Opinion is not Judgment (an excerpt from a talk I gave on a panel about curation and judgment)
The activities of selecting and choosing (which presume there is a resource, something available to select and choose from) differ from judgment. Likewise the category of opinion should be differentiated from judgment. These statements are very likely all just my opinion. Although “opinion” has a legal meaning, I mean it here in the vernacular way. I charge myself, with operating under what Alain Badiou calls the “maxim of opinion” which he states as “Love only that which you have always believed”[1] This maxim advises that opinion is confirmationist, confirming both Ego and already held beliefs. He recognizes that the expression of opinion is fundamental to social cohesion. However we also recognize the reductive pressure to have an opinion, familiar is the experience of leaving an exhibition , biennial or art fair either high or hungover from the expression of opinions. Opinion is related to judgment only through a case of mistaken identity. Badiou says of opinion:
“Opinion is beneath the true and the false, precisely because its sole office is to be communicable. What arises by a truth process, in contrast, cannot be communicated [ne se communiqué pas]. Communication is suited only to opinions (and again we are unable to manage without them). In all that concerns truths there must be an encounter. The Immortal [a Badiouian description of the human] that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must be directly seized by fidelity.[2]…To enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you.” [3]
One could say then that an encounter with truth is notable for its destruction of any simple or unexamined notion of judgment as decision or opinion.