Judyta Dąbrowska
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Numer 1 (51) „Kulturowe praktyki współczesności”, 2022, s. 160 - 175
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.22.011.15756The article discusses the key text of Mieczysław Porębski(1921-2012), an outstanding Polish art historian and art critic, which is vital for understanding his proposed idea of creating a metacritical language that would allow description of the contemporary art world − Introduction to Metacriticism (first edition around 1966, second 1983). All Porębski's publications on this subject are mentioned in the article to obtain a full picture of this concept in the researcher's writings. The importance of creating it for critical-artistic methods is emphasized. The sources of inspiration for the idea of metacriticism (including bibliographic ones) and the implementation of its assumptions in the text itself are shown, taking into account the approximate mid-twentieth century historical context of methodologies developed on the basis of structuralist reflection, especially the influence of information theory and game theory. The ways in which Porębskicame to formulate the assumptions of metacriticism are presented, also through analysis of the language itself.
The idea of metacriticism is placed in the wider context of the researcher's scientific work too, linking it with his proposal to divide the history of art criticism into the so-called criticism of poets and criticism of experts, as well as the idea of the iconosphere postulated by him, which proves to be a pioneering one for contemporary research on visual culture. Finally, the paper suggests that the idea of metacriticism can be the beginning of the present-day style of writing about art.