ARTH 387 - Art and Criticism
- F - 9:00-11:30
- EV-1.615
- INSTRUCTOR: TAMMER EL-SHEIKH
“Studio criticism really amounts to a form of art-teaching… in which the critic is only concerned with advising the artist. It is… technical criticism. The critic accepts the artist’s aims and concerns himself to commenting upon his methods… If Studio criticism is ever concerned with questioning aims, it is so only in direct relation to the artist's personality… Public criticism… is addressed to the general public. The critic, instead of identifying himself with the artist, identifies himself with the spectator. He cannot consider the works in question as works in progress – a progress which his comments might influence; he must consider them as presented works and must try to evaluate them in relation to the world to which they have been presented.”
- John Berger, “Critic’s Credo”, ArtReview (1955)
This excerpt was shown in a 2017 presentation by Sky Goodden, founding editor of MOMUS, on the prospects of art criticism in the digital age. Spaces for the production and display of art have changed in our time, but Berger’s distinction in 1955 between studio criticism and public criticism remains as important as ever. How are we to interpret art that leaves no trace in a physical studio? How are publics for artists constituted in virtual spaces, across national and cultural boundaries? Is the “personality” of the artist still a privileged source of information for the critic, or, are we more concerned nowadays with an artist’s political and professional commitments? To what extent are such commitments registered in public forums for art - online, in museums and galleries, and within universities?
In the course, students will take up these questions through the research and practice of art criticism. The course will follow these two tracks:
1) We will closely read and analyze key examples of studio/technical and public art criticism from the 19th century to the present. These examples will be drawn from the writing of Charles Baudelaire, the Bloomsbury Group, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Lucy Lippard, Griselda Pollock, and emerging critics online and in print. In this study, we’ll consider how critics have represented the aesthetic, philosophical and political concerns of artists. We will also evaluate the public aims of art critics since the 19th c., focusing on how they have called standards of popular and avant-garde taste into question, supported or challenged art markets and institutions, and, more recently, functioned as advocates and interpreters for (Indigenous, women’s, LGBTQ2 and minority) rights movements.
2) Alongside this chronological study of key moments in the history of art criticism, students will develop their skill as writers, in journals and through a sequence of review assignments. The questions and topics that guide our historical study of art criticism will structure the writing assignments as well. Students will develop their practice of art criticism through discussions of each other’s work, in-class descriptive and evaluative writing exercises, and in reviews of gallery, museum, and artist-run center exhibitions. In the spirit of Berger’s credo, students will be expected to reflect on the goals of their writing, as studio critics and as public critics.