The new phenomenon of artists and critics eagerly hatching their careers, quickly cobbling together movements for their resumes, and planning for their retrospectives before they have anything to say, may sound vulgarly affirmative to those reared in the ‘60s communes or the ‘70s DIY subcultures.

The text gets lost in rhetorical questions, cliché, and telling the audience what it is not about.

The task of the artist (or art critic for that matter) is perhaps not to avoid categories, but rather to temporarily show that all of them are in fact ambiguous because all of them change before our eyes, regardless of us.

It is affectless electronic music at its best, and it is an exegesis of self-cancellation. 

Jankowski keeps trying to grapple with the problematic relationship art has to society even though he cannot offer a solution.

Garden of Delete is the “determinate negation” of the Garden of Eden, whose claim to innocence it debunks.

The sounds of the tower, both percussed and ambient, are the most interesting dimensions of this project; yet, they are also what become the most compromised through Bertolozzi’s treatment of them.

Oneohtrix Point Never is the highest expression of the art of middlebrow pastiche.

With A Moon Shaped Pool, the band has officially transitioned from ostensible aesthetic activity to political pseudo-activity.

How then, in 1994, did O.J. become the posterchild for “racial justice” against the LAPD? How did his acquittal convincingly offer any sense of hope to black people across America?

As a whole, it is clear that Floratos has revamped the ways of the amateur and did not merely mimic them.

Interiority is not anything other than a reflection on the social state of music itself.

The Life of Pablo is West’s most dissonant record, literally and figuratively.

Silence has been metaphysicalized in contemporary art and music, and so a necessity has been made a virtue; a critical opportunity has been neutralized. 

In truth (one Poitras fails to see) nothing today is readily available. In our society, that unknowable-ness, that other, is channeled into fear-driven domination.

The majority of ambient music seems to reside in a form of despair; it exists most often in a state of being, relying merely on the passing of time itself to serve as its dramatic momentum, engaging the listener in a largely static sonic-auratic experience.

In the end an artwork can teach us, as a form of social knowledge, about how we experience our own experience in the face of the total industrial domination of life and, of course, art.

Being ambitious about art criticism is really about trying to grasp what has not been grasped, even and especially by the artists themselves.

The disintegration of art criticism does not have a single locus. But it does coincide with another decline: the decline of the political Left as an active force in the shaping of history.