The unfortunate few who've been reading the blog for my classes have been subjected to a long tirade about Radical Craft, so I thought I'd bother the rest of you with some other ruminations that are not entirely unrelated. Here goes:
I have been teaching a research class at Art Center this semester and I have included a lot of critiques in the class because I think one of its covert reasons for being is that crits are so deadly. Artists tend to have a very narrow concept of what influences them and relatively little specific vocabulary for relating their interests to the work or idea of others. To that end, I've been using very rigidly formulated crits to get at different aspects of the work.
The results have been disappointing. In part because the work is too rooted in intuition and pleasure to stand up for a critique in the first place, but in part because everyone is really good at evaluating but not that good at trying to figure out who they envy and why (here I paraphrase Keith Gruber's thoughtful post on the other blog ). This I find funny. At Art Center, the faculty is especially proud of what's called "critique culture" and its influence on learning. But even here, "criticism" is often a code word for justifying preference, but it shouldn't be that (or at least that's not what i was interested in practicing when I wrote criticism...) I watch Iron Chef and see people who can talk about why one plate is better than another, or Project Runway and see people who can talk about fashion and I wonder how to get that conversation - thoughtful, evaluative but also engaged - into my classes.
So I wonder where people see criticism in action? What are its models? Not its manners, with which we're all too familiar, but its models, best practices, exemplars, etc.? As a society, we've grown fond of saying that 'everyone's a critic', but we're not too willing to accept criticism form some people...why? And from whom are we going to seek it out? (Need some more grist for the mill? visit here and scan the headlines for interesting tidbits, or visit this blogand take a look...a)
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2 comments:
My comments turned into something larger than I expected so I posted them here.
I recognize that I am about to make a grande faux pas, connecting sports to art, but I think there is some relevance in the comparison. So do hear me out, then if necessary shoot me down like a three-pointer.
I think that I am safe in saying that sports play a leading role to art in the USA. Newspapers for example publish 7 sports sections to every 1 arts section. Far more citizens flock to sporting events than to galleries, and athletes are paid ridiculously monstrous salaries compared to artists, and in a society where worth/ value seems to based on $$$, artists are sitting the bench. In regard to criticism though, I think sports are right up there with politics, as being the most heavily critiqued. From the managers on down to the back up players, and everyone in between, including and especially the referees, athletes and their performances are analyzed and evaluated critically every time they step onto the field, and often continuing into their lives and actions while off the field. Every fan is a self-appointed critic, and since athletes are paid bountifully, near perfection is expected.
Not unlike art critiques, comparisons seem to be the norm: "This guy has a pitching delivery like so and so," "This defense is good, but not as solid as last year's," "This kid is going to be the next whoever" etc. Sometimes an athlete is evaluated from a more subjective stand point: "He plays with a lot of heart," "He is not much of a team player," "They just don't seem to know what they are doing out there," etc. But the big difference I find between the formats of athletic and artistic criticism is the concept of numbers. In sports everything boils down to statistics and numbers, therein lies the bottom line. Stats are what give sports critics a way to compare and evaluate athletes in from both past generations, to athletes in other leagues, as well as to an athlete's own performance in the last game.
In the art world what numbers do we have to work with, what are the stats? I create rubrics in my teaching that are mostly based on the elements and principles of art and design, and they get the job done as far as branding a work of art with a grade, but certainly rubrics are not the ultimate method for critiques. I do think it would be fun to make "Artist Player Cards" which had pictures on the front and on the back in slick, easy to read graphics would list an artist’s averages in: Line, Shape, Value, Color, and Texture, putting asterisks beside their key stats, (be sure to collect them all!) Though this is a bit far fetched and will probably never happen, I think it is not entirely different than some art resumes, which develop a similar format in terms of gallery showings and awards received, some of which even being accompanied by asterisks for particular successes.
There is however one thing positive and useful that can be said about numbers, and that is the basis for success, which they are capable of establishing. Stats present a firm ground in determining success, and without any such numbers, such being the case in art, I think criticism inevitably, becomes based on feelings, or theories, which can always be contradicted. Though I don’t think a statistically based approach is any way to look at artwork having a grounded basis for success has its merits, and at the very least this post should serve to get everyone excited about this summer’s softball bout, Let’s Play Ball!
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