Antagonising the Limits of Critique

Abstract

This chapter examines the artistic practices and discourses emerging within the field of ‘Institutional Critique’ understood here as the historical tendency of the artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present. As set out by sociologists Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello, the idea and practice of critique—and here I specifically refer to artistic practices of institutional critique—exist in a paradoxical and dynamic relation with capitalism: an ‘isomorphic’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, The New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 518) relation, both sharing the primary aim of the ‘prioritisation and exploitation of change’ (Boltanski, 2011, On Critique, A Sociology of Emancipation, p. 136). Moreover, this isomorphism of critique and capitalism inevitably transforms the way in which the subject is to be understood insofar as it has an influence over the modes of subjectification available to artists, including those engaged in practices of institutional critique.