Oscar Murillo
If so, are there any positive aspects to this development?
In my judgement, the “art market” is, by definition, not about “critical apparatuses.” It is about money and power. What else could it be about? Why else would it be called a “market,” bringing in connotations of Meat Markets, Facebook Marketing Your Life as their Commodity, and every other sort of capitalism/greed based transaction.
A positive aspect would be the abandomnemt of the necessarily? corrupting activity of object production. Scarcity. Greed. Object production and its manipulation in the “Art Market” are filled with antisocial and counterproductive motivations. Let’s finally complete the half century long trajectory of rejecting object production and focus on the art of social engagement.
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I think “critical apparatuses” means the institution, art publishing, and even blue-chip galleries. We’re seeing a lot of young (often male) artists heading straight to auction. A lot of this action seems to be thanks to art advisor and flipper Stefan Simchowitz. Has the market ever before been totally detached from the value creation of the art museum, critic, and gallery system? Seems like it’s been inching this way for a while.
Take for example, the painter Wyatt Kahn, who recently doubled his pre-sale estimate at Phillips and to my knowledge has never been in a major exhibition.
This isn’t a critique of the creation of objects, rather an observation that art, in some corners of the art world, has gone full-blown commodity. I guess people don’t want to start this conversation against the backdrop of Miami, though. 
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I agree with you Vanessa, let’s focus on art of social engagement.
Art as a commodity is a modern concept, so, as anything western and modern is, it is attached to a capitalist system. But, as anything, it can be changed as it happened with other systems. It doesn’t mean changes are good, nor bad, it means we are heading toward some kind of change, because art market doesn´t make sense today in the art domain (but makes sense in the market domain). But, again, it doesn’t mean that every artist is aware of it, although, many artists are uncomfortable with the voracious market context.
On the other side, artists must live, they can’t do works of art without, or out of the system. But they also must know, as part of a commitment to art (same as a commitment to save lives from a doctor), that it is about art, not about money and fame. That is another thing, and it can be attained in many ways, not only trough art, and hardly trough art.
I believe that the changing configurations of the global situation and political awareness shaking the old world, where artists where tied by Greenberg’s " umbilical cord of gold" to the market and the state elite, is crumbling in corruption of aims: commitment to money and fame.
But artists, as any other working citizen, can work in life spaces. It is the way artists work that is missing in institutions, scientific research , social structure, cultural agency and political action. Artists can be and do many things different from just selling in the art supermarket. Life is waiting more than an exhibition. So, I think there are new critical apparatuses, but they are in the blind point. They are not on the media, nor the galleries as commodities. But they are more interesting than art market and are growing. I think of art as evidence (Poitras, Applebaum) for example, or Transpedagogy (Pablo Helguera), as many other “trans” encounters in life.
What traditional critical apparatus?