CRMEP Public Lectures, Autumn 2026, 2: Peter Osborne, ‘From Critics to Criticizability'

For decades, there has been talk of ‘a crisis of criticism’ in the artworld, following the loss of credibility of the critical paradigms established in the early- and mid-20thcentury. This has in part been a democratic reaction against the institutional of hegemony of certain forms of judgment. Yet its main effect has been to delegate effective social judgment to the market. This lecture traces the so-called 'crisis of criticism' back to artists' reactions against critics in the late 1950s and 1960s and their subsequent consequences in both the emergence of the figure of the artist-critic and the broaderinterpretative paradigm of Visual Culture. It asks: is there really a intellectual crisis of art criticism or rather a crisis in the self-image and social power of the critic? It suggests an alternative approach by returning to the question of the ‘criticizability’ of works themselves. What makes a work ‘criticizable’, rather than merely an object of descriptive commentary and subjective evaluation? What does it mean to criticize an artwork today?