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The Task of Art Criticism
Author(s) -
KassmanTod Joseph
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
curator: the museum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 2151-6952
pISSN - 0011-3069
DOI - 10.1111/cura.12289
Subject(s) - criticism , task (project management) , art criticism , interpretation (philosophy) , set (abstract data type) , epistemology , aesthetics , sociology , art , computer science , philosophy , performance art , literature , engineering , art history , programming language , systems engineering
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the task of art criticism. My proposal will be guided by reflection on the following question: if art criticism involves an effort of entering‐in, getting at how and why the artwork matters, then where does this effort cease to be an act of discovery and veer into something added in? I argue that the critic must be interested in both (1) possibilities of sense‐making not taken up by the artist's sense‐making community but that are made available in our engagement with the work of art, and (2) the way that the possibilities for enriched understanding set up by the artwork can be interpreted by us, in ways that matter to us. The task of the critic is to articulate their interpretation of these possibilities.