Syllabus—Situation Critical

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·      Daniel Mendelsohn, “A Critic’s Manifesto,” New Yorker, 28 August 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-critics-manifesto

·      Dwight Garner, “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” New York Times, 15 August 2012

·      Anya Ventura, “Slow Criticism: Art in the Age of Post-Judgement,” Temporary Art Review, 15 February 2016, http://temporaryartreview.com/slow-criticism-art-in-the-age-of-post-judgement/

·      Barry Schwabsky, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” The Nation, 9 March 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/a-critics-job-of-work/

Optional:

·      Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (originally published in The National Review, 1864; reprinted, Macmillan & Co., 1865), 9-36

·      TS Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 1-14

·      HL Mencken, “Footnote on Criticism,” in Prejudices, Third Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 84-105

·      RP Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work” in Language As Gesture: Essays in Poetry (1933; reprinted, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 372-399

·      Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation (1966)

·     Various Authors, “Do We Need Professional Critics?,” New York Times, 7 October 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/10/07/do-we-need-professional-critics

·     “Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age” Talks and other materials, Walker Arts Museum, 28-30 May 2015, http://www.walkerart.org/superscript/

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·      Raymond Williams, “Criticism” and “Culture,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), 84-93

·      “Culture” in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Bennett, Grossberg and Morris (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 63-69

·      Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular'” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Boston: Routledge, 1981): 227-39

·      Edward Said, “Criticism Between Culture and System,” in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 178-225

·      Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 225–48.

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      Subscribe to daily or weekly ArtsJournal email, http://www.artsjournal.com/aj-newsletter-subscription-center

·      Join listserv mailing lists for MCA, Art Institute of Chicago, Arts Club of Chicago, Block Museum, and any other Chicago venues of interest (Links Hall, Siskel Film Center, Facets, arts at other area universities, museums, concert venues, theaters, etc.)

Optional:

·      bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation” Video, 1997

MCA (open until 8pm)

Guests:

·  Joey Orr, Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, MCA

·  Erin Toale, Curatorial Assistant, MCA

Introductory Essay, 500-1000 words. Compile a list of quotations from our readings/viewings of whenever any writer/speaker attempts to define what cultural criticism is what a cultural critic does. Make a list of these. Develop a 500-1000-word exploration of 1-3 of the quotations. What do you make of each one? How do they compare to each other: similarities, differences, larger implications from those contrasts or intersections? Are there any “keywords” you notice among your quotations? Can you tell us more about why these are “keywords”? Submit assignment at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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·      AO Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth (New York: Penguin, 2016)

·      Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art” [1962], in Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 134-44

·      Hilton Als, “I Am Your Conscious, I Am Love: A paean 2 Prince,” Harper’s, December 2012, http://harpers.org/archive/2012/12/i-am-your-conscious-i-am-love/

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

·      Responses to Assignment 01 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

MCA (open until 8pm)

Guest:

·      Abraham Ritchie, Blog Editor and Social Media Manager, MCA

·      In 750-1000 words, respond to one artwork, song, exhibition, performance, or event that you experienced at the MCA or elsewhere. Your short critical essay should include a “close reading” (detailed description) of whatever it is you are examining and then should compellingly link detailed description to interpretation. Try to develop an effective opening “hook” and develop a clear, cogent, and exciting organizational flow for your essay. End strongly. Consider potential multimedia elements (photographs, annotations, video, experiments with design of text, hyperlinks, timelines, etc.). Refer to the rubric for additional information and consider examples and models from our materials as you develop your short critical essay. Submit assignment at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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·      Matti Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)

·      Lane Relyea, “Your Art World: Or, The Limits of Connectivity,” Afterall 14 (Autumn/ Winter 2006): 3-8

·      Howard S. Becker, “Preface to the First Edition” “Art Worlds and Collective Activity,” and “Aesthetics, Aestheticians, and Critics,” in Art Worlds (1982; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), xxiii-xxv, 1-39, 131-164

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

Optional:

·      Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World (2013)

Meet at Block Museum (Open until 8 pm)

Guests:

·      Susy Bielak, Associate Director of Engagement/Curator of Public Practice, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

·      Janet Dees, Curator, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

·      Responses to Assignment 02 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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·      Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 3-26

·      Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, “On Infiltration,” in Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera (Chrysler Museum of Art/Grey Art Gallery/Lyon Artbooks, 2015), 87-118

