To Serve Art or the System: On Misuse of Criticism and Trivialization of Art
To Serve Art or the System: On Misuse of Criticism and Trivialization of Art

Summary/Abstract: This paper is about different strategies the patriarchal system has been using to diminish the power of art and make art promote the ideology of the masculine-oriented culture. The author makes use of several examples: a play by Howard Barker, Shoshana Felman's analysis of the critical readings applied to a story by Balzac, and Sallie Goetsch's discussion of some modern productions of the Oresteia. The focus is on different ways in which criticism has been misused, and different forms in which art comes to the audience, its subversive power already neutralized. The author proceeds to refer to the famous and still controversial essay on interpretation by Susan Sontag in order to consider the possibility of conceiving a critical discourse whose power will not be that of mastery or repression, but of true liberation.

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