Abstract

In this essay, I examine how Cavell's discussion of the challenges and attendant risks faced by artworks to be genuine rather than "fraudulent" informs his discussion of the challenges and attendant risks faced by art critics to offer interpretations rather than misinterpretations of artworks. Moreover, I clarify how this relation between Cavell's philosophy of art and his philosophy of criticism is mediated by his discussion of modernism. For Cavell, modernism does not so much introduce challenges for artworks as exacerbate them. In doing so, modernism also exacerbates the challenges faced by art critics. In exacerbating rather than introducing these challenges, modernism has a revelatory significance for arts criticism. Namely, it reveals that the difference between imposing meaning upon an artwork ("reading into it") and illuminating an artwork ("hearing it out") is non-criterial, such that good arts criticism necessarily resembles bad, even "fraudulent" arts criticism. With this challenge in clear view, Cavell argues the art critic must accept the hermeneutical risk of imposing meaning upon a work in order to illuminate it by embracing rather than discounting or bracketing her subjectivity. Attempting to avoid this risk denies what modernism reveals about arts criticism, and accordingly, Cavell argues, it both fails and introduces new hermeneutical risks.