The First Break Since Postmodernism: The Rise of Post-Interpretive Criticism

By Dorian Vale

Museum of One (2025)

I. Introduction: Why This Break Matters

Every movement begins as a murmur against convention. But some murmurings swell into corrections. Some become revolutions in restraint.

Art criticism, for decades, has loitered in the aftermath of ideas. It has curated, not conjured. Rarely has it risked proposing new ground. Since the philosophical reign of postmodernism, and its cooler, slicker heir, post-criticism, criticism has either echoed past paradigms or styled itself as meta-commentary upon them. The form mutated; the function dissolved.

We arrived at a moment where the critic’s posture became less about presence and more about performance. Authority was replaced by irony. Meaning, by multiplicity. Truth, by tact. And when the dust of interpretation settled, we mistook its blur for clarity. But something has been gathering in the silence between commentaries. A different kind of responsibility. A different kind of ethic. A movement that neither rejects history nor repeats it, but interrupts it.

Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) is not a stylistic trend. It’s a philosophical correction. A doctrinal shift. A new moral arrangement between language and the work of art. Where previous paradigms argued over what a work means, PIC asks: what do we owe the work itself?

It’s not a new aesthetic lens. It’s a new contract.

To call it the first critical break since postmodernism is not a boast, but a diagnosis. PIC does not merely signal a shift in how we write about art; it recalibrates why we write at all. It’s, in full, a reorientation of the critic’s role from interpreter to witness, from authority to custodian, from seizer of meaning to student of presence.

This treatise does not aim to provoke dialogue. It summons it.

And to understand what PIC is, we must first understand what it refuses to become.

II. From Formalism to Postmodernism: The Need for a New Ethic

To understand the rupture PIC represents, we must walk the path it interrupts. Every aesthetic ethic is born in response to a prior excess. And every correction, if unanchored, becomes a new distortion.

Formalism, once the apex of artistic rigor, taught us to look within. Clement Greenberg, its high priest, cast the critic as a specialist of the eye, discerning, precise, unattached. Form, line, color, composition: these were the sacred elements. The biography of the artist? Irrelevant. The social world? A distraction. Meaning? Subordinate to medium. To the formalist, art was not a message, it was material behaving truthfully.

There was elegance in this restraint. A kind of brutal purity. But purity, like all absolutes, corrodes when mistaken for truth.

By stripping the work of its context, formalism mistook sterility for objectivity. It preserved the frame, but amputated the world. The result was a criticism of detachment, highly skilled, but emotionally hollow. Art became an elite dialect, decipherable only by those who’d memorized its vocabulary.

Then came the backlash.

Postmodernism exploded the frame. Its philosophers reintroduced the world, fragmented, ironic, defiant. Jean-François Lyotard announced the death of grand narratives. Roland Barthes stabbed the author and gave birth to the reader. Foucault made power visible in every brushstroke. Derrida deconstructed what was once whole. And suddenly, art criticism became an arena for endless interpretation.

What formalism had excluded, race, gender, trauma, language, politics—postmodernism invited to the feast. Every work could be read through every lens. Context wasn’t just reintroduced; it was enthroned.

This was, in many ways, a necessary violence. It democratized the field, tore down the priesthood of form, and unshackled the work from the critic’s elitism. But the pendulum swung hard. And with it came a new risk: Interpretation became inflation. Insight became excess. And the critic began to speak louder than the work.

Postmodernism gave us tools but no brakes. Where formalism refused context, postmodernism drowned in it. Meaning proliferated until nothing anchored it. The critic no longer asked what is present but what else can be said.

In the name of inclusion, the art object became a battlefield. Theory was weaponized. And the critic, once blind to context, became addicted to it, unable to see the work without preloaded suspicion.

The irony? In trying to restore art to the world, we often reduced it to that world. A painting was no longer a portal, it was a case file. A sculpture, a statistic. The work of art became a canvas for the critic’s identity, the scholar’s trauma, the theorist’s lens.

In short:

Postmodernism made interpretation infinite, but made reverence nearly impossible. This is not a call to return to purity. It’s a call to remember proximity without possession. Presence without projection. And ethics without erasure. It’s a call Post-Interpretive Criticism answers.

