Communicative strategy of interpretation in art criticism discourse
It is generally assumed that the central communicative purpose of art criticism discourse consists in evaluation of objects and phenomena which lay claim to the status of artworks. In order to achieve this purpose the critic is expected to present an argumentative ground which takes form of an interpretative or descriptive commentary. The article tackles the question of how the strategy of interpretation, which is proposed as one of the pragmatic consistuents of the art criticism discourse, is actualized in the discourse under consideration. Basing the investigation on art reviews of contemporary painting, the author examines a number of communicative tactics which belong to the domain of the strategy of interpretation. These include the tactics of rendering the artists’ intentions, which is actualized via direct and indirect quotations and structures presenting the artist as the logical agent; the tactics of metaphorization, which allows to create an ultimate verbal and visual image of an artwork; the tactics of creating intertextual links, which is widely used owing to a high intertextuality level of the contemporary art discourse itself. The research reveals the fact that the art reviewers, while following the strategy of interpretation, on the one hand, try to facilitate the comprehension of artworks for a wide audience by exposing one of its possible meanings, but on the other hand, constrict the potential readership circle by making the cognitive structure of the discourse more complex.