Contemporary Art and Artistic Discretion (81874)
Session Chair: Birgit Bærøe
Saturday, 15 June 2024 15:35
Session: Session 4
Room: Salle 233
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Professional discretion is about being granted the authority to make assessments and decisions in the absence of specified guidance. Theories about discretion are primarily found within the social sciences and the research field of professional theory and the welfare state. Drawing on this conceptual apparatus combined with recent art theory, I will propose a theoretical conceptualization of artistic discretion. The aim is to show how this framework can provide a way to understand assessments of contemporary visual arts in its complexity.
Contemporary art consists of a variety of composite expressions and practices, across genres, categories, and disciplines. This expanding and increasingly cross-disciplinary field has in the last decades contributed to repeated discussions about the status and crisis of art criticism. Criticism understood as assessments of whether the specific work is good or bad, judgment on quality and value, has played a decreasingly role in favor of a more descriptive, affirmative critique. However, parallel to the development of alternative post-critical theories, renewed attention is directed towards the need for an explicitly critical, professional discussion about justification and the meaning of judgment and evaluation. Problems of categorization and judgment becomes pertinent in a visual arts field of interdisciplinary practices with composite aesthetic, institutional, ethical, epistemological, and political aspects, where different normative principles and frameworks conflict. In this context I will suggest that a theory of artistic discretion can address the dilemmas and considerations involved in assessments, more precisely than traditional theories of aesthetic judgment.
Authors:
Birgit Bærøe, University of Oslo, Norway
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Birgit Bærøe is a University Doctoral Student at University of Oslo in Norway
See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule
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