"Retreating into the external world"

In the framework of the lecture series „What is critique?“ Lucie Kolb will talk about her book Study, Not Critique (transversal 2018). The series is based on Michael Foucault’s famous lecture with the same name. It investigates how criticism can be articulated with the means and strategies of art. Study, Not Critique considers the fine line between self-determined knowledge production and a commodified form of critique. The book examines three journals from the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s, each of which stands for a different political and aesthetic agenda: The Fox (New York, 1975-1976), A.N.Y.P. (Munich and Berlin, 1989-1999) and e-flux journal (New York, 2008-present). In distinct ways, each publishing project blurs the border separating artistic production and discursive production while simultaneously attending to new forms of discipline and commodification arising in the process. Lucie Kolb demonstrates the connection between common intellectual activity in the art field, which takes place in this field but is not of it, and work on the conditions of production.