Let us pause to think about how art first became characterized by a critical dimension. She told me this is where Europe's richest people go. the ones who go to Cologne to do business seem to do the best. The most visible artists are very good at serving the rich. that seems to be the dominating economic model for artists in this country. We were talking about whether choosing to be an artist means aspiring to serve the rich. But attending to the present moment, the following question from an intelligent young scenester may be taken as a tongue-in-cheek provocation rooted in the zeitgeist, reminding us that political and socio-critical art is at best a niche production:
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In either case, it is not the general audience but the educated castes and professional artists or writers who are most attuned to such hermeneutics. The veiled criticality of art under repressive regimes, generally manifesting as allegory or symbolism, needs no explanation for those who share that repression, but audiences outside that policed universe will need a study guide. Criticality that manifests as a subtle thread in iconographic details is unlikely to be apprehended by wide audiences across national borders.
1 Art, we may now hear, is meant to speak past particular understandings or narratives, and all the more so across national borders or creedal lines. In considering the long history of artistic production in human societies, the question of “political” or “critical” art seems almost bizarre how shall we characterize the ancient Greek plays, for example? Why did Plato wish to ban music and poetry from his Republic? What was to be understood from English nursery rhymes, which we now see as benign jingles? A strange look in the eye of a character in a Renaissance scene? A portrait of a duke with a vacant expression? A popular print with a caricature of the king? The buzz around works of art is surely less now than when art was not competing with other forms of representation and with a wide array of public narratives calling some art “political” reveals the role of particular forms of thematic enunciation. The naming process is itself frequently a method of recuperation, importing expressions of critique into the system being criticized, freezing into academic formulas things that were put together off the cuff. Two years on, this may be a good moment to revisit the parameters of such work (now that the fascination with large-scale, bravura, high wow-factor work, primarily in painting and sculpture, has cooled-if only temporarily).Ĭategories of criticality have evolved over time, but their taxonomic history is short. Just a few months before the real estate market brought down much of the world economy, taking the art market with it, I was asked to respond to the question whether “political and socio-critical art” can survive in an overheated market environment.
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