The gallery press release is a weird little document. It lands in your inbox, typically on a Tuesday, wrapped in euphemism and institutional pep. It promises an exhibition that’s “thought-provoking,” an artist who’s “internationally recognized,” work that “interrogates themes of identity and belonging.” A tidy bouquet of pre-approved adjectives, tied off with a ribbon of jargon. The real mess starts when that same document, barely touched, shows up under a critic’s byline. A review ought to be an exercise in discernment, not dictation. Yet the boundary between a press release and published criticism has softened into a beige fog of mutual back-scratching.

Learning to spot a review that’s just a press release with a few extra adjectives isn’t hard, but it does ask you to squint past the polite frontage of arts journalism. Here’s how to sort the critical wheat from the PR chaff.

The Anatomy of a Press Release in Disguise

Before diagnosing the problem, you have to know the patient. A standard gallery press release follows a shape so predictable you could set your watch by it. It opens with a grand pronouncement about the artist’s practice. Then it trots out the CV bullet points—residencies, biennials, awards—as though pedigree alone guarantees merit. The middle section describes the work with a clutch of safe, all-purpose terms: “exploring,” “questioning,” “blurring boundaries.” It wraps up with the practical bits: dates, venue, a nod toward the opening reception where the wine is free. The whole thing is engineered to sound significant while dodging any real commitment.

When a review copies this architecture, it does so by adopting the same reverent hush. The critic turns into a curator of pre-curated remarks, picking and repeating the artist’s talking points as if they were stone-cold fact. You’ll notice a fatal shortage of skepticism. The work is never ugly, never a failure, never boring. It’s always “compelling,” “rigorous,” “urgent.” Words that used to mean something, now worn down to critical wallpaper—present but entirely unnoticed.

The Adjective Quotient

One quick test is what I call the Adjective Quotient. Tally the praise terms in the first three paragraphs. If you’ve clocked “stunning,” “breathtaking,” “masterful,” and “luminous” before anyone tells you what the art actually looks like, you’re in trouble. Press releases lean on adjectives because they don’t have the space—or the nerve—to describe. A real review builds its argument with nouns and verbs. It mentions that the canvas is six feet across, the paint laid down in watery, thin layers, the sculpture listing slightly left as if it’s had a long day. Specificity is the press release’s enemy and the reader’s best friend.

The Telltale Signs of Recycled Publicity

Beyond the adjective pile-up, certain structural habits give away a review’s publicity-department origins. First up is the Artist’s Statement Echo. That’s when the critic paraphrases the artist’s intentions with zero critical framing. “The artist seeks to destabilize our perceptions of domestic space,” the review announces. Fine. But does the work pull it off? Is the destabilization productive or just disorienting? A press release reports the ambition; a review judges the outcome.

Another warning sign is Biographical Padding. A review that devotes more ink to the artist’s exhibition history than to the work hanging on the walls is basically a fancied-up CV. “Smith, a Royal College of Art graduate and recipient of the 2022 Frieze Artist Award, has shown at…” Stop. Unless that detail cracks open the art—say, a link between the artist’s textile-design training and their current woven pieces—it’s filler. It tells you the writer either didn’t spend much time with the work or didn’t trust what they saw.

Then there’s the Quote Plague. Press releases adore a pull quote from the artist or curator, and a lazy reviewer imports them whole. “As the artist explains, ‘I am interested in the liminal space between memory and forgetting.’” A sharp critic might use the line as a launchpad for contradiction or deeper digging. A press-release review uses it as a crutch, letting the artist do all the interpretive work while the critic nods along.

The Vibe Descriptor

Watch out for writing that describes the feeling of a show without tying it to anything you could sense yourself. “The gallery hums with a quiet, meditative energy,” or “The works exude a raw, visceral power.” These are vibe descriptors. They ask you to take the critic’s word for it. A trustworthy review would mention the dim lighting, the muffled hush of carpeted floors, the canvases spaced far apart like introverts avoiding eye contact. Vibe is the cheapest shortcut in criticism, and the press release is its native soil.

Why This Happens, and Why It Matters

The spread of press-release reviews isn’t just about individual corner-cutting. It’s a whole habitat problem. Critics are underpaid, stretched thin, and often filing for outlets that care more about speed and search rankings than depth. Galleries, meanwhile, have gotten awfully good at churning out “ready-to-publish” material, complete with glossy images and pre-written captions. The path of least resistance is to shuffle the language a bit, slap on a byline, and call it done. The result is a feedback loop: the gallery gets its promo copy blessed by an outside voice, and the publication scores free, easy content.

The reader pays the price, cheated out of real insight, and so does the artist, whose work gets squashed into a set of marketing bullet points. When criticism steps back from its job as a discerning—sometimes quarrelsome—voice, the cultural conversation becomes a monotone of pleasantries. Art warrants more than being boiled down to its own press kit.

A Field Guide to Spotting the Fraud

To steer through the murk of arts journalism, here’s a short checklist. If a review shows three or more of these symptoms, you’re probably reading a press release in a critic’s borrowed coat.

• The Opening Gambit: The first sentence is a sweeping, unearned claim about the artist’s stature. (“One of the most significant painters of her generation…” Says who?)
• The Vague Verb: The work “explores,” “interrogates,” or “examines” a theme, but the review never lets on what the exploration actually uncovers.
• The Absent Object: By the end, you still can’t picture a single piece. No colors, no materials, no scale, no mention of how things sit in the room.
• The CV Recitation: More than two sentences are spent on the artist’s education, awards, or past shows without tying any of it to the work in front of you.
• The Unchallenged Quote: The artist’s statement gets presented as self-evident gospel, not as one reading among several.
• The Conclusion of Convenience: The review wraps up by calling the show “a must-see” or “a triumph,” with no sign that struggle, risk, or outright failure ever crossed the writer’s mind.

The Antidote: Reading for Resistance

The best defense against press-release reviews is to turn into an active, skeptical reader. When you hit a review, ask yourself: What does this writer actually see? Can I picture the exhibition from their words alone? Do they offer a single observation I couldn’t grab from the gallery’s own website? If the answer is no, you’re being handed a brochure. A real review leaves you with the sense of a mind at work—grappling, second-guessing, interpreting. It might even get under your skin. That’s fine. Irritation is a marker of engagement. Blank approval is a marker of copy-and-paste.

Look for critics who call things what they are. A writer who describes a painting as “muddy” or a video as “overlong and self-serious” is sticking their neck out. They’re delivering judgment, not just a summary. And judgment is the entire point. Without it, criticism shrinks to consumer guidance, and a press release does that job for free.

Conclusion: Adjectives Are Not Insight

Next time you read a review that feels oddly frictionless, try a simple experiment. Strip out every adjective and see what’s left. Often, you’ll be staring at a bare scaffold of institutional data: the artist’s name, the gallery address, the show title. That’s not a review. That’s a calendar listing with airs. Demand more. The art world is stuffed with words, but honest critical attention is rare. Don’t settle for the promotional copy when you could have the real, messy, adjective-resistant thing.