only the quality of the art they review, but also the quality of the values by which they evaluate art in their reviews.

Mr. Martinez brought up the recent controversy surrounding two articles by Times critic Ken Johnson that some have accused of being racist and misogynistic. (If you thought art criticism didn’t matter, your mind would have been changed by watching certain Twitter feeds during that week last November.) Like many of the artists in one of the shows Mr. Johnson reviewed, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980,” Mr. Martinez is based in L.A., and on the panel he said that he kept hearing from colleagues in New York about how upset people were. At first he didn’t understand why they felt so strongly. He spoke with four L.A. artists in the show who seemed unconcerned. Finally, he said, a colleague told him, “Daniel, it’s The New York fucking Times.” That drove it home. An entire organization had let those reviews run as they were. “There is an institutionalized racism that has not been addressed,” he said. “There is an institutionalized misogyny that has not been addressed. There is an institutionalized homophobia that has not been addressed. It runs rampant.”

That experience, he said at another point during the panel, made him wonder “who we are and what we have become as an art world. What do we expect of our critics; what do we expect of our artists? What is it that we want to build for ourselves?”

Art criticism, like art, can provide a forum in which we can play out various political and societal tensions using what Ms. Kraus called “contemporary art’s coded and infinitely malleable discourse.” But it needs in some way to circle back into broader discussions. And here art criticism—like the art industry in general—has a long way to go.

“Quite honestly, if you just take a tiny peek around this room,” Mr. Martinez said, “when people say that it’s a Caucasian art world, they’re not joking. I can count, what, three black people in the room, if I’m lucky? What does that mean to anyone? Nothing, because everyone is going to go back to their jobs.”

“Someday, maybe, it will change,” he added. “I’ve been waiting.”

Arusseth@observer.com

Zoë Lescaze contributed reporting.