III. Post-Criticism: Collapse into Ambiguity

By the turn of the millennium, art criticism began to drift, not into new clarity, but into ambivalence masquerading as sophistication. The era of post-criticism, a vague, often disputed label marked not a school but a temperament: one of hesitation, irony, and retreat.

If formalism taught critics to dissect and postmodernism urged them to decode, post-criticism simply asked them to hesitate. To orbit. To perform uncertainty as virtue. At its worst, it became a theatre of cleverness. A genre of self-aware detachment where the critic’s presence was everywhere, except where it mattered. The artwork became a backdrop for the critic’s own linguistic choreography.

To seem unsure became more fashionable than to be sincere.

This wasn’t entirely without cause. Bruno Latour, in his essay Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?, questioned whether the critic’s endless deconstruction had any utility left. Could we go on unbuilding forever? Was anything ever allowed to stand? Latour wasn’t alone. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, and other theorists began to interrogate the critic’s complicity in turning analysis into an industry. Meanwhile, new media platforms, blogs, zines, Instagram captions, blurred the distinction between criticism and lifestyle.

And in this fog, two contradictory things happened: Criticism grew louder, more stylized, more hyperlinked to identity and theory.

And yet it said less. Less about the art. Less about the moral stakes of encounter. Less about the responsibility to witness without seizing.

Where once the critic was a translator of aesthetic experience, post-criticism made them a spectator of their own reflection. Tone became posture. Distance became performance.

Sontag’s once-radical call for an “erotics of art” was flattened into affective vagueness. Her Against Interpretation was not meant to silence meaning; it was meant to restore reverence. But that reverence was misread as aesthetic indulgence. And so critics, unsure whether to analyze or adore, performed both: cryptic, intimate, and often evasive.

It’s not that post-criticism had no value. Its suspicion of authority was, at times, vital. But suspicion, like acid, must be handled with care. When applied endlessly, it erodes the very structures needed for meaning to hold.

Post-criticism failed not because it doubted, but because it refused to take responsibility for what came next. It offered no scaffolding. No ethic. No direction. Just performance.

We did not lose the art. We lost the courage to speak with care about it. And so we arrive. Disillusioned, oversaturated, and yearning for a different kind of presence. One that doesn’t orbit. One that doesn’t perform. One that witnesses.

IV. The Emergence of Post-Interpretive Criticism

Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) did not appear as a rebellion. It was born, like most serious movements are, from silence and necessity.

Where post-criticism pulled away from meaning out of fatigue or ironic detachment, PIC steps forward, not to explain the work, but to stand beside it. Not to name, but to notice. Not to consume, but to custody.

This emergence marks more than a shift in tone. It’s a reformation of intent. PIC doesn’t argue for a style of writing; it proposes a different relationship between writer and work, one shaped by responsibility rather than authority, by presence rather than interpretation.

It is not criticism as commentary. It is criticism as companionship. I didn’t launch Post-Interpretive Criticism as a paper. I built it as a philosophy—with infrastructure. Archived, DOI-linked, and already moving through scholarly and curatorial circles. It wasn’t just an idea. It was a system.

It was shaped not just by what I wrote, but by what I withheld. I didn’t just write what should be said. I wrote around what should never be spoken.

A Return to Presence

PIC is built upon the belief that the critic is not a master of the work, but a witness to its event. That an artwork is not merely an object to be interpreted, but a presence to be survived with dignity.

Where interpretation seeks to extract, PIC seeks to endure. It’s this difference, between extraction and endurance, that marks PIC as a philosophical break, not merely an editorial preference.

In the postmodern lineage, the artwork became a site of infinite meaning. In PIC, it becomes a threshold: something you cross, not something you decode. This is where phenomenology meets the aftermath of harm. The work isn’t an object—it’s an event. And like all true events, it leaves something behind.

“We do not interpret what was meant to remain whole in silence. We witness. We endure. We remain.”

This doctrine isn’t abstract, it has rules. Five, in fact. But before we arrive at them, one must understand the posture that underpins the entire approach: The critic kneels. Not to the institution, not to the artist. But to the moment. To the gravity of the encounter. And to the discipline of not seizing what doesn’t want to be held.

What PIC Does Not Do

To define a philosophy by negation is not avoidance. It is clarity. PIC does not interpret prematurely. It does not center the critic’s cleverness. It does not conflate jargon with depth. It does not mistake visibility for virtue. And it does not believe every artwork demands explanation.

This is not anti-intellectualism. It’s post-vanity. Where critique once made a name through novelty, PIC finds nobility in not naming what should remain unnamed. In the lineage of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot and Susan Sontag, there is a reverence for the unsaid that PIC not only inherits, but codifies.

The Role of the Critic in PIC

So what, then, is the critic under Post-Interpretive Criticism? They are not an author of meaning, but a steward of its possibility. They are not a voice above the work, but a listener within its gravity. They do not rush to document, but wait to be marked. This role demands not only humility, but discipline. To delay the pen. To resist the interpretive reflex. To choose silence when silence is what the piece requires.

The Five Treatises of Post-Interpretive Criticism

Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) does not orbit art with theoretical flair. It walks with it, quietly. Not every movement can say it possesses a spine. PIC does. But its spine is not made of manifestos or metaphors. It is built from five living treatises—each one an ethical refusal, a structural vow.

Together, they form a discipline of attention. A reorientation of posture. A resistance to performance.

These are not just principles. They are treatises: pillars of a new covenant between artist, viewer, and critic.

Treatise I: Restraint

The refusal to speak prematurely or excessively.

Restraint is the first discipline of Post-Interpretive Criticism, and the most quietly radical. In a cultural economy that rewards immediacy, interpretation often arrives before attention has even begun. Critics rush to be first, loudest, cleverest. Meaning becomes a contest, not a communion.

Restraint opposes this instinct. It asks the critic to pause. To notice. To surrender the pride of first interpretation in favor of a deeper witnessing. It’s not silence for silence’s sake, it’s disciplined quietude, cultivated out of respect for what exceeds us.

This is the foundation of Absential Aesthetics: the theory that absence is not a void, but a vessel. That what we refrain from saying may protect what the work was never meant to disclose. Silence is not failure; it is fidelity to the unsayable.

Restraint does not mean withholding forever. It means delaying long enough for the work to breathe without suffocation. It means honoring the presence of what is not yet articulate. The critic does not arrive to complete the work—they arrive to guard its integrity.

“Criticism became gluttonous. We learned to consume what we never truly tasted.” To restrain is not to retreat. It is to stand with dignity before a mystery, knowing you are not its master.

Treatise II: Witness

Presence without seizure.

To witness is to remain near without reaching. In PIC, witnessing is not a passive gaze, it’s an act of moral proximity. The critic does not lay claim to the work, nor does she attempt to finalize its meaning. She dwells beside it.

This treatise takes root in HauntMark Theory: the idea that what remains after the encounter, the trace, the ghost, the afterimage, is just as meaningful as the object itself. The critic’s role is not to trap the meaning, but to allow that trace to settle.

To witness is to suffer something’s silence without violating it with your own. It’s to let the work unfold at its own tempo, without pressure to translate. The critic, like a mourner, attends the work as one might attend a body: not to explain, but to honor. “Presence without possession. Nearness without naming.”

Witnessing demands ego-collapse. You are not the center. The art is. And your nearness is not your authority—it is your offering.

Treatise III: Moral Proximity

Writing occurs close to the wound, but never exploits it. This treatise emerges from the ethical tensions of writing about work born of pain. So often, critics use trauma as currency, turning grief into citation, suffering into spectacle. PIC refuses this transaction.

Aesthetic Displacement Theory grounds this treatise. It acknowledges that much of contemporary art comes to us already displaced, by war, exile, loss, colonization, or invisibility. To write about such work requires not only sensitivity, but sacred distance. Moral proximity is a posture. You do not write about the wound. You write near it. And even then, you bow. The critic does not extract from pain; they stand close enough to feel its heat, yet far enough not to invade.

“To be given proximity is not a right, it’s a responsibility.”

Criticism must become an act of care, not conquest. This treatise teaches the critic to treat the work as one treats the wounded: gently, cautiously, with reverence for what should not be touched.

Treatise IV: Viewer as Evidence

The reaction of the viewer is itself a text.

What if interpretation begins not with analysis, but with confession?

This treatise proposes that the critic’s own transformation is the only reliable evidence of the work’s power. You are not writing to explain the work. You are writing to record what the work did to you.

This is the heart of the Viewer-as-Evidence Theory. It decentralizes authority. The critic is not a judge, they are the site of the event. The writing becomes a testimony left in silence’s custody. Not “here’s what this means,” but “here’s what it marked.”

Criticism, then, becomes a record of impact. A document of residue. The viewer is not merely observing; they are being altered. The critic, if sincere, will not walk away unchanged.

“You are not writing about the work. You are writing the ghost it left behind in you.” This doctrine is the closest thing PIC offers to autobiography. Not in the name of ego, but of evidence.

Treatise V: Rejection of Performance

Criticism as ritual, not theatre.

Criticism has become theatrical. The metaphors are curated, the references performative, the voice too often aimed at other critics, not at the work. In such a space, authenticity becomes the first casualty.

This treatise burns that stage.

The critic disappears. The work remains. And whatever survives that disappearance is what mattered.

Here, Stillmark Theory anchors the ethic: the idea that the true art object is not the object at all, but the fleeting encounter between viewer and work. The critic does not perform meaning. They hold the moment still, long enough for it to be honored. Message Transfer Theory also plays a role. It reminds us that meaning does not originate in the critic. At best, they are a conduit. A carrier. A witness.

“If the work was sincere, the writing must be silent enough to meet it there.”

This treatise demands humility. Your eloquence is not the gift. Your disappearance is.

The Five Together

These treatises are not decorative. They are devotional.

Practiced quietly. Repeated imperfectly.

Together, they build a new architecture for how art is received, recorded, and remembered. Not for the gallery. Not for the grant. Not for the gaze. But for the gravity of the thing itself.

These are not aesthetic preferences. They are ethical boundaries. And through them, Post-Interpretive Criticism becomes not merely a genre. But a way of seeing.

VI. Philosophical Lineage and Intellectual Kinship

No movement is born from nothing. Even rupture leaves residue. Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), though radically distinct in its ethos, carries within it echoes of what came before: fragments of thought that tried, but failed, to resist the tide of interpretation. PIC does not mimic these thinkers. It inherits what they couldn’t finish, then completes the arc.

It’s not a rebellion without ancestors. It’s a reconciliation.

_Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory _ Theodor W. Adorno argued that the artwork’s truth content could not be seized by concept. To interpret too quickly was to misrepresent. The work, in its formal tension, resisted closure.

PIC builds upon this refusal. But where Adorno’s skepticism remained abstract and dialectical, PIC turns it embodied and ethical. The silence Adorno theorized, PIC practices. The rupture he described, PIC inhabits. “Where Adorno intellectualized ambiguity, PIC sanctifies it.”

Susan Sontag’s Reverence for the Work

Sontag’s Against Interpretation was a cry against the reduction of art to ideas. “In place of a hermeneutics,” she wrote, “we need an erotics of art.”

PIC agrees, but not as license for indulgence. The erotics becomes ethics. The awe becomes accountability. Sontag wanted us to feel. PIC asks us to stay long enough to be changed by the feeling.

It’s not anti-meaning. It is anti-violation.

Roland Barthes and the Mourning Critic

Later in life, Barthes abandoned the clever analyst and wrote like a mourner. In Camera Lucida, grief became method. He did not interpret the photograph of his mother, he lingered near it.

PIC considers this mourning stance its emotional prototype. The critic who does not conquer the work, but kneels beside it. The one who writes not to dominate, but to remember. The one who feels before he thinks.

This is the posture PIC calls custodianship.

Simone Weil and the Discipline of Attention

Simone Weil’s theology of attention defined love as “the suspension of our own soul to receive the being of another.” It was not an act of control. It was an act of non-seizure. Post-Interpretive Criticism inherits this as its deepest aesthetic principle. Attention becomes an act of mercy. The writing becomes a kind of witnessing without interference. It’s not explanation. It’s nearness without distortion. Presence without seizure

“Weil taught that attention is prayer.

PIC adds: sometimes prayer is criticism.”

