Ethics of Wonder & A Plea for Exhibitions

Lee Weng Choy argues “that wonder is […] foundational to the process of critical enquiry. Too much contemporary writing about art […] suffers from want of rigour and forcefulness of critique.” And, he suggests “that the most lasting art criticism has as its central object the experience of wonder (Lee Weng Choy, “The Ethics of Wonder: Art and Natural History,” in Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia, eds. Alvaro Rodriquez Fominaya and Michael Lee, pp.83-4).” And Jens Hoffmann claims in the same book that “with the academisation of curatorial practice and the growth of discourse-oriented artistic practices, theory has become a key aspect not only of the eloquent argument of the premise of the exhibition, but also of the analysis of culture and politics at large, with or without any obvious relationship to actual artistic production (Jens Hoffmann, “A Plea for Exhibitions,” p.116).”