Let's not be chaste! Critics should strive for immanent dialectical critique, which has itself become desecrated. I can only imagine how many status quo readers will comment here that it’s not ‘relevant’ anymore; as in relevant to the status quo and conformed taste. And that is exactly the point.

And what do we make of the issue that our frustration is with realizing the futility of any radical gesture? That’s the problem of postmodernism in a nutshell.

For its entire modern history art was bound up in the possibility of freedom. So what happens when freedom no longer seems possible?

The ethos of artistic representation undergoes revision as it intermingles with a new enlightenment spirit in what is broadly perceived as the age of AI.

There are periodic flares of interest in sound art, from top ten lists to comprehensive sound art exhibitions, and yet no one is really certain what this term means, and what the whole thing is about.

Man must care about art because it is a practice in which he can both critique his ambivalence and envision a world without it.

The art world fails to see the election of Trump as anything more than terrifying repetition (albeit on steroids) of the Culture Wars. This points to an exhaustion of ideas.

If there's a reintroduction of politics (and not pseudo-political culture) in 2016 — something many of us have not seen in our lifetime — there will be a dramatic change in the way art is made in the coming years.

The veil has been lifted on the sensually expressed neoliberal ideals of being alright.

Are we to accept that the field of artistic production — unique in its capacity to butt up against the world as it is and imagine a world as it should be — offers only an endorsement for a political stalwart?

What role can criticism possibly play in completing works of art, or “fulfilling” them?

Modern criticism developed when art became serious and demanded thought. Yet the vast majority of our culture today isn't meant to be seriously thought about.

The new phenomenon of artists and critics eagerly hatching their careers, quickly cobbling together movements for their resumes, and planning for their retrospectives before they have anything to say, may sound vulgarly affirmative to those reared in the ‘60s communes or the ‘70s DIY subcultures.

Jankowski keeps trying to grapple with the problematic relationship art has to society even though he cannot offer a solution.

Garden of Delete is the “determinate negation” of the Garden of Eden, whose claim to innocence it debunks.

Oneohtrix Point Never is the highest expression of the art of middlebrow pastiche.

Interiority is not anything other than a reflection on the social state of music itself.

Silence has been metaphysicalized in contemporary art and music, and so a necessity has been made a virtue; a critical opportunity has been neutralized. 

In the end an artwork can teach us, as a form of social knowledge, about how we experience our own experience in the face of the total industrial domination of life and, of course, art.

Being ambitious about art criticism is really about trying to grasp what has not been grasped, even and especially by the artists themselves.