The Living Lexicon: Post-Interpretive Criticism

Author: Dorian Vale

Affiliation: Museum of One — Independent Research Institute for Contemporary Aesthetics

Movement: The Post-Interpretive Movement

Year: 2025

License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Museum of One|Written at the Threshold

This lexicon is not a glossary. It's a compass. It does not define to constrain but to protect. To ensure that the language of Post-Interpretive Criticism is not diluted, misused, or torn from its root. These terms are sacred anchors — poetic, philosophical, and precise. They are meant to orient those entering the terrain, so that they do not mistake the silence for emptiness or the witness for absence.

Core Doctrinal Terms

Term	Definition
Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC)	A movement that rejects over-analysis in favor of ethical presence and restraint. The critic becomes a witness, not a translator. Interpretation yields to mercy.
The Doctrine of Restraint	The ethic that silence, withholding, and reverence are more honorable than linguistic domination. The critic does not speak first.
The Custodial Ethos	The critic is a custodian — one who shelters, preserves, and honors. Not an owner. Not an oracle.
Witness	To be present without possession. To guard without explaining. The critic as seer, not spokesperson.
Threshold	The liminal edge between artwork and viewer — a space of reverent pause. The critic stands here, not beyond it.
Absential Aesthetics	A theory that centers what is not shown, not said, or erased as a valid aesthetic category. Ghosts, gaps, and absence become the art.
Stillmark Theory	Art is not the object but the encounter. Meaning lives in presence. The mark is stillness, not spectacle.
Viewer-as-Evidence	A foundational method: the viewer’s reaction, silence, or inability to speak becomes the evidence of the work’s depth. The critic becomes the artifact.
Aesthetic Haunting / Hauntmark	The residue left behind by ethically encountered work. A haunting that lingers not in the object, but in the soul.
Displacement Theory	When institutions or language sever the artwork from its native emotional or ethical register — the critic intervenes to relocate meaning with mercy.
Doctrine of Erasure	What is erased, misnamed, or withheld remains. Erasure is a form of afterlife.

Behavioral & Tonal Anchors

Term	Meaning
Restraint as Method	To hold back interpretation, explanation, ego. To let the work breathe.
Presence over Performance	The critic’s presence is the instrument — not their performance.
Mercy as Framework	A work is approached like a wounded creature: not to be dissected, but to be witnessed with care.
Silence as Reverence	A refusal to speak is not absence. It is sometimes the only ethical response.
Wounded Work	A work that has been mishandled, misnamed, or extracted from its native truth. It requires a witness, not a rescuer.
Custodial Silence	Silence chosen as care. The critic withholds commentary as a form of moral alignment.
Threshold Ethics	The art is not crossed, consumed, or claimed. The critic stops at the veil.

Vale, Dorian. The Living Lexicon: Post-Interpretive Criticism – First Edition. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17111649