#mel ramsden

Could a critique of adventuristic New York art involve me in acting like an art critic? It seems to me that art criticism provides us with a paradigm case of what art world bureaucracy really is. Even when it is carried out by those who are not just participating in careerist soldiering, it's still close to totally untenable since it treats most art as rationally there and as neutral spectacle. This means a lot of it is bourgeois criticism quite simply: a celebration of the world as diverse but neutral spectacle. But criticism, when you get right down to it, is basically stuck with assessing and grading. The activity of grading derives its sense from from both the commodity treatment of persons as well as from the unreflexive, unproblematic, and entrenched commodity use of language. The link between this mode of treatment of "things" and our way of relating to each other (the market form of life) isn't accidental.