About Looking
About Looking
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作者：
D. Craven
要理解像约翰·伯杰这样的左翼艺术批评家的必要性，以及他与众不同的原因，重要的是要认识到艺术批评是如何体现和被现代社会的矛盾所消解的。目前，艺术批评已经倒退到一种重复主义，它只不过是对艺术形式进行同义反复的描述，就像前卫艺术已经被一个现在需要艺术保持无政府主义分离的体系所占用一样。既然假定描述可以是中性的，那么一个基本的前提总是这样的：在仔细地描述艺术对象时，批评家以某种方式“客观地”解释了它--这个前提导致了关于“品味”和“质量”的自私声明，讽刺地证明了那些制造它们的人的社会自命不凡。
To understand the need for leftist art critics like John Berger, as well as the reason he is unusual, it is important to recognize the way art criticism embodies and is disembodied by the contradictions of modern society. At present, art criticism has regressed to a species of empiricism which hardly does more than give tautologic descriptions of art forms, just as avant-garde art has become appropriated by a system that now needs art to remain anarchistically apart. Since it is assumed that description can be neutral, a basic presupposition is always that, in carefully describing the art object, the critic has somehow “objectively” explained it — a presupposition which results in self-serving pronouncements about “taste” and “quality” that ironically bear witness to the social pretensions of those who make them.