1964: A Year of Exhibitions

2015

Este artigo pretende reconstruir o debate crítico sobre a análise da crise nas disciplinas da História e Crítica da Arte, focando particularmente a proposta formulada pelos teóricos norte-americanos que contribuíram para a revista October. O descrédito de muitos métodos críticos modernistas, particularmente o de Clement Greenberg -o diktat modernista -marcou a criação da revista e deu origem a propostas estabelecidas por críticos comprometidos com uma nova abordagem. Contudo, as suas posições divergentes contribuíram para minar os tradicionais conceitos de autonomia da arte e da crítica. As propostas discutidas durante o curso da publicação foram o resultado de uma reavaliação dos instrumentos disciplinares da História e da Crítica da Arte na sequência das cruciais alterações culturais que tiveram lugar nos anos 1980.

The State of Art Criticism, 2008

Syllabus, 2012

This course was designed -along with Art History and its Methods -as a junior-level seminar intended to give art history majors both a close familiarity with the history of a relevant discipline and a degree of experience in producing original critical writing. It is also open, however, to non-majors, and it has three further aims: to introduce all students to the history of Western art criticism since 1700, to familiarize students with some of the central tasks and goals of art criticism, and to provide students with relevant tools and experiences in crafting their own art criticism. The various assignments, which include a wide range of readings, several reading responses, group presentations, and a series of writing exercises culminating in a 1,000-word review, are designed to fulfill these aims. By the end of the term, then, students in the class should be comfortable discussing art criticism as a field and as a practice, and will have experience in authoring their own criticism.

Visual Resources an international journal on images and their uses , 2017

In 2001, art critic and historian Benjamin Buchloh declared the ‘death of art criticism’ during the October journal’s roundtable, “The Present Conditions of Art Criticism.” The following decade witnessed a plethora of articles, conferences, and books devoted to the crisis of criticism–all efforts thus far seem to have failed, the crisis has not been abated. Art criticism is decaying and our historical moment is not only “post-modern” but also “post-critical.” At the same time, art writing has become such a broad spectrum of “literature” that neither author nor reader take it seriously¬–the writing is often ironic, filled with joyful and mediocre immediacy, and not to mention, a proud ahistoricism. We are also told, however, that this is a great moment for culture: writings on film, music, and art are to be found everywhere you turn or click. The Internet has allowed the democratization of cultural production: anyone can upload a film to YouTube or a track to MySpace–everyone has a voice, everyone has a blog, and everyone is a critic. Under quickly changing conditions, then, what are the present tasks of aspiring art critics? This undertaking is multilayered but it must begin with an understanding the crisis of criticism in its contemporary and historical expressions. In the first two sections, the thesis surveys the symptoms of the illness: how art criticism has been unable to grasp the swift changes in the art world and how the curator, the dealer and the collector have replaced the critic as the main mediators between art and its public. The third section outlines how contemporary art criticism, largely anti-Greenbergian and anti-modern, suffers from “the flight from judgment.” In the fourth section, I explain how Art criticism was displaced with the emergence of art practices in the 1960s that thought to incorporate criticism into the work itself. All are important, and often contradictory considerations when seeking to understand the demise of art criticism, but all are not equally important for the task of resurrecting and redeeming criticism. The final and concluding section will dedicate itself to the future of criticism in light of its history. It will investigate and introduce possible paths for the reconstitution of art criticism, suggesting possibilities existing in the overlooked history of art criticism.

