What are the conditions of production of critical activity? And its function, in times that actually place communicability and accessibility over and above content? How is art criticism written when there is no longer any critical distance? These and other questions are underlying themes in this essay that exposes the cultural/editorial industry, the academy and communications media within the market’s assembly line. Criticism survives today under the mandate of profitability and advertising forgetting its once lofty transformative objectives. A journey through its history and observation of its mutations can offer us a picture of late capitalism and its most recent consequences, as a prior step to reactivating all its potential.

Peio Aguirre is an art critic, a writer and an independent curator. He lives in San Sebastian. His writing encompasses theory, contemporary art and design and other expressions of popular culture. He has published in several journals and newspapers including el Cultura(s) de La Vanguardia, Mugalari, A-desk, Afterall, A Prior Magazine, Exit Express, Flash Art, El estado mental, and e-flux journal. He has written in catalogues and monographs about artists such as Philippe Parreno, Ibon Aranberri, Jon Mikel Euba, Annika Eriksson, Liam Gillick, Martin Beck, Apolonija Sustersic, Fernando Sinaga, Susan Philipsz, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Willie Doherty, Fiona Tan, Txomin Badiola and others. Peio also curated the exhibitions Imágenes desde el otro lado, CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2007); Arqueologías del Futuro, sala rekalde, Bilbao (2007); Asier Mendizabal, MACBA, Barcelona (2008); and Néstor Basterretxea, Forma y Universo, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2013), among others. Since 2006 he has written cultural criticism in his blog Crítica y metacomentario.