Paul Ardenne CONTEMPORARY ART AND ART CRITICISM : TWO AESTHETIC LABORATORIES

        Between these two laboratories of aesthetics, contemporary art is first. It is really the artists who give forms, who offer a formalization of the world on the basis their own experience. Today, this experience is open as never before and is therefore without limit of forms, of concepts, of fields of action and of intervention. With modernity, artists have indeed enlarged the field of art; they promoted an “extended” type of creation that was to take an interest in pure forms as well as in social and political questions, by working all over: within the studio, in situ but also in factories, inside businesses artists create themselves for the occasion, and so on.
        Art criticism as aesthetic laboratory--this expression is also valid, secondly, in a more particular way for curators, for the organizers of theme-based exhibitions. As one knows, curating in art, especially in living art, has become in this way, mainly since and with Harald Szeemann, one of the major forms of art criticism. Thus, some art critics do not hesitate to introduce themselves as “writers of exhibitions.” What are we to understand by that expression? They “write” exhibitions like others write books, poetry, drama, or film scripts. It is simply that the words they use to write are not exactly innocuous, nor are they ordinary. These words are artworks and, through these works, the artists themselves; they use both artworks and artists to fulfill their own role. Yet there is more. In “writing” some “exhibitions,” in choosing the themes thereof, and in selecting the artists who supposedly best illustrate the themes of such exhibitions, these curator-critics also are writing the equivalent of a history of living art.
        To put it quickly: through curating in the realm of contemporary art, art criticism ceases to be the expression of a mere opinion about art. It becomes, instead, a way of placing art in perspective. It leaves the terrain of gut reaction, of a subjective or occasional point of view, so as to adopt the standpoint of the master, of he who tells the truth about art and who means to tell it for a long time, just as historians establish facts not in order to produce an inventory of circumstances but, rather, with the goal of constructing a coherent narrative and also of giving a skeletal structure to the devertebrated way in which we humans occupy our time.
        This to say what? Art is, on the one hand, characterized by its unlimitedness, by the lack of limitation on its practices, on its purpose, on the form of its works, and on the sites in which it may act. In a word, to speak like Aristotle, it is characterized by the unlimitedness of its “poetics.” When writing exhibitions, art criticism is, for its part, characterized by selection, by the containment of artistic writings, by theoretical constriction, in short, by limitation. One has a presentiment that this situation results, at best, in a tension between art and criticism and, at worst, in a betrayal of art by criticism.
        Is this serious? It is not serious if art criticism confines itself to what it was already in the time of Diderot and to what it in large part remained until the emergence of the “culture industry” that is characteristic of modernity’s end and of postmodernity--namely, first of all, a judgment of taste, an opinion, the expression of a doxa.
        Where, on the other hand, the situation becomes more ambiguous, more subject to controversy, is within the framework, as a matter of fact, of this “culture industry,” that administrative form of both (and I insist on this “both”) culture and public taste. Within the framework of the activity of the “culture industry”--which can also be a cultural entertainment industry--the curator-critic is, indeed, never a free individual. He serves certain interests. While he may put forward his own convictions, he is also the servant of a structure that “manages” culture in the name of criteria that are themselves not fully cultural. These criteria are well known: political propaganda (be it that of democracy), the search of a minimum of consensus, the image-policy of an institution, cultural seduction, and the art market.

        So, unlimitedness, on the one hand--art--limitation, on the other hand--curatorial criticism. The assessment I am formulating certainly has nothing new about it. As early as 1972, during Documenta 5 in Kassel, Daniel Buren published a text entitled “Exposition d’une exposition--Ausstellung einer Ausstellung” (Exhibition of an exhibition) that gave echo to this situation. So, what did Buren write? The French artist openly criticized at that time the Documenta curator Harald Szeemann, accusing him of using artists and their works as a florist uses flowers to make a bouquet. This bouquet, Buren went on to say, is Szeemann himself, the curator of Documenta 5, who was the exhibition’s sole organizer, its sole composer. The artists and their works exhibited in Kassel were reduced to the role of yielding value. The artist, in short, is not necessarily the person one believes him to be. There are indeed, at Documenta, artists who exhibit their works. But above them, there is another artist, an artist in majesty, a superartist, who is the show’s curator.
