Title: Art criticism in the age of curating : from judgment to autonomy
Abstract: Since the turn of the century criticism the West has repeatedly declare itself in crisis. This crisis had several iterations: the loss of stable formal criteria by which to criticise artworks the wake of conceptual and a related abdication of judgement; the increasing dominance of the market as the arbiter of artistic value; the functional replacement of critics by curators, and the inadequacy of extant models of criticism the face of contemporary practices that challenge traditional critical categories, practices that despite operating the institutional field of seem to dissolve into non-artistic activities. This work reads most of these positions as remaining too attached to a model of criticism grounded on judgement, even when this is described as aesthetic experience, aesthetic framing, affective intensity or others. Against such an attachment, this work argues that it is artistic autonomy as the self-reflexion and autopoiesis of the artwork - as already advanced by the early German Romantics and developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno - that remains crucial: as critique rather than a critique of art. With this mind, rather than understanding the rise of curating as a threat to criticism, this work proposed that the aftermath of what Thierry de Duve has called art general, it is within the institutional forms that have started to emerge the wake of this new understanding of curating, that artistic autonomy can continue to be developed the context of a globalised artworld.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-11-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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