Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

My paper examines Oscar Wilde’s conception of art-criticism and Michel Foucault’s conception of critique in light of contemporary theories on classical reception, which I associate with my own reading of Foucault’s theories on archaeology and the archive, in order to discuss how a combination of these two conceptions may help us articulate a broader understanding of art criticism: one I will refer to as art-critique, and which addresses the rational, imaginative and aesthesiogenic tensions intrinsic to every artwork as heuristic mediations to produce ethically-committed archaeological evaluations of the present. I therefore intend to discuss a hermeneutical hypothesis that is interested in subjectively approaching artworks as present-tense archives, as heuristic mediations for disclosing and realising orders of the present according to certain ethical commitments, as affective and intellectual grammars, lexicons and thesauri that may help the critic territorialise, deterritorialise and organise the tumultuous order of her present. What I intend, therefore, is to suggest a criticism routine: a routine that appraises the aesthetic potency of an artwork with basis on its formal and material characteristics, but which expands this very potency by studiously evincing or eliciting the possible dialectical connections that such artwork establishes with pressing political matters of the critic’s present—matters that, even if they are not this artwork’s specific objects of analysis, nor contemporaneous with it, still reflect, symptomise and enlighten social malaises current in the critic’s reality.