The exploited are not interested in the laws of exploitation

Critical art is a type of art that sets out to build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of  transformation.’

However not only  is awareness not transformative per se, but ‘the exploited rarely require an explanation of the laws of exploitation.’

Critical art depends on its own projection of a passive audience that it then presumes to activate.

Critical art ‘asks viewers to discover the signs of capital behind everyday objects and behaviours’, but in so doing only confirms the ‘transformation of things into signs’ that capitalism performs anyway.

Critical art is trapped in a vicious circle of its own making. it is a ‘ circulation of stereotypes that critique stereotypes,
giant stuffed animals that denounce our infantilisation,
media images that denounce the media,
spectacular installations that denounce the spectacle etc.

There is a whole series of forms of critical or activist art that are caught up in this police logic of the equivalence of the power of the market and the power of its denunciation.

Capitalist ‘transformation of things into signs’,  is little more than the opiate of the artworld left.

Source Jacues Ranciere