        As you know, it was starting back then that one began to speak of “artist-curators,” a term to be taken as curators who substitute themselves for artists and who themselves become genuine artists by the way they design exhibitions. More broadly, people were going to speak of “artist art criticism,” too. This expression has become popular over the past few decades. And, to simplify matters, that is so for two reasons. On the one hand, postmodernism opts for a culture of semantic approximation, collage, mixes, hedonism, and self-justification: every critical position, every curatorial proposition suddenly becomes admissible, even when futile. On the other hand, the culture industry becomes more pronounced; it demands visibility. In particular, ever more numerous exhibitions combining around ever more varied themes will give it, among other things, this visibility. One will recall, in this regard, the 1990s exhibitions in New York of the duo Collins & Milazzo with their improbably titled, messy works lying around looking unpackaged. In this case of “artist criticism,” the curators asserted their prerogatives while remaining indifferent to all demands for aesthetic rigor.
        What is “artist criticism”? How is one to define it in a few words yet in a more precise way? Without caricaturing it too much, of this sort of criticism one can say that it is:

--a “self-centered” form of critical expression, convinced of its own prerogatives;

--a form of critical expression that gives itself the authority to subdue the totality of art in terms of its theoretical needs;

--a form of critical expression that, to conclude, ties the question of art, in its entirety, to the individual opinion of the curator. The “personal mythology” of the exhibition organizer replaces objective analysis: he pours out his feelings while privileging his radical emotional subjectivity; he becomes the Dichter, the master of language, to borrow a Heideggerian category.

        This “personal mythology” of the exhibition organizer gives rise, quite logically, to the principle that one must respect the curator’s “vision”--a “vision” that is supposed to sum up what art is in its entirety. Among the examples noticed over the past few years: the multiculturalist “vision,” sustained by references to Toni Negri or Homi K. Bhabha, and to Okwui Enwezor and his clones; the cosmopolitan and ecumenical “everyone, one thing and its opposite as soon as it’s on the move” “vision” of Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is renowned for having designed his exhibitions, in complete indifference to all conceptual rigor, at lightning speed in an address book, and so on.
        Speaking in media terms, the fate of “artist criticism” is well known. Such criticism today sets the tone and contributes to the revitalization of the field of living art. It does so, in any case, much better than does pure theory or that old and boring discipline of art history.
        Concerning large-scale arts events like Documenta, Manifesta, and other contemporary-art Biennales that are today spread across the globe (there are around forty of them), as everyone knows it is not the artists exhibiting their works there who focus the attention of the art world. Instead, it is the exhibition organizers who have been chosen for the occasion. When one is comparing major artistic events, what one compares, first of all, are the curatorships, not artists’ performances. What is the value of Jan Hoet’s eclectic Documenta compared to Rudy Fuch’s overtly postmodern one? What is Catherine David’s theoretico-Koolhasian Documenta worth compared to Okwui Enwezor’s exotico-Creolizing one? Who is closer to the truth of the world when it comes to recent Venice Biennale curatorial offerings, Szeemann’s Plateau of Humankind or Francesco Bonami’s The Dictatorship of the Viewer. And so on.
        Allow me, in this regard, to make a parenthetical remark. Informed people like you will have noticed that the curatorship of the Venice Biennale in the year 2005 was twofold. This phenomenon is all the more interesting as the choices made by each of the two exhibition organizers differed from each other. For Rosa Martinez, to summarize, the choice was in favor of young creative artists, a global view, and promotion of a political-feminist discourse. For Maria de Corral, the second of the 2005 Venice Biennale exhibition organizers, summarizing again, the choice retained goes from faithfulness to visual-art values to art as an embodied and vital depth experience, Marathon-like in its extent.
        In what way is this twofold proposition interesting from the standpoint of the culture industry? In this, that it doubly focuses curiosity seekers’ attention on the Biennale and keeps discussion from leaving the Lagoon to settle elsewhere. Also, it places two irons on the fire, which involves a minimum of ideological risk taking: if one does not agree with Martinez, one can always be with Corral, or vice versa. End of parenthesis.

        What, synthesizing now, would be the point of view supported by my argument? As it happens, it is the following: in its supervisible form of “artist” curating and “exhibition writing,” art criticism has become a major form of art vampirism. Indeed, while art today is more open, more experimental than ever, criticism and curating are so just as much--through the statements they make, through their own way of reading living art and its specific productions, but also, let it be understood, through the classifications and hierarchies they effectuate.
