A*DESK website landing page (Magazine, 19 August 2019): https://a-desk.org
Inspired by Martí Peran’s 2006 harangue, “What Criticism?”, the third of four short articles I wrote was published this past week in A*DESK, a trilingual contemporary art journal produced in Barcelona. Each of these four texts revisits and reframes a previously published article from the A*DESK archive.
ENTRY #3: “WHAT CRITICISM?” BY MARTÍ PERAN (FEB 2006) (English)
TEXTO NÚMERO 3: “¿QUÉ CRÍTICA?” DE MARTÍ PERAN (FEBRERO 2006)
TEXT NÚMERO 3: “¿QUINA CRÍTICA?” DE MARTÍ PERAN (FEBRER 2006)
Excerpt from my article:
“The trenchant rumbling in Martí Peran’s “What Criticism?” might remind one of Marx’s provocation, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing.” In both cases, the urgent moment of impasse presents the opening onto utopia. Aesthetic experience today offers the prevailing “model of existence” – the “culture industry,” to use the old-fashioned term – in which “culture” becomes the production line and shopping mall of aesthetic goods and services. But, as Peran indicates, the aesthetic is an experience built on buyer’s remorse. Enjoyment, as the psychoanalysts like to point out, is already a symptomatic defense against its own beyond. Following the thread of Peran’s text, one could argue that the aesthetic experience – as the determinate negation of the existing – today functions as a defense against the critical spirit upon which the aesthetic dimension as such is based.”