On the crisis of criticism and public art

Abstract

At the turn of the millennia, the politically unbiased analytical thought of the world describes the total humanitarian entropy, which has unsafely plunged the theory and practice of art into a deep crisis. Accordingly, academic scientists, and primarily philosophers and culturologists, as well as art historians who have not lost their independent critical thinking ability, are consolidating into an ever-increasing front of those analysts who resist the current situation, because they tend to see behind the superficial statistics of a sharply increasing number of glossy magazines, exhibition reviews and other printed materials, including circulations of ordinary booklets that massively accompany any art projects of all kinds of galleries or public art actions, which go to significant investment funds from private foundations and centers — the premature death of art criticism, which, in the figurative expression of James Elkins, has become “like a trackless thicket, tangled with with unanswered questions”. Artistic practitioners, accustomed to servile survival in the conditions of the global art market, which imposes the rules for the production of a creative product solely in their own interests, are in a state of crisis no less severe than criticism. Manipulative interpretations of the concept of publicity, as well as the orientation of public art towards the function of socio-political and socio-educational regulatory action, like a mediator between society and power, legitimizes and strongly supports the phenomenology of things. Without a transcendental goal, the reification of the community’sthinking leads to a slide of creative consciousness and formal vocabulary of art expression to the level of kitsch, which was sharply criticized back in 1939 by Clement Greenberg. The fetishization of an art object as a commodity contributes to the steady cultivation of an instrumentalized consciousness by artists. Public visual practices, formally inheriting the idea of dissolving in the stream of everyday life, first proclaimed by the historical avant-garde, actually dissolve in consumerism, turning art objects into objectified political and sociocultural invectives, or, according to D. Lukacs’ terminology, such invectives that have undergone the process of reification. Meanwhile, visual public projects also actively use conceptualized clichés in the form of neutral abstract design objects, where the dominant criterion of conformity to the spirit of the times as quasi-modernity is the uncommonness of an innovative solution to lexical expression. The phenomenology of a thing legitimizes any experimentation, but it is not able to overcome the deepening crisis of theory and practice, drawing the cultural and artistic existence of society into a prolonged state of hysteresis. Analysts see the only way out of this situation in the return to the culture of the theory and practice of the traditions of Kantian-Hegelian philosophy, and in particular the postulates of transcendental aesthetics.