Untitled

Critical Reflections
The next artist might read him better. It would be false to think somehow
that Baudelaire overrated Constantin Guys, or Greenberg Jules Olitski,
because the theoretical excess the two produced has its own value and can
stimulate other artists.
It’s also not that important which artworks the art critic uses to illustrate
his theoretically generated differences. The difference itself is important—and
it doesn’t appear in the works but in their use, including their interpretation—even
if various images seem suited to the purposes of the critic. There
is no dearth of useful illustrations; we’re observing a tremendous overproduction
of images today. (Artists have increasingly recognized this—and begun
to write themselves. The production of images serves them more as a cover
than as an actual goal.) The relationship between image and text has changed.
Before it seemed important to provide a good commentary for a work. Today
it seems important to provide a good illustration for a text, which demonstrates
that the image with commentary no longer interests us as much as the
illustrated text. The art critic’s betrayal of the criterion of public taste turned
him into an artist. In the process, any claim to a metalevel of judgment was
lost. Yet art criticism has long since become an art in its own right; with language
as its medium and the broad base of images available, it moves as
autocratically as has become the custom in art, cinema, or design. Thus a
gradual erasure of the line between artist and art critic completes itself, while
the traditional distinction between artist and curator, and critic and curator,
tends toward disappearance. Only the new, artificial dividing lines in cultural
politics are important, those that are drawn in each individual case, with
intention and strategy.