1.
When someone speaks of a crisis in criticism, I propose the dissolution of criticism.
2.
This somewhat urgent situation called the crisis of criticism has been steadily raised over the past several years. This is not so much a crisis unique to criticism as it is a crisis of the fundamental conditions that make criticism possible. Attached to this now-clichéd crisis are, naturally, longstanding discussions about institutional aspects within the art world, changes in the way art is experienced, and the public's reception of criticism. In these recurring debates, critics have justified criticism through its autonomy. What is the autonomy of criticism? The formation of criticism as a category - distinguished from other forms of writing such as academic papers, journalism, amateur essays, and speculative writing - places criticism under special conditions. Criticism has persisted by arbitrarily defining what it ought to be from the illusion of a teleology of value. For example, Digital Narcissus - Media Apocalypse, an exhibition I curated in 2020, structured through citations of various theories, would be something other than criticism. In this context, attempts to define the existence of criticism have mostly culminated in the teleologies of performativity and autonomy.
2-1.
After postmodernism finally swept through culture, the critic's privileged position began to erode, and various practices tied to the object of criticism were absorbed into the realm of criticism. This is because the domain of criticism, which once claimed to expose what the world could not reveal while remaining thoroughly detached from the lifeworld, now seeks someone to consume it. This neoliberal attitude in the cultural sphere has successfully dragged criticism into the realm of desacralization. Additionally, new platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have provided the public with spaces to express their views, further contributing to this trend. Critics are now (at least to the public) more like essayists than scholars, more like attendants than priests, more like the main force than the vanguard.
3.
Returning to the internal relations of criticism, many agree that criticism can articulate in language what the object itself fails to fully reveal - so-called criticism as unconcealment. Even as the boundaries of criticism blur, its starting point remains the object. In other words, criticism cannot exist independently of its object (or phenomenon). Many critics locate criticism's legitimacy in the density of its relationship to the object. Criticism detached from phenomena lacks justification. If it is not tied to the object, it ceases to be criticism and becomes mere speculation or impression. Thus, the act of criticism is oriented toward the object.
4.
Now that theoretical criticism has become dominant, it is not difficult to find points where criticism and theory intersect. Many critics attempt to merge criticism with descriptive theory, which is possible because the boundary between critical thought and criticism has blurred in contemporary discourse. (Countless aphorisms, and even the act of reading, are subsumed into the domain of criticism.) That critical thought is a necessary condition for philosophy is self-evident. The same goes for criticism, which adopts its methodologies. The question, then, is what conditions separate theory from criticism. The point where criticism diverges from description lies first in the form and function of writing, and second in the mode of articulating thought. Conventionally, theory has been presented as writing in a descriptive form, while criticism takes the form of critical writing. Theorists and critics have endowed their productive labor with new autonomy. Criticism strives not to lose its practical and productive function, just as theory seeks to remain analysis and description. Up until modernity, this separation was fairly successful in practical criticism. But how far is this possible in theoretical criticism? If criticism and theory appropriate different domains in terms of function, mutual re-appropriation would not be easily permitted. Yet critics desire their criticism to function as analysis and description, while theorists want their theories to act as practice. This mutual aspiration leads criticism and theory to constantly follow each other's modes of thought. But why can they still remain in separate realms? Most importantly, theory resides in the academy, while criticism belongs to the field. Criticism's uniqueness lies in its capture of the now. Unlike inductive history, criticism is tasked with historicizing the now. For Walter Benjamin, historicization is seizing hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. The now as fleeting memory, like a tiger's leap, declaratively grasps the past. Criticism must not be reduced to mere description. If criticism claims as its role the presentation of new possibilities for perceiving the object itself, its uniqueness is preserved. This raison d'être, unique to criticism, is the legitimacy that allows it to persist even amid constant skepticism.
4-1.
If criticism belongs to the field, is its current form still sufficiently valid? Criticism remains at the level of the object's representation - where representation means recognizing the object as a schema-governed depiction. When a critic reflects on an object, it is nearly impossible to fully approach the object itself, free from their own preexisting frameworks. Countless established systems of cognition mediate the experience of the object. Criticism may seem to present the object's unique experience within a world of views, but in reality, it reproduces the object through symbolic language, filtered through the critic's internalized cognitive structures. Particularly in theoretical and historical criticism, systematized language encodes the object. Under these conditions, criticism cannot be entirely free from the object's secondary representation. It can only present the object as already encoded at a meta-level.
