The task of art criticism: Benjamin's reading of German Romanticism

Abstract

The notion of art criticism has been object of a debate about its place and appropriateness in relation to the work of art. As a conceptual approach to the work of art, the criticism has been rejected by those positions that consider the concept outside the artistic sphere and the work of art as a selfsufficient artefact. It is obvious that this position undermines the legitimacy of the art criticism as a discipline. In discussion with these considerations, we found the enlightened positions, especially those contained in the normative poetics, which consider the work of art as a structure that can be explained by a conceptual system that pays no attention to the peculiarities of the singular works. Walter Benjamin’ s work, especially the thesis about the German Romanticism, resists both visions of the problem. The concept of art criticism that he finds in the writings of the first romantics is presented as a superseding of that opposition: the criticism is justified as a discipline by the notion of “criticizability” [Kritisierbarkeit], which establishes that the work contains itself the germ of its own criticism and, therefore, it asks for the concept from its own internal structure. The aim is to analyse Benjamin’s
reading, and then his objections to it in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.