        In what way does this pose a problem? From the qualitative standpoint, this development tends to place criticism before art. Of course, this phenomenon is not new; it made its appearance in the nineteenth century and became dominant after World War II. Art criticism, then, exits definitively from academicism. It establishes itself as an autonomous discipline and makes the critic a natural accompanist of the artist, in solidarity with the latter and yet independent: Champfleury defended Courbet and the Realist movement in art; Baudelaire supported Delacroix; Zola defended Manet; Apollinaire defended the Cubists; Greenberg and Rosenberg legitimized American Abstract Expressionism; Pierre Restany constituted the New Realism movement; Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva structured, respectively, Arte Povera and Transavantgarde, and so on. While the art preceded the criticism, it nevertheless really was the criticism that instituted the art as an identifiable, labeled, legitimated formula.
        Such a situation is ambivalent. This eminent position criticism enjoys is healthy--indeed, indisputably so. It testifies to criticism’s offensive interest in art. It signals, too, its taxonomic and pedagogic vocation: criticism brings some order into the disorder of real creativity; it pulls strings; it gives a clear form to artistic creativity that is not so clear in reality. Such an eminent position for criticism becomes open to question, on the other hand, as soon as art criticism and curating turn “artistic.” One of the perverse effects one may then note, in particular, is discrimination. To segment art, to choose a single segment of it and to value it more highly than the other segments, is necessarily to discriminate against those other segments.
        Another perverse effect of the existence of the “artist critic” is the incentive to produce institutional art, an art that conforms to what “artist criticism” expects. Numerous artists, entranced by the power of “artist criticism,” will design their works for the latter, which says a lot about where the true power lies. Thus, during the previous Istanbul Biennale, in September-October 2005, Jakup Ferri, a young artist from the Balkans, presented a series of videos, all of which were based on the same theme: artistic success. Here one sees the artist, or members of his own family, standing before the camera, addressing the curators and asking them to be understanding and kind toward him, and to help him with his career: “Maybe some day I’ll be chosen [sic]by some curator or by any [sic] other important person,” and so on.
        Even if they are not to be taken literally, these kinds of works point to the artist’s dependence on the system, and surely not his independence therefrom.

        In order to demonstrate in whatever way possible the offensive perversity of “artist criticism” and of “exhibition writing,” and with the goal of being the least caricatural possible (if that is possible), I am now going to focus on three recent exhibitions that, it seems to me, are symptomatic of the deviations and drift just mentioned.
        The first of these exhibitions is Monument to Now, a group show offered by the Deste Foundation that took place in Athens, Greece on the occasion of the 2004 Olympic Games. This exhibition was presented as a digest of current art. Artistic management of the show fell to Jeffrey Deitch, with a curatorship involving no less than four curators: two old hands at criticism, Dan Cameron and Nancy Spector, and two young ones, Alison M. Gingeras and Massimiliano Gioni. Deste and Deitch were therefore pulling out the big guns, but with what results? Sixty-six artists and one-hundred works drawn solely from the Dakis Joannou collection--works for the most part sold to this big Greek collector by Jeffrey Deitch himself, an art critic but also a gallery owner.
        The criterion for assembling these works was being part of the mainstream, being high-priced artists. In this exhibition, no artist of renown was missing, from Barbara Kruger to Katharina Fritsch, from Douglas Gordon to Chen Zhen or Damien Hirst, along with Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Rosemarie Trockel, Christopher Wool, and Maurizio Cattelan. The content was sumptuous and the way the pictures were hung was quite refined. Nonetheless, where the shoe pinches is when the viewer becomes an inspector and asks the following quite simple question: Why that piece of art there rather than another one? (There are in the show, for example, no French or Spanish artists, but on the other hand one finds there a record number of Americans.) If Monument to Now were taken literally, the viewer would be condemned to but a very selective glimpse of recent art. Thus, he would have to accept that extra-Western art is to be reduced, all told, to a few Third-World emigrants living in New York, that performance art no longer exists, that digital art has never existed in recent times, and so on and so forth. In short, taking this show literally would lead us to ascertain in unison that we have not lived through the same history of art as Deitch and his gang of servile art critics have.
        Monument to Now is in fact an ideological montage, a calculated imposture. This kind of exhibition tends to accredit the notion of a “predictive” system, which is often used by sociologists as soon as they begin to speak of contemporary art, reducing it (unfairly) to a simple universe operating in a network as a function of market interests and the ruling powers.
