A Farewell to Critique? Reconsidering Critique as Art Historical Method

While discussing the topic for this special issue of Journal of Art History, we were told to hurry. Suggesting alternatives to critique, we were further told, is already yesterday’s news. Has, in fact, so called post-critique itself “run out of steam”? Does the ambition to decentre critique – which is, perhaps, a more accurate way of putting things – implicate a de-politization of our scholarly activity? Is it anti-theory, endangering studies on race, class and gender? Does it call for a newness which itself is “a symptom of the neoliberalization of the humanities”? These are legitimate questions. However, we are convinced that a continued, careful reflection about what we as academics do when we apply critical methods – in particular while doing it seemingly automatically – is not only necessary but, in times of economic, social and environmental challenges, essential. As the authors in this issue demonstrate, exploring alternatives to critique has the potential to build lasting approaches to some of our most pressing common concerns. Thus, we want to pause and ponder what we consider to be a both complex and urgent topic, not only for our own work as art historians, but one that also has implications far outside the university setting. The topic for this special issue was conceived as a continuation of a discussion already underway between scholars from various disciplines who have voiced concerns about the way critique is currently practiced in the academy. Two of the most vociferous and frequently cited in this discussion are Rita Felski and Bruno Latour, who in different texts have offered their takes on the limits and dangers of critique. Their concern is with critique understood broadly as hermeneutics of suspicion. This mode of critical thinking hinges on a sense that a text by necessity entails clues or symptoms of hidden meanings and ideologies that an initiated scholar is able to unveil by a detached close-reading “between the lines”. Paul Ricoeur tied it to a mode of analysis represented by Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, but its prehistory goes at least as far back as the Enlightenment. Today it has become a vital part of analytical tools established and refined in academia for decades. Traditional disciplines have developed methods based upon critical theory, but this body of thought has also contributed to the establishment of entirely new academic disciplines such as gender and postcolonial studies, to name only two. In the ongoing discussion about the limits and problems with critique, the term is used as a collective marker for a whole range of approaches. Despite the many and significant differences, the broad attitude, mode and rhetoric of critique is in fact remarkably similar across different disciplines and subject matters. One of the issues is that in many academic milieus, critique in this broad sense is considered the expected method of approaching cultural objects.