Lai Fei is an editor, translator, and art critic basedin Shanghai. She is the chief editor of LEAP, China'sonly bilingual contemporary art magazine, as wellas the founding editor of ArtReview's China edition,launched in winter 2022. With over ten years ofexperience as an art magazine editor, she hasinitiated and programmed dozens of thematicmagazine features in print and in exhibitionformats.

Perpetual Crisis-Art Criticism in a Decentralized Mediascape

Everyone everywhere talks about the demise of artcriticism these days, but this lament has been goingon for decades. There isn't a unified idea for wherart criticism begins its downfall, just as art criticismitself is never as unified as some people would liketo believe. John Berger once argued that the role ofthe art critic is to relate art to public and ordinary lifeThis idea is of course contested nowadays as anyonecan share their opinion of a particular artwork on adigital media platform in a matter of seconds. Closingthe gap between professional or insider knowledgeand the public domain is no longer the art critic'sforte. Curators, gallerists, and even collectors havewell surpassed critics in being the main mediatorsbetween art and its public. While we fully embracethe idea that art criticism should encompass copiousand heterogeneous voices, how do we make suchdiversified and decentralized voices heard and how dowe make sure they are translatable and relatable-olare divergent audiences no longer relevant for today'sart discourse in a neoliberal setting? Taking examplesfrom published writings and her own experiencesediting contemporary art magazines, Lai Fei attemptsto look into the conundrums and possibilities ofcontemporary art discourses in her lecture with fellowwriters and researchers of SCL.