TWO GREAT CRITICS
Immanuel Kant, an important philosopher of art, establishes criticism as the possibility of judgment. After Kant, it's not enough to say "this is good" or "this is bad" by tradition. One has to investigate what makes that judgment possible.
In the Critique of Judgment, aesthetics no longer depends on private taste or dogma, but on a universality without a concept: it is neither objective truth nor subjective whim.
So, the idea of "criticism" NOT OPINION, is born.
Charles Baudelaire's contribution: He introduces criticism as a reading of the present THIS NOW WE LIVE IN.
The critic does not judge from an eternal canon, but from modernity as a lived experience.
Criticism is no longer a transcendent tribunal, but historical sensibility: grasping the new, the ephemeral, the urban, the unstable.
THE PROBLEM OF CRITICISM IN LATE MODERNISM
After Dada (1917) the foundation of art is shattered. Duchamp's readymade implicitly conveys the message:
If everything can be art, then nothing can be excluded. This leads to the implicit cultural slogan of the late 20th century:
“Anything goes.” Consequence?
Criticism loses its critical edge.
Judgment becomes suspect.
Hierarchy is equated with authoritarianism.
To evaluate = to oppress.
1. Criticism is not an intellectual luxury or an academic exercise: it is a basic function of orientation in the world.
You walk through Rome looking for a restaurant. You see two places:
one empty, the other full.
No one needs a treatise on aesthetics to decide.
The full restaurant means:
“The food here is good,”
“the cooking here is better.” That is already an implicit act of criticism.
The same is true when you choose a doctor:
you don't choose randomly; you choose the best qualified, the most reliable, the most effective.
You establish a hierarchy of competence.
The same applies to relationships:
saying "Paul is a better friend than Thomas" isn't sentimentality; it is a hierarchy of reasons: Paul is more trustworthy, more loyal, more present, cares more, and is more consistent. In every case, the same thing happens: we compare, evaluate, prioritize, prefer, and discard.
And the implicit criterion is always the same: to seek reasons that bring us closer to the truth. Without the search for truth, there is no direction, only drifting.
Criticism is not a cultural discipline:
it's a vital human function.
POSTPOSTMODERN CRITICISM IS A MALAISE
NOWADAYS, Opinion becomes judgment.
But it's not my opinion that Jimi Hendrix is one of the best guitar players in rock, that Igor Stravinsky restructured rhythm and harmony in modern music, that Miles Davis created epochs in modern jazz: cool jazz, modal jazz, fusion, that Franz Kafka generated a new world-model of reality, that Orson Welles redefined cinematic language.
Some judgments are not expressions of my taste: they are recognitions of structural transformation.
In other words:
“I like Hendrix” = opinion
"Hendrix transformed the understanding of the electric guitar" = fact
"Parker changed the grammar of jazz" = fact
"Kafka changed the structure of narrative consciousness" = fact
"Welles changed the language of cinema" = fact
These are not preferences.
They are historical-structural truths.
I've devoted my career to rehabilitating hierarchies. The word "hierarchy" has been demonized, but all practical life functions hierarchically. In everyday life, we use "good" and "bad" without drama:
One doctor is better than another. A bridge is safe or dangerous. Food is fresh or spoiled. A decision is prudent or foolish.
No one says, "Everything is equally valid." That would make life untenable. Hierarchy is not domination. It's operational order. It is a minimal structure for orientation. Without hierarchy, there is no choice, no preference, no formation, no learning, no transmission.
We are not Homo sapiens and Homo saliens: Axiology is Inevitable. As Homo saliens, humans cannot renounce axiology (there are two branches: ethics + aesthetics).
This is not a cultural choice. It is an anthropological condition. Three simple examples that prove it:
1. Existential: Choosing to live or not to live is already a value judgment. Living (let's except terminal ill, or dying for the right cause) is preferable to death. That's minimal axiology, even without words.
2. Practical: If you cross a street, you choose the safest path, and you avoid danger. That is an embodied, not theoretical, hierarchy of values.
Without axiology, the body itself could not orient itself.
3. Relational: Trusting one person and not another implies: evaluation, hierarchization, preference, distinction.
WHAT MAKES AN ARTWORK GOOD
1. Contribution (non-vanguard novelty)
The artwork must express novelty. It means to add something.
Not in the naïve avant-garde sense of “never done before in the history of humanity” — that’s a myth, not a criterion — but in the concrete sense of adding new notes to what already exists.
What is new? New relations. New intensities.
New articulations.
New ways of seeing old things.
So, the idea is not "never seen," but "never seen like this."
A really good work of art doesn’t float outside tradition.
It reconfigures tradition.
2. Intrinsic value (savoir-faire)
A good artwork must be good in itself. What does that mean? It must show: care, attention, craft, intelligence of form, internal coherence, precision, economy of means.
Not just ideas.
Not just intentions.
Not just concepts.
Not just discourse.
But a form that holds.
You can feel when something is made by someone who knows what they're doing.
That's not elitism — that's recognition of competence. Call it craft. And sorry, but post-postmodern art is oblivious to any idea of craft.
You know when a soup is good. And yes, maybe you've had a poor upbringing with your own food tradition (I plead guilty myself), but once you know what's better to learn it and stick to it. Call it mastery. We've seen plenty of Netflix's Chef's Table documentaries to know what I'm talking about.
Call it intelligence in matter.
Call it savoir-faire.
3. World-power capacity to transform experience.
This is the real test: a good work of art must do something.
Not just signify.
Not just express.
Not just represent.
Not just shock.
Not just provoke.
It must reorganize perception.
Reconfigure sensitivity.
Restructure understanding.
Shift how reality is experienced. A real artwork doesn’t end in itself. It continues inside the viewer.
It leaves traces.
It generates consequences.
It produces after-effects.
It opens paths.
It creates continuity.
It founds trajectories.
I'm not referring to an event. I mean a gesture.
A structure. A world-producing machine.
Compact version for thinkers (not art tourists)
A serious work must satisfy these three conditions:
It adds difference (not noise)
It embodies form (not just intention)
It produces the world (not just meaning)
If it doesn't transform experience, it’s decoration.
If it doesn't produce effects, it's rhetoric.
If it doesn't generate a world, it's just an ingredient.
Real work doesn't ask to be interpreted — it changes how you see.
In The School of Athens Raphael produces an epistemological world: knowledge as spatial order.
Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez creates a new epistemic world: observer, power, reality, and image collapse into a single system.
The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault
produces a political-emotional world of suffering and survival.
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich produces zero-degree meaning. Art as pure structure.
The Bauhaus Building by Walter Gropius. It produces a new world of living: space, function, pedagogy, and society all unified.
Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X recodes the human figure as an existential field of violence.
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude creates a world model in which myth, history, and reality are structurally unified.
The Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe shows how architecture is structured as truth.
Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is not just a container; it shows architecture as a transformative force in the city.