·      Tal Rosenberg, “Tseng Kwong Chi, downtown New York’s photographic ambassador,” Chicago Reader, 29 September 2016, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/tseng-kwong-chi-performing-camera-block-museum/Content?oid=23731017

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

Optional:

·      Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)

·      In 750-1000 words, respond to one artwork, song, exhibition, performance, or event that you experienced at the MCA, Block Museum, or elsewhere. Your short critical essay should include a “close reading” (detailed description) of whatever it is you are examining and then should compellingly link detailed description to interpretation. Try to develop an effective opening “hook” and develop a clear, cogent, and exciting organizational flow for your essay. End strongly. Consider potential multimedia elements (photographs, annotations, video, experiments with design of text, hyperlinks, timelines, etc.). Refer to the rubric for additional information and consider examples and models from our materials as you develop your short critical essay. Submit assignment at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

Open for visit to museum of choice

·      Responses to Assignment 03 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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·      George Cotkin, Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

Optional:

·      George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition Defined,” from Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 14-35

·      Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” The Dial 64 (11 April 1918), reprinted in Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 165-180

·      Regarding Susan Sontag (documentary film, 2014)

·      In 750-1000 words, respond to two artworks, songs, exhibitions, performances, or events that you experienced at the MCA or Block Museum or elsewhere. Bring the two works into dialogue with each other around a theme and detailed analysis of each work. Imagine the two subjects of your critical review to speak to some kind of “sensibility,” as George Cotkin uses the term. What is that sensibility and how, specifically, do the works suggest it, speak to it, clarify it, signal it, question it, or confirm it? Your short critical essay should include a “close reading” (detailed description) of whatever it is you are examining and then should compellingly link detailed description to interpretation. Try to develop an effective opening “hook” and develop a clear, cogent, and exciting organizational flow for your essay. End strongly. Consider potential multimedia elements (photographs, annotations, video, experiments with design of text, hyperlinks, timelines, etc.). Refer to the rubric for additional information and consider examples and models from our materials as you develop your short critical essay. Submit assignment at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

Arts Club of Chicago (201 E. Ontario Street)

Guest:

·      Janine Mileaf, Executive Director, Arts Club of Chicago 

·      Responses to Assignment 04 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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·      Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About (2009)

·      Raymond Haberski, Jr., “Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and the Duel for the Soul of Criticism,” in It’s Only a Movie!: Films and Critics in American Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 122-143

·      Nathan Heller, “Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews,” New Yorker, 14 October 2011 (read the five reviews too!), http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/five-classic-pauline-kael-reviews

·      Devon Powers, “Introduction: Criticism” and “Chapter 5: Mattering,” in Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 1-22, 123-136

·      Ellen Willis, “Dylan,” Cheetah (1967) and “Janis,” Rolling Stone (1970), in Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, ed. Nona Willis Aronowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1-20, 125-130

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

·      Cultural criticism criticism: You have been reading criticism in each issue of the New Yorker and Chicago publications over the last few weeks. Using our dive into the deeper history of American cultural criticism, select two essays from the New Yorker or elsewhere that you believe connect to each other (similar, contrasting, etc.). Write a 1000-word multimedia blog post that explains how they link to or are in conversation with or perhaps even contradict each other. Be sure to develop close readings of the essays and the material discussed in the essays to support your central interpretative contention and its elaborations. Use the  readings as background: to what extent are long-running themes, sensibilities, aesthetics, interests, concerns, anxieties present in contemporary criticism? Be specific in your analysis? Aim for subtle, precise analysis and explication. Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

Meet at MCA

Guests:

·      Lisa Meyerowitz, Editor-in-Chief, Department of Design, Publishing, and New Media, MCA Chicago

·      Responses to Assignment 05 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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·      Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2013)

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

Optional:

·      Hal Foster, Art-Architecture Complex (2011)

·      Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977)

·      Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2001)

·      Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998)

·     Using specific close readings from our recent materials such as Clare Bishop’s book, write a 750-1500-word blog post, with optional multimedia selections, about your understanding of what the “contemporary” is. You may incorporate an example (or multiple examples) from the MCA, Block, or other venues in Chicago or reviews from the New Yorker or elsewhere. Develop a clear interpretive argument that arises from your careful description and explanation of your evidence. How do these materials help us clarify what the “contemporary” is, why it matters, and what its larger stakes are? Or, with a work such as Bishop’s or George Cotkin’s Feast of Excess or Joshua Clover’s 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, how might we (almost paradoxically) consider the “contemporary” historically? Your review should include multimedia (images, video, sound) that helps propel your argument forward. Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/. Remember to select Assignment category, add a featured images, and add any relevant tags.

