We live in a time of profound transformations, which radically affect
the way in which we tend to articulate our relationship with the world
around us: transformations which affect the general framework of our
comprehension of the world, of what it means to inhabit it, of what we
can expect of our existence, and of what it means to share that
existence with our fellow beings. The old "grand recits" that
articulated that comprension have collapsed, and although forceful ideas-
-such as freedom, brotherhood and justice–continue to orient our
practices, the models of response that they support are no longer rigid,
stable and univocal. We thus find ourselves facing the need to
reformulate the horizons, the mediations: we need new maps for
understanding our times, new visions that will help us articulate our
relationship with the world and all that it means to "be human" within
it.

Regarding the practices of symbolic production in the ambit of visual
communications, I believe that those transformations have two principle
signs.

+ First, the appearance and already accomplished settling of a moving
image in the ambit of the technical image. It is true that this
appearance of a moving image already has a long history with filmmaking.
Nevertheless, that could not affect the practices of visual production
in such a decisive way. Not until the general conditions of expectation,
of contemplation, varied enough so that the time-image, the image-
movement, has become the dominant form of experience of the image–
something which has already begun to occur–permitting for the first
time in the history of humanity that representation be made ponderable
in itself as an event, as a "happening", not as something definitively
given and forever identical to itself. As it may be evident, that
implies great transformations in the general symbolic ordering that
mediatizes our whole relationship with representation. And,
consequently, in all of the social devices of production, transmission
and experience of the image and visual communication in contemporary
societies. It is therefore inevitable to assume that those great
transformations will affect not only artistic practices but also the
modes in which the practice of art criticism can be developed within
them.

+ The second of the "great signs" of which I am considering refers to
the current proliferation of the mediums through which the social and
public distribution of images and visual comunication products are
verified. If the mechanisms of collectivization of experience of visual
practices in modern societies were formerly conditioned by the
requirement of presence, and they were therefore mechanisms of a
spatialized nature (such as museums, galleries, urban spaces, specific
locations or even "alternative or independent spaces"), the current
proliferation of mediums and new mediums profiles a much broader,
swarming and lively panorama of devices. A panorama that, above all, is
no longer conditioned by the obligatory resolution of the "exhibition"
in terms of presence or specific location, spatialization. It seems to
me evident that, from there, follows an almost immeasurable challenge
for the creative practices, and by extension a peremptory transformation
of the space for art criticism (which will soon find itself facing the
possibility of using a multiplicity of channels, mechanisms and forms
for which it was not conceived).

I would not like to omit pointing out that there is a third sign of even
greater importance, if indeed possible, that also conditions the modes
of experience of that visual communicative practices in contemporary
societies, which is the very emergence of a paradigm of diversity in the
cultural organization of experience, submitted to a bursting process of
geopolitical globalization which ought to be administered cautiously
within a postcolonial paradigm. Let us say that this new paradigm
profoundly affects all the processes of the construction of subjectivity
and therefore of the circulation of whichever modules of social
"communitary" identification, through the imaginary visuals. In any
case, and since this refers more directly to the questions of content
which are the specific responsibility of the creators and cultural
producers, and since many of my colleagues have also alluded to them, I
will leave that question aside, yet not without first confirming my
conviction that, for however much we situate the "structural" problems,
in other words, those that refer to the social mechanisms of production
and social distribution of artistic knowledge, these questions of
content will always prevail as the truly principle ones.

Having stated these "big signs", I will try to be precise and specific,
and I apologize if, due to this, I fall into a simplifying schematism.
Below, I will enumerate, in a very synthetic manner and parting from
these two considerations, what I believe to be the 5 principle
challenges imposed on the practices of art criticism by this "big"
transformations.

1. The expansion of the entertainment industries, which follows the
consecration of the spectacle in contemporary societies, absorbs the
practices of production of sense into its territory, converting the
critic into an integrated manager under the figure of curator, who is
virtually a negotiator of cultural offer. It is the task of the critic
to resist the trivialization of her/his work by opposing the aim which
precedes the demand–the increase in audience–opposing to it an aim in
keeping with the increase in the amount of sense in circulation. If
this compels her or him to organize fewer exhibitions or to tailor them
toward more specialized audiences or those more willing to make an
effort to participate in the processes of construction and distribution
of sense, she or he should not falter. The current inflation of
curatorial work hardly disguises the need for the contemporary cultural
industry to supply itself with products that demonstrate meaningful
elements of novelty or content. It is the work of the committed critic
to demand that those contents do not merely "appear", demonstrating the
deceitful brilliance pertaining to phantasmagoria, but that they can
truely be inscribed and partaken in with the maximum intensity and
critical elucidation.

