Beyond Critique - by Pamela Fraser & Roger Rothman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of Conceptual Art, artists have been expected by critics, curators, and art school faculty to focus their work on exposing and debunking ideologies of power and domination. Recently, however, the effectiveness of cultural critique has come into question. The appearance of concepts such as the "speculative," the "reparative," and the "constructive" suggests an emerging postcritical paradigm.

Beyond Critique takes stock of the current discourse around this issue. With some calling for a renewed criticality and others rejecting the model entirely, the book's contributors explore a variety of new and recently reclaimed criteria for contemporary art and its pedagogy. Some propose turning toward affect and affirmation; others seek to reclaim such allegedly discredited concepts as intimacy, tenderness, and spirituality. With contributions from artists, critics, curators and historians, this book provides new ways of thinking about the historical role of critique while also exploring a wide range of alternative methods and aspirations. Beyond Critique will be a crucial tool for students and instructors who are seeking to think and work beyond the critical.

Review Quotes

Beyond Critique represents new scholarship that addresses the thesis that critical theory, or 'critique, ' has become a master narrative, is complicit in its domination of aesthetic discourses, and is deserving of critical analysis. A much-needed, wide-ranging, intellectually informative discussion, the volume provides alternative approaches to thinking about art in history, theory, practice, and instruction.
Kristine Stiles, France Family Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University, USA

Articulating an urgent and formidable challenge to the institutionalized authority of suspicious and symptomatic reading, Beyond Critique offers compelling arguments for a more inclusive range of affective styles and modes of post-critical interpretation. As a timely follow-up to Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique, this text is sure to further the long-awaited critical turn within the field of interpretation while impacting our awareness of contemporary critical analysis both inside and outside of the academy.
Michelle Grabner, Crown Family Professor of Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Navigating through postmodern pluralisms, neoliberal coercions of institutional critique, socially exclusive networks and market ideologies, this collection provides concrete analyses not only of the academic, ethical, socioeconomic and geopolitical obstacles that lay claim to the illusory capacities of critique in contemporary art, but alternatives for an art that is overwhelmed at its own upheaval of visible organization. Beyond Critique welcomes the reader into empirical approaches to past projects (such as Coco Fusco's 'Thoughts on "Two Undiscovered Amerindians, +? 20 Years Later'), and utilizes some of the most prominent thinkers of the 21st century to negotiate and reformulate the dissipation of critique today.
Anton Vidokle, artist and director of e-flux

About the Author

Pamela Fraser is an artist and an Associate Professor at The University of Vermont, USA, whose work has been exhibited internationally since 1996.

Roger Rothman is the Samuel H. Kress Professor of Art History at Bucknell University, USA. He has published articles on Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, and is the author of Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dali and the Aesthetics of the Small (2012).