The cultural logic of criticality

Abstract

The text is concerned with charting the emergence of ‘criticality’ as a technology of legitimation and power in contemporary art institutions and proximate discourses. ‘Criticality’ is examined as a ‘cultural logic’ and compared to different philosophical iterations of critique for the correspondences and divergences. Cybernetics provides a model for analysing how critique becomes functional to the maintenance of existing states of affairs, then other potential political avenues for critique as rhetorical stance and praxis are evaluated through case studies.

Keywords:

• art
• critique
• culture
• dissent
• public sphere
• institutions
• systems