Mediation in the Visual Arts

The century that just passed imposed important mutations in the configuration of the visual arts. The modernist avant-gardes - it is known imposed styles, vocabularies and work techniques radically renewing. Frequently invoked in the philosophical discourse, "the death of art" was in fact announcing the end of a cycle, the end of a "beautiful" story, the twilight of the traditional manner of making and receiving the artistic object. Alongside the classical cannons of recognizing the "work of art", the exigencies of professional criticism were also disturbed. We live in full "post-art" or in the "post-history" of art; we are contemporary to the art of after its "end", when everything is pulverized, relativized and allowed(1). The often-invoked "agony" of art is also accompanied by an inevitable theoretical deconstruction of criticism. Noting the dead end in which it seemed to get, Artpress - a Parisian magazine specialized in promoting contemporary art - aimed, in its January 2011 number, to discuss the possibility of "reinventing" criticism. How is the "mission" of criticism seen today? What of the critic? To reveal the "truth" of a work of art? To discover values? To legitimize certain practices?