ABSTRACT
The motivation to write this chapter arises from an unease-even a dissatisfaction-with much contemporary art criticism. The dissatisfaction is at its greatest when I compare much criticism with my own experience of art, whether that art is ‘high quality’ ‘old master’ paintings, or ‘interesting’ contemporary experimental work. The encounter with an artwork can be engaging, absorbing, fascinating, deeply satisfying, moving, life-enhancing, stimulating, humbling, frustrating, or even infuriating, and it cannot simply be put into words. These seem to be responses shared, at one time or another, by many people. Yet contemporary criticism, largely because of its intellectual(ist) preoccupations for reading artworks as texts so as to deconstruct their meanings, tends to ignore or dismiss a response which takes into account the qualitative and/or particular experience of art. The reader loses out twice: the attention to art is lost amidst intellectual interpretations and, with it, there is lost an art of critical looking.
