Abstract EN:

In the mid-eighteenth century judgements by the general public on the Salons begin to appear in print. An entire genre is invented—art criticism—of which literary history has preserved exemplary instances on one side of the polemics that marked the stages of the new criticism's recognition and transformations. But is this genre perceived and employed as a form of literary experience? It quickly frees itself from the discourse of connoisseurship, and from 1769 onwards its uses are diversified according to the pretexts of various appropriations. Affecting cynicism or ingenuousness, men of letters launch themselves into burlesque experiments that exploit and abuse artistic actuality as much as literary and national history—experiments in which the reader's memory involves him with complicitous laughter. These burlesques also anticipate the sharing of aesthetic pleasure by conjuring up tableaux in which visitors to the Salons can be seen grappling not only with the exhibition but with a cultural, social, and political " imaginaire " which both stimulates and disturbs their sense of their own relationship to the art on display.