Abstract: In recent years, there has been an increasingly conspicuous international return to dialectical thinking as part of a revival of interest in Marxist-inflected cultural analysis, associated conceptions of radical democracy and emerging debates related to the term ‘contemporaneity’. In this article I shall examine this return to dialectical thinking critically as part of a wider genealogy of changing attitudes towards the supposed criticality of western(ised) post-Enlightenment art. I shall argue that western(ised) dialectical framings of artistic criticality involve an ineluctably inconclusive shuttling between differing conceptions of art’s optimum critical distancing from or proximity to society. I shall then go on to examine the historically oblique critical positioning of art in China. I conclude that contemporary Chinese art holds out critical possibilities that do not translate easily into western(ised) post-Enlightenment contexts but nevertheless resonate tellingly with the problematic consensual politics of neo-liberalism internationally as well as localised political authority in China.