Beautiful Ideas, or How to Do Things with Words

In Principles of Art History Writing (1991), the art critic and philosopher David Carrier noted that ‘’style is important in artwriting, for we cannot entirely extract an artwriter's argument from the text in which it is presented’’. Following Carrier and drawing on excerpts from recent texts embodying post-critical and/or literary approaches to critical writing, I will argue that criticality in writing about art, rather than being explicit, elucidatory or interpretative, might be embedded in the form, voice and timbre of a text. Rather than 'extracting' argumentation from the text in which it is presented, then, my paper considers the integration of poetry and criticism through the manner and mode of writing