| Description: |
In the second half of the 1980s, the aesthetics of dumbness [bêtise] proved to reach the general field of cultural production. From 1994 to 1998, a few young art critics tackled the phenomenon and tried to theorize it. They did so in the most widely read magazines at the time: Flash Art International, Artpress, Frieze. The corpus of this paper (articles by art critics Joshua Decter, Éric Troncy, Jon Savage, Andrew Hulktrans and Jean-Yves-Jouannais) testifies both to undergoing changes in art criticism itself and in the way critics look at dumb art. It appears that art criticism converted to cultural criticism: critics paid little attention to artworks, making them mere illustrations and visual arguments. On the contrary, popular media culture, including the most regressive of it, came under close scrutiny in contemporary art magazines. Beavis & Butt-Head, Melrose Place or Bay Watch were quite thoroughly investigated in the columns of Artforum or Flash Art. Quite surprisingly, works of art labelled as “contemporary art” provided little analysis, while television soap operas and cartoons led to the most stimulating thoughts, using the paradigm of meta-criticality dear to modernism. In that way, they gave the most regressive pieces the status of specular images, both deceitful and critical, of the very culture of stupidity they were born from. Then comes the following paradox: art criticism in the 1990s, alternatively over-enthusiastic and plaintive, intellectualized the most radical anti-intellectualism. ; Dans la deuxième moitié des années 1980 s’est développée, dans l’ensemble du champ de la culture, une véritable esthétique de la bêtise. Quelques jeunes critiques d’art se sont alors emparés du phénomène et ont tenté de le théoriser, entre 1994 et 1998, dans les revues les plus lues de l’époque : Flash Art International, Artpress, Frieze. L’étude de ce corpus d’articles (signés par Joshua Decter, Éric Troncy, Jon Savage, Andrew Hulktrans et Jean-Yves Jouannais) témoigne à la fois des mutations de la critique ... |