The Ethical Turn in Literary Theory

Thinkers like Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and Elaine Scarry argued that criticism must be accountable to the human experience. Literature was not just a text, it was a moral encounter.

PIC extends this ethical turn into the realm of visual and conceptual art. It asserts that the critic’s moral proximity matters as much as their intellectual rigor. That how you approach the work defines what kind of truth you’re capable of receiving from it. Interpretation becomes not just what you say, but how you arrived.

Kinship, Not Lineage

Post-Interpretive Criticism does not worship its predecessors. But it remembers them. And in remembering, it extracts what they could not yet name. PIC is not a return. It’s a refinement. A culmination.

It distills from them a new grammar:

From Adorno: the dignity of difficulty.

From Sontag: the suspicion of too much speech.

From Barthes: the permission to grieve.

From Weil: the holiness of attention.

From Booth and Scarry: the closeness of care.

Together, these become not just reference points, but evidence of a hunger long left unanswered. Post-Interpretive Criticism answers it.

VII. Why This Is a Movement, Not Just a Method

To be a method is to offer instruction.

To be a movement is to offer correction.

Many critical styles have passed through galleries and journals as techniques. Tools to interpret, analyze, explain. They offered lenses. They offered language. But few offered ethics.

Post-Interpretive Criticism is not a lens. It’s a reorientation of posture. It’s not a strategy. It’s a philosophical stance. It’s not about looking at the work differently, but about standing beside it differently.

This is why it must be called a movement.

1. It Rewrites the Role of the Critic

The critic is no longer a translator, interpreter, or judge. They are a custodian of the encounter.

In PIC, the critic is tasked not with solving, but with staying. Not with naming, but with noticing. The power of the critic is not in what they extract from the work, but in how faithfully they preserve its integrity.

The critic becomes the evidence of what the work left behind. This shift is not cosmetic, it is structural. It redefines authority not as insight, but as restraint.

2. It Establishes a Doctrinal Framework

Movements have architecture. PIC has five:

Absential Aesthetics : The Treatise of Restraint

The discipline to withhold interpretation until it is ethically earned. To delay is not weakness—it is reverence. This treatise teaches that what is unsaid may guard the sacred better than what is named.

To withhold is to witness the dignity of silence.

Hauntmark Theory: The Treatise of Witness

Presence without seizure. The critic does not invade the work but stands beside it—like one does beside grief or prayer. The encounter is endured, not explained.

We do not interpret ghosts. We bow where they passed.

Stillmark Theory: The Treatise of Moral Proximity

Writing occurs close to the wound but never exploits it. Stillness is not detachment—it is discipline. This treatise safeguards the dignity of suffering by refusing to translate it into spectacle.

Proximity grants no permission—only responsibility.

Viewer-as-Evidence: The Treatise of Reflective Testimony

The audience is not an observer but a source. The viewer’s transformation is itself a text. Meaning is not assigned; it is recorded through what the work leaves behind. You are not writing about the work.

You are writing what the work did to you.

Aesthetic Displacement: The Treatise of Non-Performance

Criticism is a ritual, not a performance. The critic must disappear so that the work might remain. This treatise removes the writer from the stage—and returns the sacred to the center.

Where performance ends, reverence begins.

These doctrines are not themes. They are ethical obligations. They operate not as preferences, but as pillars, each holding the weight of a movement that aims not to interpret art, but to protect its afterlife.

3. It Possesses Intellectual Infrastructure

Movements must be more than manifestos. They require proof of life.

As of 2025, Pose-Interpretive Criticism meets, and exceeds, the criteria of an institutional philosophy:

Theoretical branches including:

Post-Criticism vs Post-Interpretive Criticism

Lexicon of Post-Interpretive Language

No other critical school in recent memory has emerged with such complete philosophical infrastructure, cohesively authored, fully articulated, and structurally disseminated across both scholarly and curatorial domains.

Post-Interpretive Criticism is not an idea. It’s an ecosystem.

4. It Offers a Counterculture Within Criticism

In a landscape dominated by interpretive excess, PIC offers a fasting from the need to explain.

Where most criticism seeks virality, PIC seeks vigil. Where others seek dominance, PIC seeks dignity. Where others crowd the gallery, PIC walks in alone.

