The place and role of criticism as we know it from modern art is fundamentally changed today, as is art itself. If anything can be art today (after Duchamp) and anyone can be an artist (after Beuys), then how does the concept of criticism adapt and change in this new artistic environment? What are the parameters by which a work of art is judged today? What is the context that determines its significance? What is the role of the critic?
"Critics in Space aims to respond to a changed and updated role of the critic. It rejects the anachronistic idea of the critic as a narrow specialist and final authority who must say whether or not a work has value.
The Critics in Space project places the critic in a dialogical situation in which understanding art derives from knowing and sharing the process of making art itself. The critic is removed from his pedestal and reveals his own process of thinking, searching, and hesitating.
Our desire is that the themes and issues that the videos present "leak out" to real life through the democratic format of video. There, in formally familiar territory, the viewer can decide for themselves how the issues - thematic and aesthetic - resonate with their own experience.
"Critics in Space is a video series about art and criticism. A project of the Art Affairs and Documents Foundation with the support of the Innovative Criticism Program of the National Fund for Culture.