2. The transformation of the "economies of visuality" through the
emergence and settling of a time-image presses against the need of
spatialized devices for exhibition of visual creations. The critic must
join that pressure, favoring the rapid transformation of the old
devices so as to make them capable and adequate, as soon as possible,
for the presentation of the new forms of a time-based-art (even there
where this pressure can make possible the disappearance of such "spatial
devices"). This does not only mean working on a transformation of the
exhibition form which requires the museum, the gallery or the
"independent space" to find formulas for presenting within its territory
"non spatialized" forms of immaterial work in the production of time-
images. But that it can even mean making ponderable modes of social
distribution and collective appropriation of these new artistic forms
and practices that do not cross the required rituality of its
presentation within spaces.

3. Like what is taking place within the arena of criticism, we are also
witnessing a transformation of the function of those devices of public
presentation and social appropriation of the aesthetic experience and of
artistic value. If it becomes clear that to a large extent that change
of function claims for a task of dynamization of the processes of
reception perhaps it also has to become clear that there exists a need
to adapt those public devices into effective instruments of support for
the very processes of production. The contemporary cultural producer
feels liberated from the "compulsion of the object" that pressured her
or him from a spatialized conception of the artistic practices, and that
leads to a limitlessness of the forms in which it is ponderable to
resolve and develop his or her immaterial work (of sense production).
Since this has not to be conditioned anymore by a necessarily material
resolution of one or another object–an object that can be introduced in
the market or presented under an stable appearance in any "space"–since
then the institutions must assume a new role of aiding the production of
these new practices. If that compels the museum to begin taking on a new
responsibility related to the production of the new expressive
practices, it seems to me evident that it is the critic who should take
on this work together with the creator, conceiving of her or his new
role as a cultural producer too, and at the same time mediating with the
institution so as to achieve an evolution therein and a newborn
receptiveness of this new system of production necessities.

4. However it comes about, it is necessary to restore, reestablish and
reinforce the terrain of writing as a fundamental domain of the work of
the critic. This implies in any case a withdrawal from the journalistic
space, in which criticism succumbs to the demands of information and the
advertising interests of the cultural industries in their systematic
search for a spectacular projection, supported by the media. The domain
in which that recuperation is ponderable cannot be any other than the
essay space, meant also as a space open to experimentation, to the
attempt, to the test. The critic must be, first and foremost, an
essayist.

and 5. This essay writing–which appears not only as the domain of
judgement or valoration, but also and especially as a territory or
machine for the proliferation of the interpretations and the
multiplication of the senses–this writing must expose itself to the
challenge of interaction, of being online, of contrasting itself in the
"real time" made possible by the new communication technologies. If the
power of writing as a critical device resides in its being structurally
projected toward its posterity, toward the other time in which it will
be read, it is possible to imagine that the challenge of a rewriting and
rereading online (in the resulting approximation of the acts of writing
and reading) that challenge supposes an imponderable margin of risk and
at the same time a strengthening that must be investigated. The
participative act of a critical essay, at all times objectionable, open
to dissent, to response, in which any enunciation is not exercised in
any way other than one among many possibilities, profiles a map of a
breakdown of the hierarchy of interpretive judgement and value, which is
expanded in the style of a time that knows that only in the multiplicity
of interpretations and their interweaving, in the diversity of the
paradigms and their contrast, can any remaining effect of truth repose.
Submitted to that tension, critical writing does not only become
accomplice to an unrenounceable project of engagement with the
radicalization of democratic forms, but it is itself submitted to its
demands.

I trust that it is understood, in any case, that with these brief notes
I do not intend to define answers or definitive orientations, but merely
to point out some of the challenges that, in my opinion, defy and
interpellate the practice of art criticism in our days.

+ + +

This essay was given for "The art critic in the culture of today," a
panel organized by de Appel, Amsterdam, in April 2000.

Translated from Spanish by Dena Ellen Cowan.

* Essayer is Ensayador in Spanish and in that language can also mean
rehearser. (Translator's note)