Criticality and Modern Art

This seminar will interrogate a central way of understanding the politics of twentieth-century art: criticality. The notion that art’s relationship to society is one of negation, diagnosis, and destabilization pervades modern art history. This seminar will trace the development of criticality as an artistic practice and art-historical methodology. Alongside texts on critique in philosophy and theory, we will examine artists for whom criticality is paramount: Dada’s ballistic mission, repetitions of the neo-avant-garde, anti-art, institutional critique, critical postmodernism, art as undercommons. We will end with recent claims of critique’s collapse and assess the viability of criticality in art of today.