TY - JOUR
AB -  John Baldessari. This is Not to Be Looked At. 1968. Courtesy of the artist. Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism George Baker: I want to read from Paul de Man’s essay “Criticism and Crisis” to start off. For there, de Man isolates a cycle of innovation and obsolescence that had invaded the activity of criticism by the late sixties, a cycle which it now seems to me is itself obsolescent: Well-established rules and conventions that governed the discipline of criticism and made it a cornerstone of the intellectual establishment have been so badly tampered with that the entire edifice threatens to collapse. . . . The crisis aspect of the situation is apparent, for instance, in the incredible swiftness with which often conflicting tendencies succeed each other, condemning to immediate obsolescence what might have appeared as the extreme point of avantgardism briefly before. Rarely has the dangerous word “new” been used so freely . . . Today almost every new book that appears inaugurates a new kind of nouvelle nouvelle critique. Perhaps this statement makes some of us nostalgic. For today we do not see the constant renewal of critical discourses of which de Man spoke, 
TI - Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism
JF - October
DO - 10.1162/016228702320218475
DA - 2002-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/mit-press/round-table-the-present-conditions-of-art-criticism-clCuWbUjQu
SP - 200
EP - 228
VL - Spring 2002
IS - 100
DP - DeepDyve
ER -