“The end of art” entails a perfect state of pluralism, in which artists are liberated to convey their thought by any means whatever. To be an artist today is to philosophise by visual means. There are no constraints any longer on the media that may be required: old newspapers, meat, used clothing, found snapshots, discarded tyres, soiled playthings, vials of inert gases, elephant dung. The imperatives of purity that defined the final phase of modernism have no particular relevance to artistic practice or critical sensibility today. Art criticism in particular can take nothing for granted. Whatever the critic encounters has to be dealt with on its own terms. That task of the critic is to infer the best explanation of what is there, using whatever helps in arriving at an intelligible interpretation. This can be a fairly time-consuming inquiry, but it is the paradigm of how art is to be experienced today: everyone is required to be a critic, and must learn to put together the thought embodied in the work. The professional critic enacts this for the sake of his or her readers, giving them what they need to understand the art.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 05:45:15 +0000
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