4-2.
As a disciplined literary genre - a subcategory of literature - criticism unfolds through narrative deduction. Yet even after navigating the stratified hierarchies of fixed narrative structures (unequal paragraph relations, footnotes subordinated to the main text), doubts remain as to whether criticism can unfilteredly reveal the object's own code. Loss occurs at the point where the object is translated into formal language. In other words, representation tends toward abstraction. (The more criticism textualizes the object, the higher its degree of abstraction.) If one reason critics must tirelessly strive is to represent the object's categories, criticism need not achieve this solely through generic form.
4-3.
If criticism is seen as an act of translation, it should be a literal translation, not a free one.
5.
No single criticism exists independently. Countless criticisms interlock to form the object's world. Yet critics still want their criticism to function autonomously. As an analytic proposition, criticism proceeds recursively, advancing thought within its own conditions. Meta-criticism of their own criticism is a threat to them. For a long time, criticism has wielded the power to insert meaning into the object from a meta-position and still clings to that stance. The power of criticism arises from its refusal of the object's gaze, insisting on a unilateral perspective. This meta-critical power seeks to remain in a close but hidden relationship with the object, yet criticism's tendency toward abstraction inevitably distances it from the object. In the same vein, criticism sometimes veers into metaphysics.
5-1.
When meta-criticism arrives in the field, criticism aspires to become the object's idea. But the idea is not achieved through the secondary representation of the object's concrete body. Rather, the idea emerges among the multitude of considerations that criticism and the object bring to light.
6.
As long as criticism occupies a metaphysical position relative to the object, it remains impractical in terms of the object's reception (even if it contributes to the object's ontological formation). Criticism that operates at a meta-level, rather than where the object functions, becomes a floating language game around the object rather than residing within it. Such criticism often tends toward theorization - especially in analytical criticism, where it becomes indistinguishable from theory. While theory clearly contributes to the linguistic grounding of natural objects and the construction of cognition, does it also contribute to the now - the object's immediate presence and the possibility of intense experience? For criticism to escape abstraction and metaphysics, the hierarchy it imposes on the object must be dissolved. Unlike chasing after theorized criticism, a new practical criticism must escape its own position. Practical criticism should not stand behind or above the object but beside it. It must break free from its self-appropriated position and juxtapose itself with the object. The new criticism does not present the object's total signified as representation but belongs to the field of the object's meaning-formation as its allegory. In terms of reception, the audience now assumes the position of producer.
6-1.
What I advocate is not the abolition of existing criticism.
7.
The allegory, as Benjamin defines it, holds an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. It possesses no completeness and has no fixed referent. Unlike theory and criticism as symbols - which, under the tribunal of reason, present an aesthetically purified nature, or the virtual - allegory does not deal with the virtual, which is absent from the field. Moreover, while the symbol pursues an essential uniqueness, allegory has no final destination; it repeats and suspends itself. The symbol, as an analytic proposition, corresponds one-to-one with the object, purifying the natural object through reason. But reason as totalized enlightenment is a fiction. For Benjamin, the world is not a rationally ordered history but a ruptured foundation. This foundation reveals itself not as symbol but as allegory. Allegory merely displays fragments - death, suffering, the incomplete shards of a fractured world. Ultimately, criticism as allegory is not historical but genealogical, dismantling and reassembling history. Thus, criticism relates to provocative impulses that stir emotions. Logos only imposes constraints on understanding the object. This predicament is also evident in Rosalind Krauss's discourse on the paradox of the post-medium. The Art & Language group wrote in the inaugural issue of their journal: "If what is readable rather than visible becomes art, then couldn't an editorial statement also be art?" [1]
7-1.
