On May 21, 1969, American cultural critic Jill Johnston organizes the public
panel “The Disintegration of a Critic,” at Loeb Student Centre at New York
University, a location used frequently by the ongoing student and new left
movement, as in the case of the Angry Arts Week in 1967.1 In her press release
for the panel, which was the third in a series of panels on dance and citique,
Johnston describes the program as a “final solution to a personal problem which
I would hope to have some effect on all those caught in a similar trap if indeed
they see it that way” (Johnston 2019 [1969]: 194). She furthermore explicates
the intent to offer her name “as a sort of sacrifice [...] of a disintegration of crit-
icism,” which she views as an “outmoded form of communication.” This kind
of communication, Johnston makes clear, is a question of the critic’s alienation
of the artist, and vice versa. Furthermore, she underscores the problem with
the modern concept of history, and how it is ‘imposed’ on people by means
of domination from transcendent, critical subjects – including herself.