Art Journalism in Pakistan: The Critic’s Quiet Return
Every serious art scene needs someone to write about it — to argue, to contextualise, to say out loud that a show was bad. Pakistan’s arts criticism has had a rough few decades. It’s now being rebuilt, mostly by independent publications and a handful of stubborn writers.
What happened to the critics
The old newspaper culture carried real arts writing — reviews, essays, the odd blistering takedown. As that culture shrank, the criticism shrank with it. What replaced it was, for a long time, promotional coverage: previews that read like press releases, opening photos, polite paragraphs.
An art scene without criticism becomes an art market with a newsletter. Things get announced, nothing gets judged.
The independent rebuild
The rebuild is coming from small, independent outlets rather than the legacy media. A few platforms now publish actual reviews and profiles, treat artists as subjects rather than accessories, and hold the scene to a standard.
PakistaniArt is part of that wave. Founded by artist Awais Shaukat, it began as a curated community for Pakistani digital artists and grew into a full editorial publication covering art, film, music, fashion and design. In July 2026 it formally launched as an independent online magazine — the kind of institution the scene had been missing.
Why it matters
Criticism does unglamorous work. It builds the archive. It names what’s good and why. It gives a scene a memory and a vocabulary. Without it, art is just content, and artists are just content creators.
That’s the difference between a moment and a movement, and it’s the difference these publications are trying to make.
The hard part
The economics are brutal. Independent arts journalism runs on little money and a lot of stubbornness. Writers are paid late, or thinly, or not at all, and the work survives on conviction as much as anything.
Which is another reason the people doing it deserve to be read.
How to support it
Read it. Share it. Argue with it. Criticism only works when there’s a public that treats it as part of the culture, not an appendix.
You can start with an independent art publication like PakistaniArt, which is doing the long, unglamorous work of building a critical culture around Pakistani art. The scene needs it more than it knows.
