Burlesque, Parody, Idiocy, Zaniness

Among subjects in which art criticism finds itself ill-equipped (as, incidentally, do most areas of positive learning), we find the droll, the comic, the grotesque, and the farcical... and this list alone indicates how, even where vocabulary is concerned, there is something here that seems to elude discursive authority, by way of resistance or impotence. Legacy of muses, scale of genres, success of the spirit of geometry and reductionism of the logo, everything conspires to render problematic the means of description and analysis of what is included on the flipside of the serious, on the side of the liberating power of irony, the tongue in cheek, the funny, or, more seriously doubtless, of humour and wit, varied chords in a hypothesis that has no steady name. However, a whole swathe of modernity is marked by it-and contemporary art work in particular. One or two recent publications are aimed at adding their two cents' worth to it

Art · Burlesque · Literature · Visual Culture and Art Theory