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Guest:

·      Peter Taub, Former Director of Performance Programs, MCA Chicago

·      Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2011)

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

Optional:

·      Various authors, “Volume 1: On Performativity,” Walker Art Center Living Collections Website Online Magazine, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity

·      Richard Wagner, “The Artwork of the Future” in The Art-Work of the Future, and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993)

·      Selections from The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, eds. ‪Anke K. Finger and Danielle Follett (Baltimore: ‪Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

·      Responses to Assignment 06 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

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Guest:

·      Lauren Warnecke, dance critic, various outlets

·      Zachary Whittenberg, dance critic, various outlets; marketing director, Hubbard Street Dance Company

·      Laura Molzahn, dance critic, Chicago Tribune

·      Joanna Furnans, Joanna Furnans Dance and founder of Performance Response Journal

·      Kate Lydon, “Confessions of a Dance Critic,” Pointe Magazine, 11 November 2011, http://pointemagazine.com/inside-pt/issuesdecember-2011january-2012confessions-dance-critic/

·      Lauren Warnecke, “One Dance Critic’s View On Choreography And Criticism,” 24 February 2014, 4dancers, http://www.4dancers.org/2014/02/one-dance-critics-view-on-choreography-and-criticism/; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-warnecke/one-dance-critics-view-on_b_5140918.html

·      Zachary Wittenberg, “Sudden Flash: Twenty-first century ballet arrived thirteen years early,” Critical Read, 2016, http://www.criticalread.org/sudden-flash

·    Laura Molzahn, “Death Without Dignity,” Chicago Reader, 6 April 1995, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/death-without-dignity/Content?oid=887092

·      Arlene Croce, “Discussing the Undiscussable,” New Yorker, 26 December 1994, 54

·      Madison Mainwaring, “The Death of the American Dance Critic,” The Atlantic, 6 August 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/american-dance-critic/399908/

·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

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·      Let’s reread something together. Class choice.

·      Write a 500-1000-word review of a live performance in Chicago. You can write a traditional review, explore a multimedia mode of review (videocast, podcast), incorporate interview with artist for a mixed critical review/arts journalism report, or adopt some other creative approach, but your review should offer some kind of assessment of a performance’s context, details, and value (or lack thereof). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/. Remember to select Assignment category, add a featured images, and add any relevant tags.

**Special bonus points opportunity**: write about a dance performance and post both on Situation Critical website and Performance Response Journal, https://performanceresponsejournal.com, anytime between now and the end of the quarter. Possible places to see dance: Columbia College Dance Center; Links Hall; Ruth Page Center; Harris Theater; Auditorium Theater; or check arts listings in Chicago Reader or TimeOut Chicago. You can do this for Assignment 07 or in addition to it.

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·      This week’s New Yorker back of the book and Chicago arts publications

·      ArtsJournal email

·      Responses to Assignment 07 (minimum 2). Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/.

·     Develop a longer interpretive multimedia essay about a work, activity, event, critic, curator, historical phenomenon, or other topic related to cultural criticism and the contemporary museum. Imagine your essay as a “feature” article or long review, roughly 2000-3000 words but also could be fewer words and more video or audio or use of images other modes of critical analysis/communication. Select something of interest to you, a topic that you wish to spend time investigating. For instance, your essay can be a focused historical study of a particular critic or a time period or it can be a more theoretical exploration of contemporary criticism, it can draw upon and compare readings from our syllabus or branch out to new readings and materials, it can focus on the MCA or Block or it can reach toward other institutions and contexts. You need not aim for breadth in your final assignment, but rather substantive inquiry based on close readings that inform an argument about a particular aspect of cultural criticism. Think carefully about how to unfold your argument and evidence effectively in the digital framework through multimedia and design elements. Consider how your voice and style enhance the interpretation you seek to make—how does the form of your review fit the content? You may consult with the instructor over the course of the quarter to conceptualize and hone your final essay into successful content and form. Submit assignment responses at WordPress website, https://sites.northwestern.edu/situationcritical/. Remember to select Assignment category, add a featured images, and add any relevant tags.