Arata Hasegawa | Re: But That Doesn't Mean—Back Issues of Each (3)
Curator Arata Hasegawa reflects on the value of artscape's archives, particularly Futoshi Hoshino's book reviews, concerning the nature of criticism.Summary
As part of artscape's 30th-anniversary project, independent curator Arata Hasegawa contributes an essay focusing on the site's archives, especially the book review series by Futoshi Hoshino since 2018. Hasegawa notes that for him, self-taught in art, artscape served as an infrastructure where value judgments were consistently recorded. He found particular joy in Hoshino's reviews, which felt like accessing an academic lecture. Analyzing the three books Hoshino selected to launch his series—*Theories of Photography*, *On Criticism: The Philosophy of Art Criticism*, and *The Collected Essays on Literary Criticism by Kiyoshi Miki*—Hasegawa interprets Hoshino's critical stance. This stance involves resisting the wholesale forgetting of past criticism (encapsulated in the phrase "But that doesn't mean..."), being conscious of the unique context of 'criticism' in Japanese versus Western 'criticism,' and, crucially, maintaining the spirit of co-creating the 'reader' alongside the act of criticism.
(Source：artscape)