Immanuel Kant

Small is Beautiful, but Big is Sublime

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Kant, Le Corbusier, Koolhaas
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Analytic of the Sublime

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The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it, or at its instance, and yet it is also thought as a totality.

— Immanuel Kant, 1793
Critique of Judgment

Bolshevism means big

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“Bolshoi!”

It is a word (a magnificent one) and not a mere matter of party membership.

In 1928, I was called to Moscow to discuss the construction of the Tsentrosoiuz there. I was taken to the office of Mr. Lubinov (now the People’s Commissar, once mayor of Moscow, before that a peasant, and at this particular time President of the Tsentrosoiuz). There was an interpreter there. The President delivered himself of a long speech in which the word ‘bolshoi,’ always delivered with great force, recurred again and again. The interpreter passed on the substance of this speech to me as follows:

The construction of this palace [The Palace of the Soviets] must prove itself an outstanding event in Russian architectural history, a history that only began with the Revolution itself. It is essential that there should be a visible quality of bigness in all the aspects of its design, a bigness achieved not simply by means of physical dimensions, nor by emphasis, but by a judicious regard to proportions. It is essential that this non-military building, the biggest that has so far been envisaged by our regime, should constitute a model: strict expression of function and dignity. All our projects must come into the world under this sign: BIG, bolshoi…

I questioned the interpreter: “That word, ‘bolshoi,’ which Mr. Lubinov kept hammering out, what does it mean?”

“Big!”

“So, Bolshevism…?”

“Bolshevism means: everything as big as possible, the biggest theory, the biggest projects. Maximum. Going to the heart of any question. Examining it in depth. Envisaging the whole. Breadth and size.”

Up to then, I had understood from our newspapers that Bolshevik meant a man with a red beard and a knife between his teeth.

— Le Corbusier, 1930
The Radiant City

Manhattan

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The skyscrapers here are much too small.

— Le Corbusier arriving
in Manhattan, 1935 Continue reading →

Confronting the “death” of art criticism

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Introduction

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The crisis of art criticism is undeniable. Rigor, commitment, narrative, and judgment have become dirty, antiquarian, even authoritarian words. Art criticism has almost disappeared from newspaper columns. Historical awareness of the discipline fades further with every new online journal or blog. Art criticism with a persuasive voice, poetic aspirations, dedicated to new evaluative criteria for quality, and that attempts to critique an artwork is a rare, endangered species. With the proliferation of Ph.D. studio art programs and the expansion of the art world and global art market, it is neglected. For some, art criticism’s crisis has turned into a terminal disease with no cure in sight.

The turn of the 21st century has seen a plethora of articles, conferences, and publications devoted to the crisis in criticism. Publications include Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (ed. Raphael Rubenstein, 2006), and James Elkins’ What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003). The most recent and comprehensive accounts of the dilemmas confronting art critics today are included in The State of Art Criticism (eds. James Elkins and Michael Newman, 2008) and Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism (eds. J. Khonsary and M. O’Brian, 2010). The latter endeavors to build upon the problems posed by Elkins’ and Newman’s book. In seeking to understand the crisis, both are driven to reexamine the relationship of art criticism to other disciplines (like curating, art history, and philosophy), the role of judgment in art criticism, and the challenges to art criticism posed by the emergence of certain critical art practices (or Conceptual art).

Arnold Böcklin, Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (1872)

Arnold Böcklin, Self-portrait with death playing the fiddle (1872)

This thesis is motivated to approach the problem of the lack of historical self-awareness and continuity of the discipline of art criticism. The aim is to present the historical conditions of the crisis of art criticism as it was understood in the last decade, with priority given to questions raised by a rejection of judgment in art criticism. The other task for this thesis is to determine the deeper historical causes of the crisis. First, I will situate this crisis within the early history of art criticism and, especially, with respect to the interrelationship between critique and crisis. Following this, I will flesh out what this crisis looks like in the art world today, and review how this crisis has been registered by those currently writing about art, particularly with respect to large-scale transformations in the art market. The objective, here, is to specify what kind of criticism has become practically obsolete, grasp how this process of obsolescence unfolded, and reflect on the broader implications of the implausibility and apparent anachronism of art criticism in the present. In so doing, I hope to clarify the significance of what art critic and historian Benjamin Buchloh called “death of art criticism.”[1]

On earlier modes of art criticism

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To better understand the explanations of the current crisis, let us briefly revisit the emergence of criticism itself. Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1988) elaborates on the significance of criticism and crisis in the 18th century. For Koselleck, criticism is an 18th century catchword; he describes countless volumes published during this period with the term “criticism” or “critical” in their titles. On the other hand, the term crisis was rarely used in the 18th century and cannot be considered a central concept in this period. The etymology of the words “criticism” and “critique” are at the root of his investigations. He points out that the word “critique” is derived from the Greek “krinein,” which means “to judge,” while the Greek “krisis” means “discrimination and dispute” to “select, judge, decide.” Thus “crisis” also meant decision, in the sense of final judgment or appraisal, which today extends into the category of criticism. In Greek, a single word encompassed concepts that today would usually be seen as separate: “subjective” criticism and “objective” crisis.

Later in the 20th century, this notion of the affinity between crisis and critique is recognized and elaborated in the discourse around the crisis of literary criticism. In Paul de Man’s 1964 essay the “Crisis of Contemporary Criticism,” crisis and criticism are very closely linked; much like the ideas presented by Koselleck, although he was moving beyond the issue of a shared etymology. De Man addresses the moment in which literary criticism is said to have entered a crisis because of the influence of French structuralist theory. In response he argues, “all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis.” Furthermore, “in periods that are not periods of crisis, or in individuals bent on avoiding crisis at all cost, there can be all kinds of approaches to literature: historical, philological, psychological, etc., but there can be no criticism.”[2] If we agree with Koselleck and de Man, and consider crisis a constant element of art criticism, then claims about the death of art criticism imply an abandonment of the problems posed by crisis. Continue reading →

The Marxist hypothesis: A response to Alain Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis

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Untitled.
IMAGE: Cover to Alain Badiou’s
Communist Hypothesis (2010)
Platypus Review 29 | November 2010

Chris Cutrone

Against Badiou

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Alain Badiou’s recent book (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.”[1] This is also the title of Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review[2] on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.[3] There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows:

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, “communist” means, first, that the logic of class — the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity — is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.[4]

Badiou goes on to state that,

As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts — the slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by Müntzer — might be identified as practical examples of this “communist invariant.” With the French Revolution, the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.[5]

Badiou thus establishes “communism” as the perennial counter-current to civilization throughout its history. Continue reading →

Radical Bourgeois Philosophy, Week 4: Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant

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Immanuel Kant

Benjamin Constant

Last week we covered Adam Smith’s excellent Wealth of Nations, focusing on the way in which Smith can be regarded as “the philosopher par excellence of the manufacturing period of capitalism,” as Marx called him.  We took note of the way that Smith registered the development of the division of labor, relations of exchange, and the nascent possibility of a society in which everyone could work less while still producing more useful goods for consumption.  This week we are reading Kant’s brief essays on “What is Enlightenment?” and his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.”  The interpretation that is being presented is that Kant articulates the new, modern subjectivity of bourgeois society, based on the principle of universal freedom.  This parallels the way that Smith articulates the new, modern economic form of bourgeois society as being founded on the principle of universal exchange.  To this end, we are also reading Benjamin Constant’s “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” as Constant spells out more explicitly the difference between Kantian freedom and earlier philosophical/theological treatments of free will, as say by Augustine or Leibniz.