Sweet Dreams. Comptemporary Art and Complicity - Jan Baetens

In short, Drucker charges modernist and postmodernist art theory (one of the most interesting aspects of this thesis is that it stresses the ideological and aesthetic continuity between both periods, at least if one focuses on their major theoreticians) with dogmatism as well as with unworldliness. Dogmatism, for both modernist and postmodernist thinkers, reject all types of art that do not obey the notion of ‘negativity' (a concept that relies heavily on medium-specific theories à la Greenberg and the Adornian critical theory tradition): art is defined in terms of antagonism, and the main victims of such a dogmatism are materiality on the one hand (Drucker brings well to the fore the conceptual ‘superego' of modernist and postmodernist theory, and maybe of theory tout court ) and visual pleasure on the other hand (all positive feelings engendered by art being considered petty-bourgeois and therefore despicable). Unworldliness, since the plea for negativity is credited automatically with a political surplus value that its very sociological conditions (art as negativity flourishes best in academic circles and the subsidized art circuits that live in symbiosis with academia) prevent it from doing what it is supposed to do, namely to foster societal change. Yet art that stays far from the madding crowd cannot have any real impact, neither on the audience nor on society in general. more...

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