Crisis as form

Contemporary art criticism is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, subterranean terms of art judgement are largely neglected on both sides of the debate. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement used in contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland. The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity and the changing state of museums, to analysing the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time. To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art‘s own constitutive crisis of form.