Applying Benjamin's methodology once more, the strategy demanded by practical criticism would be that of the traktat. The quotations composing the text function as allegories, enabling a leap of cognition. Like a mosaic, these quotations are perceived montage-like. But montage cognition is not something preassembled and presented; it operates in the ruptured gaps between elements, generating new and intense meaning-formation. Even arranging quotations alone as a mosaic allows meaning - experienced intensely - to emerge from their interlocking events. Montage is the premise of cognition and the condition of meaning-formation. Montage arises from the differences between objects. Local differences between parts generate meaning, and these meanings make the object an object of experience. For instance, the aphorisms and short texts scattered across Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds have no inherent relation, yet in cognition, they are rearranged as montage. Facebook and Twitter can become sites of intense experience. Each aphorism is an allegory, endlessly updated. These are things of the now, soon to be forgotten. Even if archived in a digital album, these aphorisms - which can only be experienced in the moment - lose the meaning they could form when entangled with the history of the now. Montage cognition is achieved not in historical spacetime but precisely now. It does not matter when or where the object or criticism originated. What matters is that all minute elements - including criticism and the object - at the moment of cognition, become a concrete constellation of meaning. In this sense, criticism composed solely of theoretical quotations is more practical than impressionistic criticism. Dismantling the object and arranging it as allegory does not presuppose cognitive completeness. In other words, criticism as (meta-positioned) proposition cannot generate new cognition.
7-2.
Practical criticism should not be a totalized entity but an allegory that itself contains countless micro-entities while also functioning as one. The object and criticism are not solid conceptual realities but mere categories arbitrarily composed of numerous micro-elements. The object is the sum of its parts, and criticism is the sum of words and paragraphs. What artists and critics do is collect and combine these elements in their own ways. Practical criticism must now shift from its meta-position to stand beside the object, functioning as both allegory and simulacrum. In this chain-like structure - allegory (the relation between object and criticism) within allegory (the internal structure of criticism) - object and criticism, as juxtaposed elements, acquire the possibility of meaning-formation through montage. As previously stated, this is not the presentation of a complete deduction but an experience of meaning as affect and intensity. Criticism contributes to the phenomenon, and the recipient grasps its phenomenalization.
8.
Audio-Visual Film Criticism breaks from traditional written criticism, presenting reflections on film through audiovisual means. It introduces itself as another cinematic genre. Examining the framework of this discussed form reveals how it operates. According to it, written criticism is limited by its inability to directly cite film. Critic Yoo Woon-sung notes that since filmmaking digitized in the late 90s, the practical methodology of found footage expanded, enabling the appropriation and autonomization of images, thus granting it critical function. What was impossible in written criticism - direct citation of film - became possible. The deconstruction and recombination of the film-object, selective arrangement, and placement of commentary seem to anticipate new meaning-formation. Yet the images extracted from the film, inevitably losing their original meaning, are again subordinated to the film through textual language (subtitles or narration). Moreover, (current) audio-visual film criticism still employs structuralist interpretive methods. The subtitles (or narration) corresponding to the images are merely non-textual forms of the same linguistic regression. Audio and visuals appear on-screen as separate signifiers and signifieds. The cited images serve only as illustrative plates. How far is this from traditional criticism? In its adherence to language as symbol, it ultimately retains the position of conventional criticism.
9.
Appropriation and recombination must, as in all criticism, reveal the object. The relationship to the object is the lifeline that makes criticism possible. But the potential of appropriation and recombination is realized through mosaic and montage. While the critic's power inevitably persists in presenting views on the object, the audience, in receiving the critic's montage, can participate as producers in new meaning-formation. In this sense, practical criticism becomes a platform. Faithful to traktat-like representation, the object's allegory - reproduced through this detour - can be presented alongside the object to the recipient. The recipient does not internalize the criticism as deductive narrative but generates intense meaning through immediate montage effects. Here, the critic acts like a DJ, engaged in collecting and mixing.
9-1.
Just as past practical criticism and new criticism lost validity, contemporary criticism is also waning. The discourse of crisis was not raised for a single reason. It has been a rhetorical constant across practical criticism, new criticism, and now. As Hal Foster, once at the forefront of philosophical criticism, lamented: "Nothing seems to work now - not psychoanalysis, not Marxism, not structuralism, not poststructuralism..." [2] Our cognition must find a new way forward within the all-encompassing category of contemporaneity.
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[1] Editors of Art-Language, "Introduction," in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 98-104, p. 100.
[2] Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 673.