ABSTRACT
295 Part IV consists of reflections on the changing role of authorship, medium, message, and audience, and how critique and criticality are applied in art, architecture, and design within this shifting landscape. The chapters in this part challenge traditional notions of knowledge, language, consumption, and voice, asking who and what determines authority or expertise. It explores how the popularity of social media platforms, like Instagram, have impacted how criticism is consumed and who might be or act as critic. Today, ideologies that inform profit-driven capitalist models trade in commodities like ‘excellence’ or ‘lifestyle,’ rather than knowledge and culture, which may be leaving individuals, and societies more generally, with a limited, confused, or unrealistic understanding of their place in the world. But concepts like ‘excellence’ are not fixed and are defined differently by different cultures, disciplines, and by the context in which it exists. 1 The rising body of lay critique and the amateur critic who generates it—enabled by social media and with international reach—may provide opportunity for a new more genuine experiential evaluation of objects, building, and environments. However, there is also a risk that uniformed opinion-based criticism will be accepted blindly by an unquestioning public who want merely to identify with a popular or desirable ideology or ‘in-group.’
