Chapter 9 of potential hindrances to our creative development continued…

Before we get into whether someone can “make it possible for us to change by ourselves”, it may help to take a closer look at the peculiar nature of an art critique (and how it differs from criticism). Having gone through 5 years of these in art school, I would say that no one really knows what they are. I mean, art is not exactly a straightforward thing to talk about beyond the common offerings like, “hmm…interesting” or “that’s so good!” (not to mention the opposites of those).

There is both thrilling and maddening complexity around the art critique and as much as I would like to invite it all here and now, I’ll be leaving the sweet depths of that twisty rabbit hole to you. To offer some sort of entry point I’m basically going to steer you to the flow of research put forth by James Elkins who is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I came across Elkins’ book Why Art Cannot Be Taught : A Handbook for Art Students back in my first year and it offered me 1) some insight through the history of art schools and 2) a clearer perspective of the bizarre and sometimes destructive unfoldings that show up in an art critique.

To offer some sort of footing, I’d like to begin by paraphrasing the intro to Elkins’ (extensive) chapter called ‘Critiques’:

While art criticism appears to have contributed to the rise of the Renaissance by encouraging people to describe and judge what they were seeing, it went down a path of competition with unfair and unexplained ranking systems delivered by anonymous boards of judges (and these were the norm throughout the Baroque). From there, the Romantics and Post-Romantics didn’t think it seemed right that individual students were compared to each other and ranked as if they were all trying to do the exact same thing. That would make art school critiques seem like technical school exams and there is a critical difference. Usually when we get something wrong on an exam, there is a way to correct our mistake and (hopefully) learn from it. But critiques aren’t like that— when something goes wrong it’s not always apparent to know what it is. Even when everything goes well, it’s sometimes hard to know why. 

Elkins arranged his chapter as a list of 11 reasons why critiques are hard to understand and I recommend this reading (especially if you are a student in an art school or a teacher in the arts). He is interested in both making sense of them and demonstrating that they can never really make sense. I hope this contradiction rings a bell— by now it should feel like an old hat when opposites like this show up in a creativity discussion along with the ever-present uncertainty and constant flux that resists any final conclusions.

For now, I prefer to speak from my personal experience of an art critique from my perspective as a student and instructor. As a student, a critique from actual hell looks like the following scene to me:

I put up my work in front of my instructor and classmates and must begin by explaining what I have made— including my intentions, why I have made choices about material and content, my inspirations/influences etc. (feeling like I gotta sell it). From here I stand by my work and have to field questions, opinions, judgements (positive & negative), suggestions, sometimes passionate accusations and I will probably have to defend something (or everything) I’ve said. I may also have to face total silence (the whole cricket thing). Generally speaking, my audience will be scrutinizing the work and thinking about it through what I have said about it. Like if I say it’s something about my near-death experience or my title is ‘Glam Slam’, the conversation will revolve around that. I guarantee there is going to be more than one person who says (cringe), “you know what you should do?” followed with a description of what they think I should change or how they would have made my work. And I would be surprised if someone didn’t recommend that I make more or make it bigger. Walking away from such a scene left me asking, “why do I want to make art, again?”

I’ll get into specifics later but I guess the main reason I find this model to be such a drag is that it seems to be one of the criticism variety— involving an activity that embraces analyzing, debating, finding fault and offering praise. In hindsight, I find it rather surprising that the above scenario happened on several occasions (enough to feel scripted) and with more than one professor at the helm. At the time, I felt like the whole thing hovered at the ‘ego’ level and was just an exercise of current validated knowledge and opinions and I really wanted to go deeper than that; I wanted to go beyond my intellectualizing mind.  Perhaps you can imagine my relief when I found Elkins’ book and discovered there is actually no good definition, model, history, or guide for an art critique and we’re not all sentenced to a criticism approach. 

I was particularly eager to find out if there were any models that could set aside judgement. Elkins shared this curious tidbit in a conversation held at Cork Caucus, Cork, Ireland in 2005: 

The thing to know about the history of critiques is that the word comes out of the Kantian critique, and what Immanuel Kant meant by a critique was completely different from what anybody these days means by critique. A critique in his way of thinking was ‘an inquiry which tells you the limits of your thinking’. It’s not to judge, it’s to find how far you can think, where you have to stop. This kind of critique is in the background of what we call critiques, but obviously something fundamental has changed because, in what ‘we’ call critiques, the point is to judge. If you do a pure Kantian critique you don’t judge.

Lucky for me (and so many other students), I ended up in a class with a brilliant professor who introduced me to a nearly judgementless (in the ‘ego’ sense) art critique that left me feeling like there were unlimited possibilities for my work.

Nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

-WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

[Title gif: I wish I knew who made this!]

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