Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of
evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and
aesthetics have lost all legitimacy. Formerly, artists claimed their right to
decide for themselves what counted as a work of art, thanks to the subversion of
the established criteria of aesthetic judgment. But that very subversion is
today the object of subsidy and support by museums and galleries, anxious to
display their liberalism. A new and ambiguous game of complicity and antagonism
has united artists and institutions.
Yet, however much the alliance of subversion and subsidy aims to exclude it,
aesthetic judgment remains