Critique and post-critique in contemporary art history: Excessive attachment to suspicion in academia and beyond

Abstract

This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war art history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanities scholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur in contexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanities scholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance on critique as a negative skill, resulting in scholarship that tears down without building up, and self-satisfied debunking of anything that does not stand up to the current era’s identity politics. The essay argues that the question of critique is of particular urgency to the field of contemporary art. Here critique is embedded in the material studied—artworks, artistic practices, and discourses—and therefore in dire need of being understood, challenged, and decentered as a method.

Textual Alchemy: AI, Authorship and the Shifting Paradigms of Interpretation

“…While John Moore notes that the goal of higher education should be to induce critical thinking in students (Moore qtd. in Callahan, 2021), the present publication scene is rife with AI text-generation tools and software as well as collaborative spaces for authors and creators to use their writing skills to the fullest potential. These unconventional platforms are being used for educational as well as creative purposes.…”

“…Their statement in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique ( 2017) is a disillusioned one: "The intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident" (Rita and Anker, 2017, p. 1). Felski uses the term critique to highlight a mode of thinking and writing, building on the intellectual and philosophical traditions of Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Foucault, and a broad range of feminist and postcolonial theorists (Callahan, 2021). Can the old models of post-author theories of the author's death do justice to the world of legal battles over copyright?…”