One of the most powerful languages in contemporary art today is “critique.” Exhibitions question society, institutions dismantle power, and the curatorial produces discourse that moves across boundaries. Museums and biennales function as platforms for interpreting politics and society, history and identity.
 
What matters is that this critical language has become a central apparatus of contemporary art. At the same time, it has begun to solidify into an institutional grammar.
 
Critique was once a language that created fissures in the existing order. Yet in today’s international contemporary art world, critique increasingly functions as a standard language operating within the institution itself. Keywords such as postcolonialism, borders, diaspora, gender, otherness, mobility, and community now function beyond the concerns of individual exhibitions, forming a shared discursive structure that organizes the international art system as a whole. A language that emerged as resistance to dominant power has shifted into a central grammar that produces new structures of legitimation.

 
 
How Did Critique Become an Institutional Language?
 
The expansion of the biennale system since the 1990s has accelerated this transformation. Contemporary art was no longer understood only within the art history of a particular nation. After globalization, it was reorganized as a field for interpreting political and social conditions. International exhibitions increasingly began to revolve around social agendas, historical memory, coloniality and postcoloniality, identity, and mobility. In this process, the curator emerged not merely as an exhibition organizer but as an authorial figure and a producer of discourse.
 
One important starting point for this transformation was Harald Szeemann (1933–2005). After Szeemann, the curator came to be understood not as an exhibition administrator, but as an independent author who designs the conceptual structure of an exhibition. Later, Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) expanded the political and historical horizons of international exhibitions by combining the global biennale model with postcolonial discourse. Hans Ulrich Obrist (1968– ) reconfigured curating as a process of knowledge production centered on interviews, archives, research, and collaboration.
 
This trajectory was further expanded into the conceptual discourse of “the curatorial” by theorists including Irit Rogoff (1949– ). Curatorial theory understood the exhibition not simply as a site of aesthetic experience or the presentation of artworks, but as a field in which knowledge production and critical practice take place. Within this shift, the artwork was no longer treated only as an independent aesthetic object. The relations, structures, contexts, and languages surrounding the artwork also emerged as central elements of the exhibition.
 
This transformation broadened the horizons of contemporary art. Exhibitions became spaces that read social reality through artworks, revealed historical silences, and newly called forth subjects and regions that had been excluded from existing art history. Yet it is precisely at this point that another problem arises. When the critical curatorial hardens into a repeatable institutional language, critique begins to function not as a living question, but as an already sanctioned attitude.
 
Many international exhibitions today appear to speak about different subjects, yet in practice they operate within highly similar grammars. Borders and mobility, memory and the body, identity and community, coloniality and otherness are repeated again and again. These issues remain important. However, when they become excessively institutionalized, discourse no longer functions as a device for rethinking reality, but as a form that guarantees the legitimacy of the exhibition.

 
 
Curatorial Power and the Reinforcement of Interpretive Structures
 
One of the most significant changes in contemporary art concerns the relationship between the artwork and the curatorial. Whereas the curator in the past was closer to someone who selected and arranged works, today the curator has moved into the position of designing the interpretive structure of the entire exhibition. Artworks increasingly begin to function less as independent entities and more as cases placed within a discursive structure.
 
As a result, the exhibition has increasingly become a “space to be read.” Before experiencing the work sensorially, the viewer passes through lengthy texts and conceptual structures. The artwork is interpreted within political and social contexts before it is encountered as a visual experience. In this situation, curatorial language functions not merely as explanation, but as a form of power that defines the meaning of the artwork itself.
 
At this point, curatorial discourse occupies a paradoxical position. It originally emerged to dismantle structures of power and critique the closed nature of art institutions. Today, however, it has become another system of criteria that determines which discourses are contemporary, which attitudes are ethical, and which works can be institutionally sanctioned on the international stage. Critique is no longer a question thrown at the institution from outside; it is being repositioned as a language that legitimizes works and exhibitions from within the institution.
 
Within this structure, artists are also required to occupy specific discursive positions. Rather than the formal density or sensorial necessity of the work, what is first demanded is its connection to a social agenda. An artist’s work is more easily legitimized when it is interpreted within the conceptual framework required by the exhibition than when it unfolds through its own internal logic. At this point, the artwork is treated less as a complex field of experience and more as evidence explaining a predetermined theme or ethical position.

