Citation Currency is not merely a timid habit of scholars seeking shelter; it is a constitutive mechanism of academic visibility whose violence is often misrecognized as “rigour.” Yet the claim that the persistent afterlife of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour functions primarily as “safe currency” risks reducing citation to a one-dimensional transaction—an accountancy model that flatters itself as realism. Gatekeeping is real, but it is not stable: reviewers are heterogeneous, fields mutate, and the “safe” reference can be a liability when it signals unexamined compliance rather than conceptual necessity. In contemporary art writing, the canonical citation often performs a double bind: it confers legitimacy while also exposing an author’s inability to name the present without ancestral permission. However, the remedy is not to declare the canon “outdated,” but to diagnose methodological anachronism—the lazy transposition of mid-century European diagnostics onto twenty-first-century planetary systems, platformed publics, and extractive cultural logistics. When Pierre Bourdieu is invoked as a universal solvent for every institutional scene, or when “the gaze” becomes an all-purpose metaphor, the problem is less the thinkers themselves than the unreflexive formatting of inquiry: citation as template, not tool. The more interesting critique, then, is that peer review does not merely reward canonical anchoring; it rewards legibility to a pre-existing rhetorical operating system—one that art discourse increasingly shares with grant language, museum PR, and even search-driven discoverability.
Canon Plasticity complicates the supposed opposition between “old guard” and “fresh machine,” because the canon is not a mausoleum; it is an adaptive interface. The proposition that new work must “move away from pure theory toward praxis” sounds salutary, but it can also reinstall the anti-intellectual romance that art institutions periodically weaponize: the fetish of immediacy, of “the living” as a substitute for analysis. A crucial point: the twentieth-century archive contains more than “ghosts”; it contains unfinished instruments for reading contemporary conditions, including the infrastructural turn and the production of subjectivity under new regimes of mediation. The pressing question is not whether Donna Haraway is “outdated,” but whether citation is being used to open or foreclose thinking—whether it is an aperture or a sealant. Likewise, celebrating Yuk Hui as a fresher replacement risks repeating the very fetishism being condemned: swapping saints while keeping the shrine. Indeed, Hui’s rapid institutional uptake—visible in his placement within the ArtReview Power 100 ecosystem—shows how quickly novelty can be monetized as authority. The deeper issue is infrastructural capture: the contemporary art world’s idea-market—biennials, journals, fellowships, keynote circuits—absorbs critique by turning it into programmable prestige. Under these conditions, “freshness” is not inherently emancipatory; it can be an acceleration of branding, where the new becomes a legibility strategy for institutions eager to appear aligned with planetary urgency while maintaining familiar hierarchies of selection and exclusion.
Planetary Technics and Metabolic Aesthetics do mark a substantive shift, but not in the clean direction suggested by the thesis. The move from “social construction” to cosmotechnical plurality matters precisely because it forces art discourse to confront competing ontologies of technology and world-making—yet this turn is also at risk of becoming an elegant alibi. Cosmotechnics can be staged as difference while remaining structurally dependent on Euro-American validation pipelines; the danger is a decolonial décor that re-skins old evaluative forms with new vocabularies. Meanwhile, the rise of necropolitical analytics associated with Achille Mbembe has undeniably sharpened art’s capacity to read sovereignty, extraction, and abandonment—yet necropolitics, when routinized, can become a dramaturgy of damage, producing artworks that exhibit suffering as proof of critical seriousness. More promising is the emergent emphasis on operational knowledge: how power is enacted through data infrastructures, logistics, and platform governance rather than through a single theatrical “panopticon.” Recent scholarship on digital sovereignty, for instance, emphasizes attributes such as adversariality, multiversity, and latency—terms that better capture fragmented, post-global network power than recycled optical metaphors. Here contemporary art theory gains traction when it attends to time (latency, delay, exhaustion), material throughput (energy, waste, computation), and jurisdiction (who owns the protocols that shape perception). Yet the thesis underestimates how easily these planetary and metabolic frames can themselves become suffocating: “metabolism” may drift into totalizing explanation, where every artwork is forced to audition as infrastructure, every gesture converted into an indexable “node,” every practice metabolized into a system diagram.
Legibility Regimes are where the art critic must also think like an SEO strategist, because discoverability is now an epistemic condition, not a marketing afterthought. Keywords, citation networks, and platform metrics do not merely circulate ideas; they pre-compose which ideas can be found, funded, and institutionally remembered. This is why the opposition between peer-review “currency” and praxis-led “protein” is too binary: praxis is also audited—by visibility analytics, by institutional DEI optics, by the curatorial appetite for “research-based” work that can be narrated as scalable impact. The genuinely critical task is to cultivate strategic opacity alongside strategic clarity: to design writing and practice that can be located without being domesticated, cited without being neutralized. In this sense, the most generative “new machine” would not be a roster of replacement theorists, but a re-engineering of evaluative grammar—how art discourse authorizes claims, how it stages evidence, how it resists extractive readability while still remaining transmissible. This is precisely where Anto Lloveras and the Socioplastic Mesh become more than a slogan: as a critical framework, the Mesh can be read as an infrastructural ethics of linkage, metabolization, and selective permeability—an attempt to build sovereignty at the level of relations rather than merely at the level of citations, and to convert “freshness” from a stylistic pose into a durable mode of epistemic construction.
