Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. You’re always stepping back and looking at everything afresh, never taking anything for granted, never turning a blind eye to your own complicities and flaws—ideally, anyway. We are committed to criticism not as a way of formulating value judgments but as a literary-artistic-intellectual practice that has a relationship to irony as defined by Friedrich Schlegel: “clear consciousness of an eternal agility.” It’s also related to Adorno’s comment that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” The common denominator that links irony with Adorno’s remark is this: Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself.
In some way or other, good criticism, maybe all good art, should instruct you in not being at home in your own home. An ethos of critique in this sense aligns with Artforum’s participation in urgent larger efforts to expand art history and remedy its vast erasures; to confront how racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy shaped and continue to shape art and culture; to address inequities of representation; and to give platforms to abolitionist voices and art and writing that envision new possible futures.
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