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In the second half of the 1980s, the aesthetics of dumbness (bêtise) reached the general field of cultural production. From 1994 to 1998, a few young art critics tackled the phenomenon and tried to theorize it. They did so in the most widely read magazines at the time: Flash Art International, Artpress, and Frieze. The corpus of this paper (articles by art critics Joshua Decter, Éric Troncy, Jon Savage, Andrew Hultkrans, and Jean-Yves-Jouannais) testifies both to ongoing changes in art criticism itself and in the way critics looked at "dumb art." It appears that art criticism converted to cultural criticism: critics paid little attention to artworks, reducing them to the status of illustrations and visual arguments. By contrast, popular media culture, including the most regressive of it, came under close scrutiny in contemporary art magazines. Beavis & Butt-Head, Melrose Place, and Baywatch were quite thoroughly investigated in the columns of Artforum and Flash Art. Quite surprisingly, works of art labeled as “contemporary art” received little analysis, while television soap operas and cartoons led to the most stimulating thoughts, using the paradigm of meta-criticality dear to modernism. These magazines thus gave the most regressive pieces the status of specular images, both deceitful and critical, of the very culture of stupidity from which they were born. Then comes the following paradox: art criticism in the 1990s, alternatively over-enthusiastic and plaintive, intellectualized the most radical anti-intellectualism.