The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity

Abstract

The 1980s saw not only the elaboration of various critical aesthetic practices, but a resurgence of interest in traditional modes of aesthetic experience and models of artistic subjectivity. This was accompanied by a frankly ideological disavowal of the historical specificity of conditions of cultural production and reception. On the other hand, in the wake of Conceptual art, critics, perhaps especially on the left, were quick to suppose that what has come to be known as institutional critique had failed, because they could see, for instance, cast urinals in elegantly appointed galleries.' Indeed, in the shadow of a punctual, linear, somewhat apocalyptic avant-gardism, it becomes very difficult to think about art after the 1960s as anything but always already sold out. Certainly, by the mid1990s nothing like a movement has emerged even to act out the function of an avant-garde. Criticism finds itself at an impasse, and so, perhaps, do remaining notions of criticality. This might provoke a reflection on the degree to which crit-