ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the broader question of the ‘crisis of criticism’, discussing how this perception of crisis was driven by economic difficulties confronting the British art press, and by a bigger transformation of the culture of theory within the institutional contexts of art in Britain, both of which developed quickly in the years after 1976. It discusses the problems faced by the new generation of mainstream critics who had pursued a broadly left-wing agenda in the early 1970s, and the retreat from the possibility of influencing a general public for contemporary art, looking particularly at the negative response to ‘official’ exhibitions of contemporary art staged in London, and the changing positions of critics such as Richard Cork and Peter Fuller. It returns to the developing influence of theoretical discourse in artistic culture, arguing that the distinction between the late 1960s and late 1970s can be found in the institutionalisation of discourses that had previously existed outside these established contexts. It discusses the emergence of the new ‘commitment to the university’, while considering the political compromise that constrained these radical developments to the academy. It concludes by arguing that, more fundamentally, the explicit theoretical critique of subjectivity found in post-structuralism transformed the relationship of art criticism to its public, once subjectivity had come to be understood as the locus and product of a dominant ideology.