        The second exhibition I shall use to illustrate the deviations or drift of “artist curatorship” is Coollustre. This show took place in Avignon at the Lambert Collection in 2003. The exhibition organizer was Éric Troncy, one of the codirectors of the Dijon Consortium.
The first point about Coollustre? This exhibition had no targeted theme, nor did it have any conceptual structuring, still less any semantic concerns. Here, it is everything and anything, no matter what the period, but ever gaudy, wavering between Bernard Buffet and Helmut Newton, Ugo Rondinone and Piero Gilardi, not to forget every single fashion as well as a few artists from the Yvon Lambert Gallery. As much as possible, the point was to remain vague, to be flashy and decorative, to create beautiful effects and establish visual overlaps that are enticing to the eye. The very title of the show is indeterminate. Upon investigation, one learns that the name has been borrowed from the realm of cosmetics: Coollustre is a treatment cream product (the subliminal message is perhaps the following: not only is the word cosmetics in the title of exhibition but the exhibition itself is cosmetic).
        Another goal of this show--its main goal, in fact--was to put the viewer in the head of the “author of the exhibition,” to get the viewer to share his whims as well as his romantic schoolgirl passions by reading the insipidly naive texts by the bubble-gum rock group Eurythmics which were inscribed for the occasion in Letraset characters on the walls and moldings. The meaning is clear: here, exhibiting no longer has anything to do with art but relates, quite the contrary, to psychology, nay to psychoanalytic treatment. The curator’s prime objective is to liberate his own fantasies and frustrations in the style of the erotomaniac, an individual who wishes to be loved at any cost. In this light, dispensing with a theme proves to be an essential precondition. The important thing is a personal outpouring, curatorial exhibitionism of one’s private life. In such an operation, the artists are not served but requisitioned. (What, indeed, do they think about it? We haven’t the slightest idea.)
        In short, what there is is an underexposure of art and the advent of an overexposure of the exhibition organizer. The curator in person is exhibited in all his beauty--or, more precisely put, in his pitiable narcissistic beauty, the ultimate leftover from grand “personal mythology.”
        The third exhibition on which I shall focus briefly before concluding my argument is Translation, which took place during the Summer of 2005 at the Palais de Tokyo’s Site of Contemporary Creation in Paris. This time, the institution’s directors asked the graphic artists M/M Paris to arrange in the space various works lent to the Parisian art center by a private collection (which explains the English-language title for a French show). What did the M/M Paris graphic artists do? They seized upon some works, those of such major artists as Cady Noland, Jeff Koons, Yinka Shonibare, as well as many others, and then mixed them up with their own personal works in the mode of unbridled sampling. More than “translation,” the appropriate catchword here would be effect. Dressing Down, a dress by Yinka Shonibare, is found subtly placed beneath the glamorous, offbeat gaze of a series of models posing on posters stuck up all around it, a work by M/M Paris for Balenciaga, while Blue Moon, a painting by Chris Ofili on canvas with elephant dung, is seen literally to be drowned in a wall of M/M Paris posters, against which its frame has nevertheless carelessly been leant, disappearing into it. And so on and so forth.
        If one looks at Translation as a hedonistic art lover would, one will be delighted by this makeover [relooking] operation. If not, one will necessarily be baffled. Among the related questions one might ask: Why, museographically speaking, this abolition of meaning, which vaporizes into prettiness and favors, instead, decorativeness and display? Why this illegibility of the show, which engages only the emotions? Why this aesthetic of contamination, which no longer even respects the original works? What about the artist, who here plays the role of supplier of raw materials and whose works have literally been worked over? One thing, at least, is certain: “fun” triumphs.

        So, what is this? Is everything the “artist critic” offers bad, dubious, suspect? Not necessarily.
        Some offerings, fortunately, are not so grotesque or unjustifiable. I am thinking in this connection about a decent exhibition I had the occasion to view recently, which is entitled OK/OKAY. This show was offered in the Spring of 2005 at the Swiss Institute of New York by its former director, Marc-Olivier Wahler, who today heads up Paris’s Palais de Tokyo.
