Julian Stallabrass - art incorporated: the story of contemporary art
[...] there is a sharp contrast between much academic writing on art and art criticism. Academic writing has tended to be caught up in the continued dominance of deconstruction, old Freudian and Lacanian models (widely discredited in other fields), and identity-based accounts. In one sense, this writing, which consists of apparently wilful readings, abounding in poetic associations and arbitrary leaps, is a reflection of the freedom ideally found in art itself. The writer's performance is as creative as the artist's. Yet much academic art writing, too, demonstrates a hidden uniformity, produced by institutional pressures, beneath its apparently various surfaces. The particular advantage of the dominant deconstructive and psychoanalytical accounts is that they can be arbitrarily applied to the most unlikely of works with predictably 'critical' results: traumatic voids have even recently been discovered in the glib, slick surfaces of pieces by Sam Taylor-Wood. Once the method is learned, any material can be fed into the machine. Thus the publication quotas that are instutionally demanded of academics with little research time are met.
Stallabrass, J., 2004. art incorporated: the story of contemporary art. New York: OUP.