Prof. Peter Osborne public lecture “On Criticability”
Time: Wednesday, November 26, 2 pm
Place: Vilnius Academy of Arts, 102 auditorium, building C1 (Maironio str. 6, Vilnius)
The lecture will be held in English.
For at least 25 years now, there has been talk of a ‘crisis of criticism’ in the art world, and the lack of credibility of the critical paradigms established in the twentieth century under the conditions of a globalised art world. This has largely involved an apparently democratic reaction against the institutionalisation of certain hegemonic forms of ‘judgement’ – both intellectually and institutionally. Yet its main effect has been to delegate judgment to the market. This talk suggests that we take an alternative approach and return to the question of the ‘criticisability’ of works themselves. What makes a work ‘criticisable’, rather than merely the object of a combination of commentary and subjective evaluation? What does it mean to criticise an artwork today?
Peter Osborne is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, and the founding Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP). From 1983 to 2016, he was an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2004), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013), The Postconceptual Condition (2018), and Crisis as Form (2022).
The lecture is a part of a cycle of public lectures for doctoral students in art history and will be moderated by philosopher and curator Edvardas Šumila, PhD candidate at The New School for Social Research in New York.
Doctoral students are encouraged to read the author’s TEXT in advance.
The event is part of a lecture cycle jointly organised by the Contemporary Art Centre, the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