        What was Wahler’s thesis? Art is a setting into form that is biased by nature, a true or false way of telling lies, take your pick, or even both at once. As such, it always simulates what it represents; it plays with reality. All the works Wahler exhibited in OK/OKAY have the following peculiar characteristic: they are reversible; they seem to say one thing at first glance, but they can also very well express the opposite, in the mode of solecism (at Soloi in ancient times, as Herodotus tells us, the inhabitants’ “Yes” was reputed to mean “No”).
        At first sight, the title OK/OKAY thus seems to mean nothing, or everything, which boils down to the same thing. As such, it would seem to place this collective dual expression, without further ado, into the just-mentioned category, that of the self-legitimizing, ad hoc exhibition offering (me the exhibition organizer with my worldview, my favorite artists, my references, my vapors, etc.). It is nothing of the sort. As pretext for the exhibition, this title proves on the contrary to be quite pertinent. “OK” is no doubt the most often pronounced expression in the world. While it ordinarily means acquiescence (“OK”), it can also mean its opposite: exasperation, renunciation, particularly when its pronunciation is dragged out (“Okay”). As the glossary listing placed in the exhibition catalogue by the show’s designer recalls, the very term “OK” has, moreover, no confirmed linguistic origin. A striking paradox, to say the least, given that this most commonly used of all terms in our vocabulary would also be, when all is said and done, the most intriguing.
        In a literal way, the OK/OKAY exhibition claims to be an illustration of this semantic indecisiveness, but this time on the side of art. Each of the works retained here includes (at least) two semantic entries. For example, Valentin Carron exhibits, in all their splendor, canvases by Mondrian and Léger--but he has reproduced them on leather hides and offers them to our view in the unexpected form of Indian trophies. In one-hundred tiny pictures recapitulating the key moments of human history, Gabriele di Matteo retraces that history from its start--but all the characters, incomprehensibly, are presented there nude, from an assassinated Caesar to John-Paul II on his deathbed, and from Charlie Chaplin on roller skates to Che Guevara and Silvio Berlusconi. Leopold Kessler exhibits some rather commonplace readymades: a refrigerator, a television set. They way they operate, on the other hand, is aberrant: the refrigerator opens on its own when the viewer approaches and then unceremoniously expels its contents, while one must pound the television set furiously with one’s fist in order to turn it on or off. The air locks designed by Bob Gramsma are fascinating, an evocation of sumptuous spaceships; yet it is to be noted that they curiously open onto nothing beyond themselves. The lighting work of Christian Andersson is reminiscent of Michel Verjux’s--large patches of light verging on a sort of visual transcendence--except that, when one passes in front of those offered by Andersson, one experiences the absurd situation of a total absence of our shadow on the lit surface. It is ultimately not until one comes to the sober, “technologically”-minded installations of Ben Woodeson that confusion is sowed. In appearance, a red-wire casing runs the length of a metallic column. In reality, what lies there is the beam of a heating resistor, the effect of which is to expand the metal and increase, infinitesimally, the dimension of the column.
        No doubt, what one rediscovers here, haunting the show like some background noise, is an echo of the Duchampian concept of the “infrathin.” A pleasant discovery, indeed. Art is a setting into form that is biased by nature, a true or false way of telling lies, take your pick, or even both at once. As such, it could not but simulate what it represents and play with reality, its definitely asymmetrical other. With OK/OKAY, what Marc-Olivier Wahler obviously intends to reaffirm is the relativity of the meaning of art, plus the insane pretentiousness every other reading than an open-ended one represents. Compared with “hard” or purportedly definitive expressions, what this show lends its support to is the full fecundity of an aesthetics of the “and” or, as Umberto Eco, defines it, the “etc.”--the work of art as an artefact signifying this plus that, and so on and so forth. This demonstrative attention to art as a potential (more than achieved) formula and, by extension, to the virtues of polysemy is far from innocent. What it pleads for is a suspension of judgment to the benefit of aesthetic surprise. However superficially one analyzes it in power terms, such a militant stand obviously has one flaw: it keeps the “artist-curator” from being able to claim the least bit of authority over art in the name of meaning or in his own name.

        Let us now conclude while nevertheless taking our time.
        Art, today, is not just creativity. Art produces works, but it also produces an aesthetic of criticism. It allows “artist criticism” to produce itself as aesthetic, to appear in a specific, identifiable, and flamboyant light--just as a work of art is specific, identifiable, and flamboyant. What is meant thereby is that, while contemporary art really is an aesthetic laboratory, this art never has, speaking in media terms, an existence of its own. It is never seen or shown by the world of criticism for what it is. It finds itself, on the contrary, literally aestheticized by that world.
