Critical reflections

Thierry de Duve

Marcel Duchamp

Only later did I ponder what she might have meant, and whether I deserved the compliment even if she hadn't intended it as one, and how embarrassing it was to have been made self-conscious about something I would rather have ignored.

In any case it was too late. I couldn't erase what I'd heard, and my friend's remark has stayed with me, prompting me to respond probably much too personally to your invitation to reflect on the activity of the art critic: I feel bound to dissect what I myself do (or what I think I do—the risk of self-delusion is enormous) when I practice art criticism.

There is a kind of art critic—the poet-critic — who can legitimately claim to be an artist, but I'm not it. I would never call what I do art; I wouldn't even call it art criticism proper. My writing, I would hope, is theoretical throughout, which means that I expect some scientific or philosophical "truth" from it—not "poetry," or "style." This inevitably means that when I approach a work, I come to it equipped—and encumbered—with a combination of knowledge and ignorance inherent in the theoretical apparatuses that I've learned to use or have partially forged myself in earlier stages of my learning process. My work is situated within the boundaries of a practice that seeks explanation, not invention; critique, not art.

What is it, though, that prompts me to write on a given work or body of work? I need to like it, that's the first thing. Or perhaps not. “To like” is too weak. “To love” is better but a bit misleading. What I mean is more like: I need to feel that the work calls me. I'm sometimes tempted to write on works I hate but which call me all the same. I never have, partly because I lack the courage to openly antagonize the artist or other critics, and partly because any hatred I may have for a work of art (or a purported work of art) too easily draws me to moralizing, which I want to avoid. I would also have to explain why I hate the work—a useless thing. I never write on works that leave me indifferent, that's for sure, and the very fact that I write on this or that work is in itself a sign that I have a strong relation to it (as it is for most critics, I suppose). But to decide that I like a work enough to give it a lot of time and energy is a complex process. Love at first sight usually doesn't last, unless it turns out not to be just love at first sight. Most often, once a minimum level is reached, the works that trigger the desire to write about them are those I really don't know whether I am in love with or not, and from which I get a strong enough conviction that this is precisely what draws me to them. Without the sense that the work breaks the consensus that I have with myself, the impetus to write is just too weak.

This first step is intuitive, unwilled, unguarded, a gesture of surrender to the work. Yet it is at the same time utterly self-conscious and reflexive, as if I had said to myself: I know that I don't know whether I love this work, and that's why I say I love it. This "I love it" is shorthand for the idiosyncrasies of my personal taste, which include a taste for paradoxes and broken consensus. "That's why," in the same sentence, is shorthand for the awareness of my taste for paradoxes and broken consensus. Call me a perverse formalist, if you like; I prefer to say that my basic ethics in art criticism is to approach a work without pretending that my taste is unprejudiced but, to the contrary, keeping  the prejudices of my taste in check by adding to them another prejudice: my taste for works that compel me to go against the grain of my taste. Ethics enter the picture, here, but there is nothing moralizing about them. Prejudices are totally instinctive and are pervaded with biases of all sorts, and mine include the prejudice that controls the others. The ethical move is to trust them all, with no outside watchdog.

Artículo de Thierry de Duve publicado originalmente en Dardo magazine 1.