The Strength of the Market - The Weakness of Criticism, page 1 (2012), GCG

The Strength of the Market - The Weakness of Criticism

Punta della Dogana, Venice

23 Sep - 21 Dec 2012

The dual nature of the artwork (as autonomous and ‘social fact’) is now internal to the actualization of the contradictory structure of globalization as a projected 'worlding' of the planet as a globe. The opposition and incipient contradiction between the two basic aspects of globalization (‘globe' and 'world’: the 'objective' planetary aspect of integration of particular geographically localized social sites into global networks of various sorts, and its collectively 'subjective' worldly aspect, through which these practises and processes of 'integration' are lived as part of a transformation of 'the world') appears within the structure of the art world as a structural contradiction between art's cultural economic (or cultural-industrial) function on the one hand, and its cultural-artistic function, on the other. Each art work is a condensed fragment of a worlding of the globe.

The Strength of the Market - The Weakness of Criticism, page 1 (2012), GCG

Art's self-surpassing, however - its expansion by the non-art/anti-art dialectic (the dialectic between art and non-art internal to the work of art which displaced the question of art's critical character away from nineteenth century concepts of autonomy onto the paradoxical art-functioning of its non-art element), doesn't reside in anything internal to objects or practises, but is only completed either by criticism or by future works (or both). So the historical critical dictum is that a work of art only exists historically. It only has historical significance in so far as it becomes the condition for the possibility for the production of another work.

If you produce a work that is the basis of the condition of possibility of other work (which rejects it in various ways etc.), which then itself becomes the condition for the possibility of other work, then you have produced a historical work. All other work may have various forms of social actuality in its own time, but it won't be critically historically significant art. Which is a problem for institutions. The crisis for institutions is that they don't need critical discourse to mediate their relation to the production of art anymore (because of the strength of the market). Institutions don't really have a serious relation to critical discourses. Which means that they can't tell the difference between historically significant and insignificant work.

'The artist may not necessarily understand their own work. Their perception is probably worse than that of an intellectually serious art critic’; Serious About Contemporary Art Criticism, after August Sander and Jeff Wall; The Strength of the Market - The Weakness of Criticism (2012), GCGCA(i)