        To prove this point, I wish to take two examples that differ in spirit but that see eye to eye on the principle of control. The first example relates to the curatorial experiment undertaken by the group VOTI --the Union of the Imaginary, which was established in the 1990s. Such art critics as Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, and Hans Ulrich Obrist constitute in this case a sort of committee of theoreticians whose avowed goal is to build up a database about a maximum number of artists. An effort to reconnoiter the artistic terrain? Yes, without a doubt. But it is also an insidious effort to take control over art in the name of the classical precept of the information ideology, namely, that he who holds the information controls the territory.
        A second example comes from the curating competition established in 2003 and organized since that time by the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMEC) of Bergamo in Northern Italy. The principle for the competition is as follows: for a total of 25,000 euros (transport of works, catalogue, press office, various remunerations, etc.), the candidate must create a project designed for hanging pictures in a rectangular room. The rule is to demonstrate artistic competence, no doubt, but also economic competence. The free-market-inspired rule of productivity is not far off, nor is its necessarily corollary, profitability.
        An “aesthetic laboratory”? Perhaps the laboratory is not, one will now have understood, where it was once believed to be. Experimentation no longer characterizes just art, particularly in its most avant-garde forms, which is always on the lookout for novelty and is ever seeking to express the unprecedented. It also describes, through it continuation, “artist criticism.” “Artist criticism” proceeds, in fact, by a kind of culinary fashioning, as a chef arranges his courses. Its first objective is not the glory of art but, rather, its own glory--and, in passing, that of the curator-critic. “Artist criticism” or the aesthetic laboratory of art, in an upside down mode.
        If we agree on the fact that art offers a representation that conforms with our world, that it says in some sort of way the “truth” (in quotation marks), that it gives to reality its proper tone, this situation is quite simply inadmissible. If, as curator critic, one claims, says, or shows what art is, and if one does not intend, in doing this, to betray its meaning--for, betraying its meaning would then boil down to betraying the very meaning of the world--it would then be appropriate to take all art, to give up making arbitrary selections, to seize hold of it in its entirety without ever splitting it up, or dividing it into branches so as to serve this or that theoretical or cultural cause that is dear to us.
        If, on the contrary, we agree on the fact that art is not an exact representation of the world in which we live but, rather, a set of representations that are erratic, approximative, dramatized, excessively singularized, and so on--in short, a sum total of representations that are not at all universal--there is, on the other hand, no problem for “artist criticism.” In this case, art becomes a source material. That “artist criticism” might make use of this material in order to feed its own interests, which also can be those of the political and economic powers, is something that in this case is entirely logical.
        The present situation in fact shows clearly that art is beaten down, completely defeated on its own terrain. Why is that so? It is not because the works are bad, nor is it because they cannot support themselves. It is rather because artists in no way control the territory of mediation, of communication.
        Art’s quality is not at issue. What is at stake is the established hierarchy. In this instance, it is a hierarchy that is favorable to the art institution as such--art centers, museums, the art market, major arts events, and so on--and to those who represent them, who are not at first the artists themselves but, rather, their mediators.
        What does this hierarchy teach us today? That what the institutions in charge of art have in mind is less art than their own survival. What is their goal? To continue to exist, to give entertaining shows [faire du spectacle], to keep their various functionaries employed, and so on. What is their method? To make use themselves of art as motive energy, just as a car operates on fuel: to be able to go forward, to move, to make its way. The only good news in this affair, if one pursues the metaphor, is this: In order to go forward, to move, to make its way, a car has need of gas. The fate of art, as a consequence, is assured, at least its fate as fuel, for want of anything better.
        You might think that my argument is designed to demonize “artist criticism.” That is not the case. Reality is always the resultant of variously mastered relations of forces. The instrumentalization of present-day art is not a fatal inevitability; it is a resultant. The question is then posed in its entirety: If criticism dominates art to such an extent, is it not, all things considered, because the former has become more exciting, more interesting than art itself? Exactly what is it that impassions us in living art: what we see or what we can think about it? Let us formulate the following hypothesis in the form of a question: Might it be that the answer, here, is contained in the question?
        The answer is left to the free evaluation of each person.
        I thank you.