Lecture ART AND CRITICISM by Prof. Dr. Marcus Steinweg

Many thanks to the philosopher Prof. Dr. Marcus Steinweg for his lecture “ART AND CRITICISM” and discussing the works of our participants.

“The relationship between art and criticism is an expression of tension and difference. It’s also a sibling relationship, because critical consciousness — as well as consciousness of the critical and its limits — belongs to art, which divests itself of acute evidence by demonstrating its own arbitrariness to it. At the same time, criticism takes a sort of loan from art in order to be credibly critical instead of just a staging of the critical. Art must do the same, insofar as that means borrowing speculatively against its uncertain future. “As long as criticism is not an art alongside the other arts, it will remain petty, biased, unjust and trivial,” Rilke once wrote. Criticism is only critical when it is self-critical, which implies active self-destabilization. Its judgments are poised above myriad blind suppositions. It exists only as blind praxis based on a mortgage whose value goes undeclared.” (Text by courtesy of Prof. Dr. Marcus Steinweg)