Art history/art criticism: performing meaning

Abstract

Gallop’s insights are applicable to art history as well since, as it is conventionally practiced, art history by and large relies on art critical modes of determining value – modes derived loosely ‘from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and its subsequent refinements in German, French, English, and US aesthetic theory (from Hegel to Fry, Greenberg, and beyond).2 While most art historians would prefer not to admit it, the practice of art historical analysis most often assumes certain values determined via an art critical model of a ‘disinterested’ judgment practiced by a learned interpreter who veils his investments in the service of objectivity3 This mode of judgment continues to be structural to evaluations of contemporary art, which – even as they claim ‘post-’ modernity – tend to reiterate these Enlightenment-based assumptions of modernist criticism, even as they replace notions of ‘aesthetic’ value with an avant-gardist conception of ‘political’ value or efficacy; political like aesthetic judgments aim to secure meaning and value and are thus threatened by the anxious uncertainty put into play by the performative, theatrical dimension of meaning production.4 This essay explores what happens to the prevailing mode of judgment when it is posed in relation to works of art that exaggerate this dimension.

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