Lit Review: Attemtps to Locate a Function for Criticism

Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is the critic's task to study this activity in the present. A certain aspect of the programme of modernity has been fairly and squarely wound up (and not, let us hasten to emphasise in these bourgeois times, the spirit informing it). This completion has drained the criteria of aesthetic judgment we are heir to of their substance, but we go on applying them to present-day artistic practices. The new is no longer a criterion, except among latter-day detractors of modern art who, where the much-execrated present is concerned, cling solely to the things that their traditionalist culture has taught them to loathe in yesterdays' art. In order to invent more effective tools and more valid viewpoints, it behooves us to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social arena, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing. - Nicolas Bourriand, Relational Aesthetics

N.B. What this idea might look like applied to theater criticism. Twelve Thought Experiments On Gauging Distance, Jeffrey M. Jones. Just one possible application.