The Cult of the New and the Work of Critique

This paper complicates 'the cult of the new', which has replaced art's auratic tradition in modernity, drawing on the work of Baudelaire, Valéry, Adorno and Benjamin and argues for a kind of criticism that introduces a reflexive and politically inflected notion of 'novelty'. Such a qualified notion of novelty evades the typical conflation of the 'new' with technical innovation, chronological progression or sensation, which would result in the mere banality of the new. The new is produced instead in the very act of critique at the moment of its encounter with the specific artwork. This notion of newness can be derived from the theory of criticism suggested by Walter Benjamin, in turn inspired by the work of the early German Romantics, such as Schlegel and Novalis. Benjamin's critical model equally avoids empiricism and formalism and allows for the concern of the mutually constitutive relationship between specific art forms, the Idea of Art and criticism to become the focus of attention by suggesting a relationship of mutual transformation between the work and its criticism. What Benjamin called 'immanent critique' transforms its object by selecting each time to activate certain potentialities latent in the work while in the process it becomes itself reflexively transformed by the specific work which imposes its own criteria of criticism. This is a type of criticism that acknowledges the surplus of historical and artistic possibilities inscribed in the work, thus opening the work to potential future critiques as well as the past ones which constitute tradition. In this respect, criticism is not so much about 'judging' the work as about knowledge and understanding, liking the world of language with that of specific spatio-temporal experience inscribed in the work. The 'newness' of the artwork then is related with the activation of its past and future potentialities in the moment of criticism rather than simply with the application of the external criterion of technical novelty which is concomitant with the myth of progress modernity propagates.