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Beate Söntgen: Decorating Charleston Farmhouse:  Bloomsbury’s Experiments in Forms of Life,  Work, and Art
Decorating Charleston Farmhouse: Bloomsbury’s Experiments in Forms of Life, Work, and Art
(p. 139 – 172)

Beate Söntgen

Decorating Charleston Farmhouse: Bloomsbury’s Experiments in Forms of Life, Work, and Art

PDF, 34 pages

  • criticism
  • aesthetics

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Beate Söntgen

Beate Söntgen

is Professor of Art History and was Vice President of Research and Humanities in the Presidential Committee (2012–2019) at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. She heads, together with Erich Hörl, the research training group “Cultures of Critique” as well as, together with Susanne Leeb, “PriMus – PhD in Museums.” Before joining the Leuphana University in 2011, she held a professorship in Art History at Ruhr University of Bochum (2003–2011), where she directed, together with Ulrike Groos, the postgraduate program “Art Criticism and Curatorial Knowledge,” and was Laurenz Professor for Contemporary Art at the University of Basel, Switzerland (2002–2003). She is a member of the Advisory Board of Texte zur Kunst and of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation. She has published on modern and contemporary art, art theory and art criticism. She co-edited Judgement Practices in the Artistic Field (in print, München: Edition Metzler, 2020), was guest editor of Der Ort der Kunst­kritik in der Kunstgeschichte for the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (78:1, 2015), and with Ewa Lajer-Burchardt co-edited Interiors and Interiority (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2016).
Other texts by Beate Söntgen for DIAPHANES
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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