and led them to create in Harrison's words, a "studio filled up with large pictures of cunts." And he continues, "For a while, it was these, rather than the process of masking, that claimed autonomy of a kind, though-if this is not a contradiction-it was in their very stylistic degeneracy that their self-sufficiency seemed to lie" (p. 137). This gives a sample of Harrison's somewhat unusual style of art writing. "Masking" refers to the coverings that were made to hide the original Courbet painting from a viewer who might be shocked; it also refers to the coy attitudes of Khali-Bey, who commissioned it and hid it behind a landscape of Courbet, and to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, into whose possession it came and who hid it behind a painting by Andre Masson (p. 135). At least there are moments of entertainment hidden in this history of art! The final section, "Whose Looking," raises questions that have preoccupied several American aestheticians. Harrison, rather than musing over the end of art, as we do, titles his essay "Painting and The Death of The Spectator" (pp. 171-191). He begins with this provocative statement: "The question whether anyone should persist with painting as an art hangs over this book, as of many others concerned with the practical and theoretical circumstances of art in general at the end of the twentieth century and the outset of the twenty first" (p. 171). Conditions that, in his opinion, would justify painting into the future would be reasons to "persist with the making of pictures," and an audience who would find them "edifying." He is frightened by the production of "blank painting" in our time and seems to be haunted by the Balzac story, "The Unknown Masterpiece." Underlying his anxiety is the conviction that painting must realize "imaginative perception" through which it delivers both knowledge and strong feeling to the viewer. That is, he sees the need for theory to be generated within and through painting itself and not imposed upon it by philosophical ideas of the sort that modernism itself tried to escape. It will be helpful to the reader if Harrison's examples are set alongside Danto's example of a set of red rectangles, intended to demonstrate the role of theory in interpretation of a set of objects exactly alike (see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, chap. 1). Harrison's response to this problem is the statement, "If any blank surface can be 'a painting' ... how can painting any longer claim to be the occasion for significant acts of critical discrimination?" (p. 181). In contrast, Danto's analysis shows that painting itself generates philosophical interpretations, and often must be interpreted by the viewer through a philosophical structure. Harrison, whose presuppositions are different from Danto's, insists that painting is a "socially significant activity ... that involves cooperation, exchange, self-criticism, and learning," all contributing to what he calls "a culture of ideological resistence" (p. 173). What he means, I think, is that painting must, in a kind of Deweyan sense, be actively fruitful in the lives of the perceiver. And if that is no longer possible, then painting is at an end, or should be given up. One gets the impression that Harrison feels bereft in the postmodern-anythinggoes world he sees about him and that the Art & Language movement sees itself in its explorations as marking the end of a historical process culminating in the death of the spectator.

Academia Letters, 2021

Art criticism is a controversial activity, born from the Kantian necessity and subjective universality of judgement and historically marked by the word "crisis". The constant and eternal "crisis" of art criticism has been attested and demonstrated several times since Idealism. For over a century, art criticism has been taken as an empty activity that does not offer examples that can be taken as more than an exercise of trial and error, reduced to mere descriptions or so-called biographies. The meta criticism expresses this eternal state of "crisis". Lionello Venturi in History of Art Criticism, back in 1936, attributes this situation to the severance between aesthetics, history, and criticism, that is, the many aspects of the relationship between the public and the work of art. This severance points to the influence of positivism, to the absence of a link between theory and praxis. Thus, the "crisis" that accompanies art criticism can be perceived as some collateral effect of the very thought that originates it. The subjective and circumscriptive character of Kantian philosophy is the first symptom of this situation. Kant establishes the birth of art criticism by overcoming a technical notion of art and consequently of a prescriptive aesthetic. He does so by neglecting the object, transforming judgement into a formality concerning the subject, motivated by something exterior. Within this context art criticism's praxis stumbles upon two main difficulties: the attempt to search for the truth of experience through discussion, regardless the impossibility of accessing the noumenon; and the attempt to encompass the phenomenon without incurring in relativism. Both difficulties are surpassed by Kant's theory, but only formally. Therefore, art criticism is born as a possibility of this discussion but without a direction to guide its realization. Giving the metaphysic structure that grounds art criticism, "crisis" is the result of a posterior focus on the object that leads to the understanding of limitations and difficulties brought up by it. Therefore, art criticism assumes a task that contradicts its underlying

2004

Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.