FOR LEGITIMATE SPECIFICITY IN OUR ART CRITICISM

For all those who work in the encompassing field of visual culture, within the Caribbean and Latin American area, the professional and social problems art criticism has to deal with are not alien to them.

Either those who have practiced it in an authentic and profound way, like many artists with a conceptual background, or persons who work in cultural teaching institutions, in museums, galleries, or are simply experts or collectors, they all complain about the confusion that exists sometimes among the different disciplines that conduct the analysis, coding, publicity, periodization, and putting the artistic products into ideas.

They also tend to reject an indulgent, gullible “criticism” that lacks a sound intellectual knowledge, very common in a lot of publications where the underdevelopment sign forks into an ordinary sophistry at the service of business and in the repetition of snob phrases, incoherent adjectives and shallow apologies.

Also meetings, magazines, and books, or special TV programs and the digital media have been means to show all the disagreements and approaches of many art critics about the vital limitations or essential deviations that combine within the panorama of that diarist practice or evaluation in perspective, which, in an article published many years ago in the second issue of Loquevenga magazine, I labeled as «the paltriness trade».

The same economic poverty and of opportunities in our continental and insular contexts projects itself over the critic's personality, forcing him to depend on other activities to make ends meet, or on occasions to leave aside his ethical condition, his philosophic and aesthetic concepts, and even his decisive role as an inductor or mediator in the evolution of art, to instead respond to requests from investment and merchant collectors that require a pseudocriticism with admitted responsibility, even getting to adopt fallacies and “fairy tales” suitable for the propagation and dominating imposition of «art-merchandise.»s?