Art criticism: a unique mode of writing production

Abstract

The text examines the contemporary twilight of art criticism, a literary genre to which 19th-century-modernity had conferred extraordinary critical vigor, and which had been born under the auspices of an
emerging mass culture, reaching full maturity between the 1930s and 1970s. It claims that the first signs of this twilight appeared in the last one and a half decades of the 20th century and were connected to the emergence of an omnipresent system of art and culture that since then has established itself as a new artistic public sphere. According to the author, the retraction of art criticism (at least in the terms from which modernity had forged it) is crucially connected to the disappearance of the mode of production of the artwork as it had been constituted in modernity. As the author concludes, this modality of essayistic writing, notably influential in the art of 20th century, steps aside also as a result of the professionalization and constricted institutionalization of the artistic and cultural field during that period, thanks to which artistic production promptly emerged in direction of a new and mnipresent cultural sphere, with its liable and diverse constellation of new actors that henceforth would introduce themselves as mediators between this production and the public.