Art services critics by perpetuating the view that the artist inhabits the site of silence, vision, transcendent spirit, emotion and intuition.
By contrast the critic exerts this from the site of intellect, speech, judgement and rationale. In more recent times a postmodern sensibility has become established, one that aims to dissolve the assumed hierarchy through which critics’ use of praise, blame, and explanation to reveal the meaning, and therefore truth and value of a work, is rejected as being a spurious and reductive division between theory and practice.
(Series edited by Peter Venner and Matthew Coleman, January 2011
