Criticism as a Protective Device of Art

비평의 본질로서의 예술성과 비평의 제문제

Criticism of today finds itself in an awkward situation, for it is now being transformed in the same way that literature and the arts were transformed by the avant-garde movements at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It is characterized predominantly by a break with harmony and with the values of realism. As such, it is driven by a post-modem ethos, an artistic, social, and cultural phenomenon that veers toward open, fragmentary, and indeterminate forms. In this paper, I examine today's most urgent social and cultural issues with reference to artistic production and criticism, in order to illuminate the true nature of criticism. The outstanding questions in the world of art criticism are given in five categories: the lack of critical reality in argumentative criticism; the problem of artistic and literary production in global capitalism; the artistic mind and its consciousness of socio-historical ideology; anxiety of the rise of cyberjournalistic criticism; and the question of subordination to western systems in the field of interpretation and criticism. For my analysis, I have tried to formulate a three-dimensional critique structure that will help us organize the relationships between the points of argument: 1) criticism as a creative force behind the artist; 2) criticism as critique of artistic production; and 3) criticism as critique of other critics. This multi-layered structure will be appropriate to our task of interpretation and evaluation, as the proposed complex structure of criticism will be able to embrace the diverse aspects of our problematic argument. In the final analysis, my argument resolves itself into a question of art, more specifically into a question of criticism as a protective device of art in an age threatened by globalization and cultural monopolization.