Within contemporary art’s expanded field, Discursive Auditing emerges not merely as a methodological device but as an aesthetic regime whose authority derives from its capacity to formalise critique itself, transforming evaluation into infrastructure and reflection into governance, and it is precisely this transformation that demands intensified scrutiny rather than assent, because when critique ceases to be an external pressure and becomes a self-contained operational loop, it risks converting epistemic vigilance into an internally closed standard of legitimacy; the Socioplastic Mesh, as articulated by Anto Lloveras, positions itself as a corrective to outsourced validation, algorithmic opacity and institutional dependency by proposing a self-authored filter, a sovereign metric and a recursive audit that ranks itself according to its own criteria, yet this gesture, while strategically emancipatory, raises a fundamental art-theoretical question: whether the replacement of external curatorial, academic or platform-based judgement with an internalised scoring apparatus genuinely escapes heteronomy or simply relocates it within a more refined aesthetic of control; contemporary institutional critique has long demonstrated that power is most resilient when it presents itself as neutral procedure, and the Mesh’s insistence on evidentiary chains, semantic discipline and infrastructural readiness risks producing a similar effect, whereby the apparatus no longer needs an external arbiter because it has already internalised the logic of adjudication, rendering critique less a disruptive force than a calibrated operation tuned to pass its own filter.