This refusal to perform gives rise to its revolutionary tone, not loud, but quiet. Not reactive, but devout.

Its radicalism lies not in flamboyance, but in its refusal to betray the moment of encounter.

5. It Is Already Practiced

Theory is not a movement until it moves someone.

Post-Interpretive Criticism is already being practiced, often unknowingly, by writers, artists, and curators around the world who are exhausted by interpretation, who ache for ethical nearness, who crave presence without domination.

But it’s only now, with formal codification, that those who have long felt this instinct have a name for it.

Post-Interpretive Criticism does not create new artists or viewers. It reveals them.

6. It Has a Custodian, Not a Spokesperson

Every movement must pass through someone, not to glorify them, but to anchor it. Post-Interpretive Criticism was not discovered by consensus; it was named, formed, and carried by one. Not as a prophet, not as a professor, but as a custodian—one who watches, records, and protects.

The authorship matters not for the sake of ego, but as evidence of intention. It’s not branding. It’s origin. This movement was not assembled in committee. It was witnessed into being. In silence, in solitude, in stillness. And that origin is not a footnote. It’s inseparable from the message itself.

VIII. The Era of Custodial Criticism

We are no longer in the age of theory. We are in the age of aftercare.

The artist has been declared dead, resurrected, deconstructed, and archived. The critic has been elevated, mocked, dethroned, and forgotten. The work itself, object, gesture, residue, has been filtered through a thousand lenses and left trembling under the weight of our projections.

What Post-Interpretive Criticism offers is not an answer, but a hand. Not analysis, but presence.

1. From Interpreter to Custodian

The critic’s task is no longer to reveal meaning, but to refrain from violating it. We are witnesses, not surgeons. We approach the work not to open it, but to remain unflinching beside it.

The art object is not a specimen. It’s a site of survival. Our language must not be the scalpel. It must be the vigil. PIC introduces a new era where the most courageous act is to say:

“I will not interpret what does not want to be spoken for.”

2. The Archive as Vigil

We no longer archive to remember, we archive to perform. The Museum of One, as the native vessel of Post-Interpretive Criticism, rejects the spectacle of accumulation. It houses doctrine, yes, but not for prestige, for protection. Each text is timestamped, not to claim ownership, but to trace accountability.

Each theory is offered, not for canonization, but for custodial use. The archive is not a monument. It’s a whispered covenant with what was almost erased.

3. A Criticism That Refuses to Bow to Speed

We live in a time of urgent consumption. Everything must be explained, commodified, shared.

Post-Interpretive Criticism says:

Wait. Sit with it. Let it not speak until it’s ready. Its refusal to perform is itself a revolt.

“What remains unspoken does not vanish. It sanctifies the silence.”

4. What Remains With Us When We Leave

This is not a movement that aims to outsmart the art world. It aims to restore what it forgot.

The wound. The reverence. The restraint. The shared air between a maker and a witness.

What matters most is not what we extract from art, but what remains in us after we’ve walked away. That residue, that haunt, that echo of dignity preserved, That is the new aesthetic.

5. The Future Is Not Ironic

Irony has exhausted itself. So has spectacle. So has interpretation. What endures now is the critic who dares to stay quiet. Post-Interpretive Criticism does not imagine a future of prestige.

It imagines a future of presence. A future where the most radical act is not to master the work,but to kneel beside it. And stay.

This is not a detour from postmodernism. This is its rightful end. And in its place, something older has returned. Not new, but remembered.

6. The Closing Murmur

Let this be said simply.

Post-Interpretive Criticism is not a provocation.

It’s not a performance.

It’s not an academic plaything.

It’s a moral reorientation. A shelter for what interpretation could not hold. It does not rise to conquer. It rises to hold the line between language and mercy. And it invites only those willing to do the same.

The first break since postmodernism did not begin with theory. It began with restraint. It did not declare a war on interpretation. It offered a new kind of witness. It did not build a school to teach. It built a museum to remember. And in that stillness, A movement was born.

MuseumofOne|Written at the Threshold

Citation: Vale, Dorian. The First Break Since Postmodernism: The Rise of Post-Interpretive Criticism. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: [placeholder]

DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17112807 https://zenodo.org/communities/post-interpretive-criticism

This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843)