Metacognitive Immunity * Porous Critique

If the proposition of a “Critical Filter” as a sixth organ promises an ascetic upgrade of critique—from interpretive commentary to infrastructural governance—then its real provocation lies in how it redefines authorship as Metacognitive Sovereignty: not merely the power to speak, but the power to decide what qualifies as speakable within a system. The declared shift “from a generative model to an evaluative infrastructure” installs criticism as an operating layer, an epistemic customs desk that converts reading into an intake protocol rather than a risky encounter. Contemporary art theory has long been suspicious of such hygienic turns: the avant-garde’s history is also a history of productive contamination, of misreadings, leakages, and illegitimate kinships that generate new publics. To render critique as a stable apparatus—especially one oriented toward “rigorous auditing”—risks displacing the artwork’s capacity to fail, seduce, or remain unresolved, replacing it with a regime of eligibility. Here the self-reflexive archive becomes less an ecology than a jurisdiction. In an era when cultural legitimacy is increasingly modulated by platform metrics and institutional compliance, the filter’s promise of autonomy is double-edged: it can resist capture, yes, but it can also mimic the very bureaucratic logic it rejects, achieving sovereignty by importing the grammar of administration into the heart of artistic research.