Committed, Politicized, or Operative: Figures of Engagement in Criticism from 1945 to Today

In 1995, in an article on the renewal of criticism published in the French journal Le Visiteur, architect and critic Bernard Huet related to Charles Baudelaire to expound his position on the subject.¹ Determined to emphasize architectural criticism’s separation from history and theory, and therefore to highlight its peculiar disciplinary distinction, Huet espoused an idea of engaged criticism connoting the latter for its social and political function in the spatial domain. Huet specifically referred to a passage in one of Baudelaire’s writings (the Salon de 1846), where the terms partiale, passionnée, politique — partial, impassionate, and political — were used to indicate art criticism’s chief attributes.²