 
 
The Deferral of Judgment and the Automation of Critique
 
What is most seriously weakened within this structure is “judgment.” Many institutions today do not actively carry out judgments regarding the formal achievement or sensorial density of artworks. Instead, they operate by legitimizing specific discursive positions and social attitudes. Discussions of form diminish, while exhibitions increasingly shift toward questions of ethical and political legitimacy.
 
The issue is not that exhibitions engage with social discourse. The more fundamental issue is that discourse has begun to replace judgment regarding the sensorial density and formal achievement of artworks. At this point, the artwork is no longer an object to be experienced and judged independently, but is placed as a case that proves an already established theme or attitude.
 
What emerges as a result is the “automation of critique.” Critique should operate within a state of living tension. Yet critique today is often repeated within predictable language and sanctioned forms. Institutional critique has become a safe language inside the institution, and political attitude has begun to function as a form of cultural capital within the international system.
 
In this situation, contemporary art finds itself in a paradoxical condition. It constantly speaks of new discourses, yet in practice it repeats the same language. It speaks of diversity, yet the structures of legitimation become increasingly standardized. It speaks of critique, yet that critique has already been stably incorporated into the system. The institution does not exclude critique; it absorbs critique into its own mode of operation.

 
 
The Erosion of Sensory Experience
 
What has been most significantly weakened in this process is sensory experience. Art operates as experience before it becomes explanation. Color and form, matter and time, density and rhythm act directly through human sensation. An artwork reaches the viewer through dimensions that cannot be fully reduced to language. It is precisely this inexplicable layer of sensory experience that distinguishes art from a simple message or claim.
 
Yet in many exhibitions today, artworks function less as objects of sensory experience and more as objects of conceptual reading. The viewer reads text rather than pausing before the work. The structure of discourse must be understood before the tension of the image can be felt. The exhibition’s thematic statement preempts the meaning of the work before the density of matter and the rhythm of form can take effect. As a result, art increasingly moves away from the realm of visual experience and begins to operate like a sociological or political device.
 
Art cannot be separated from reality. Addressing the problems of contemporary society is also important. However, when art is reduced to a medium for delivering political positions, the artwork’s distinctive sensory power and formal density are weakened. The critical force of art does not derive solely from the ethical validity of its subject matter. It also arises from the way form makes the world perceptible differently, the way matter unsettles thought, and the way images generate tensions that precede language.
 
Therefore, the task of the post-contemporary condition does not lie in removing discourse. The core task lies in reconstructing the relationship between discourse and sensation. Exhibitions must be able to raise social questions. At the same time, the artwork must not become a mere tool for explaining those questions; it must be a field that generates thought on its own through the dimensions of sensation and form.

 
 
Questions After the Post-Contemporary
 
The central issue today is not the existence of critique, but the institutionalization of critique. When discourse, once a living question, becomes fixed as a repeatable system language, contemporary art enters an increasingly self-replicating structure. The institution appears to renew itself through critique, but in reality it stabilizes its own order by repeating only those forms of critique that have already been legitimized.
 
The direction that art after the post-contemporary must take is not a return to past formalism. Nor is it the exclusion of political discourse. What is necessary is the recovery of tension between sensation and thought, form and critique, experience and structure. The artwork may remain deeply connected to social reality. Yet that connection should not be produced by imposing external discourse onto the work; it must arise necessarily from the work’s form and matter, time and sensation.
 
Exhibitions can produce discourse. Yet that discourse must begin not from repeated languages of legitimation, but from the necessity of the artwork itself. Critique must not be a safely repeated attitude within the institution, but a force that generates tension again between artwork and viewer, sensation and judgment. For contemporary art to regain new possibilities, it must recover the power of experience and judgment generated by the artwork, rather than rely on the language that explains it.
 
Art after the post-contemporary begins again precisely at this point: not by repeating the institutionalized language of critique, but by recovering the power of sensation and judgment that the artwork generates on its own.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects. In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.