ACADEMIA Letters The plurivocity of art criticism Rachel Cecília de Oliveira Art criticism is a controversial activity, born from the Kantian necessity and subjective uni- versality of judgement and historically marked by the word “crisis”. The constant and eternal “crisis” of art criticism has been attested and demonstrated several times since Idealism. For over a century, art criticism has been taken as an empty activity that does not ofer examples that can be taken as more than an exercise of trial and error, reduced to mere descriptions or so-called biographies. The meta criticism expresses this eternal state of “crisis”. Lionello Venturi in History of Art Criticism, back in 1936, attributes this situation to the severance be- tween aesthetics, history, and criticism, that is, the many aspects of the relationship between the public and the work of art. This severance points to the infuence of positivism, to the absence of a link between theory and praxis. Thus, the “crisis” that accompanies art criticism can be perceived as some collateral efect of the very thought that originates it. The subjective and circumscriptive character of Kantian philosophy is the frst symptom of this situation. Kant establishes the birth of art criticism by overcoming a technical notion of art and consequently of a prescriptive aesthetic. He does so by neglecting the object, transforming judgement into a formality concerning the subject, motivated by something exterior. Within this context art criticism’s praxis stumbles upon two main difculties: the attempt to search for the truth of experience through discussion, regardless the impossibility of ac- cessing the noumenon; and the attempt to encompass the phenomenon without incurring in relativism. Both difculties are surpassed by Kant’s theory, but only formally. Therefore, art criticism is born as a possibility of this discussion but without a direction to guide its realization. Giving the metaphysic structure that grounds art criticism, “crisis” is the result of a posterior focus on the object that leads to the understanding of limitations and difcul- ties brought up by it. Therefore, art criticism assumes a task that contradicts its underlying Academia Letters, May 2021 Corresponding Author: Rachel Cecília de Oliveira, rachel-cecilia@ufmg.br Citation: de Oliveira, R.C. (2021). The plurivocity of art criticism. Academia Letters, Article 353. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0