Autumn 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

I was going to call my essay "Fatal Subtraction" because it occurred to me that the art world's relation to French theory is doubly fatal. If it accepts French theory wholesale, then the whole edifice must collapse. Without works that are more historically significant than others the rich would lose interest and none of us would be able to get paid for doing only what we want to do. If the art world behaves toward French theory selectively, as it has and must, then it can never use theory to rethink itself but only to complicate and elaborate itself, largely, I would suggest, as an array of parallel activities that have no demonstrable relationship to one another whatsoever but are critically and commercially administered as if they do. It becomes a vast jungle of mutually irrelevant practices that have nothing in common save the conditions of their display. Which suggests to me that while Foucault and Lacan may have taken over the roles of Marx and Freud--to expose and explain external and internal repression--and while Derrida and Deleuze offer--through deferral and fluidity, difference and the singular--possibilities for an enlivened and messy formalism by no means committed to endings and final conditions, it is, as usual, Baudrillard who gets the economics right. The sign may be reversible, but the art world requires it to be lodged in a discourse of irreversibility, where reactivity is a precondition of meaningful signification.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe teaches art at Art Center, Pasadena. His critical works include Immanence and Contradiction: Recent Essays on the Artistic Device (1986), Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993 (1995), and two forthcoming works, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime and (in collaboration with Frank Gehry) Frank Gehry, the City, and Music. He was the 1998 recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art or Architectural Criticism, in part for his most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Blankess as a Signifier" (Autumn 1997).