ART, “LIFESTYLE CULTURE,” AND THE CRISIS OF CRITICISM

While no one can much agree on any clear mission for “art writing,” criticism, or the role of the critic, J.J. Charlesworth writes on Spiked.com, it is clear that there has been a severe and pessimistic attenuation of what critics today believe their activity can achieve. Art is becoming indistinguishable from lifestyle culture, and the logic of fashion also dominates how art is made visible; with the centered authority of modernist aesthetic criteria long dead, and post-modernism’s politicized proliferation of criteria equally exhausted, fashion steps in to regulate things with its free-market, vaguely democratic aesthetics. After all, if we all like the same art at the same time, then it must be good. After that, who needs criticism?