Committed, Politicized, or Operative: Figures of Engagement in Criticism from 1945 to Today

In 1995, in an article on the renewal of criticism published in the French \njournal Le Visiteur, architect and critic Bernard Huet related to Charles Baudelaire \nto expound his position on the subject.1 \n Determined to emphasize architectural criticism’s separation from history and theory, and therefore to highlight its \npeculiar disciplinary distinction, Huet espoused an idea of engaged criticism \nconnoting the latter for its social and political function in the spatial domain. \nHuet specifically referred to a passage in one of Baudelaire’s writings (the Salon \nde 1846), where the terms partiale, passionnée, politique — partial, impassionate, \nand political — were used to indicate art criticism’s chief attributes.2