Note on the task of criticism in the arts today

Excerpted from “Remarks on Warhol,” on this site:

Art only functions and so truly exists when encountered not only in experience in its perceptual and sensual character, but also as something that must get people talking. Not because, as the idealist philosopher Hegel believed, thinking in concepts, propositions, and arguments is all that matters in a modern world where people are less embedded in the social life they are engaged in, but just because seeing and feeling on the one hand and reflecting on what we see and feel using concepts that grasp what they are “about” and propositions that present not lifeworlds but interpretive hypotheses, these are inseparable. And this is at the broadest level also the politics of art today, since to think is to problematize. When you see images that strike you, be they beautiful, ugly, or simply striking, ask, what is the matter?