arts criticism for what? a panel explores.
The panel “Form and Content of Writing,” a panel discussion at the Stockyard Institute’s Nomadic Studio at the Depaul Art Museum, took awhile to get humming, but eventually began to engage crucial questions in arts criticism. In the question-and-answer session, an astute audience member asked the question that the panel had been headed for from its start: “what should criticism be?”
This was a question that the panel and audience members kept circling, with various answers proposed or insinuated:
- Arts criticism should pursue a kind of subjective accuracy. It should measure personal, quirky reactions.
- Arts criticism should pursue a kind of objective judgment. It should be able to articulate the shared classifying and categorizing of an artwork’s significance.
- Arts criticism should be a kind of marketing, the revelation of new and undiscovered artists.
- Arts criticism should be education. It should reach out to new audiences as the community arts movement does. It should not simply be talking to a small, elite audience, but should explicate and connect across boundaries of social division.
- Arts criticism should simply be good writing. It should be evaluated based on its own artistic expressivity.
What the panel made me think of was a slightly different question, not “what should criticism be?” but rather “what does it mean to be critical?”
Criticality might be, in the end, a kind of sensibility that surfaces unexpectedly but powerfully in any of the above modes. It is a small explosion caused by the potent mixing of sincerity and clarity. And it moves through forms as a kind of illuminating glow, perhaps even Walter Benjamin’s profane illumination, we might say.
Criticality leaves an imprint, but does not ossify. It fuels us with a kind of hissing steam of awareness, dissolving into the ether even as it lights the way forward and powers us around.
LINKS: