Banksy, the anonymous artist, has been busy in New York City lately. He supposedly set up a stall in Central Park and sold artworks for $60.00 each. He has also been stenciling and spraying art all over the city and claiming ownership by posting photos of it on his website. It seems to me that his work would be a great focus for a discussion concerning art criticism.
Art criticism is one of the foundational disciplines of a comprehensive approach to art education, along with art making, art history, and aesthetics. Art criticism is, in simple terms, responding to, interpreting meaning, and making critical judgments about specific works of art. Usually art criticism focuses on individual, contemporary works of art.
Any agreement on a simple definition of art criticism is difficult to obtain. In Practical Art Criticism, Edmund Feldman writes that art criticism is "spoken or written 'talk' about art" and that "the central task of criticism" is interpretation. Feldman developed a widely used sequential approach to art criticism based on description, analysis, interpretation, and judgment.
Terry Barrett, author of Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary, bases his approach to art criticism on the four activities of describing, interpreting, judging, and theorizing about art. Barrett suggests that, although all four overlap, "Interpretation is the most important activity of criticism, and probably the most complex." Though interwoven with description, analysis, and judgment, interpretation of the meaning of individual works of art is of foremost concern in contemporary art criticism.
Any agreement on a simple definition of art criticism is difficult to obtain. In Practical Art Criticism, Edmund Feldman writes that art criticism is "spoken or written 'talk' about art" and that "the central task of criticism" is interpretation. Feldman developed a widely used sequential approach to art criticism based on description, analysis, interpretation, and judgment.
Terry Barrett, author of Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary, bases his approach to art criticism on the four activities of describing, interpreting, judging, and theorizing about art. Barrett suggests that, although all four overlap, "Interpretation is the most important activity of criticism, and probably the most complex." Though interwoven with description, analysis, and judgment, interpretation of the meaning of individual works of art is of foremost concern in contemporary art criticism.
Art Criticism in the Classroom
Through art criticism activities in the classroom, students can interpret and judge individual works of art. Interpretation is the most critical task of art criticism, but there is no prescribed order to follow. The work of art itself should guide the approach to inquiry. For example, a non-objective painting initially may be approached through description, while a highly-detailed, symbol-filled realistic painting probably would be best approached first through possible interpretations of meaning.
Written art criticism can be thought of as persuasive writing, with interpretations of meaning supported by reasoned judgments. Terry Barret, author of Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary, states, "Critic's descriptions are lively. Critics write to be read, and they must capture their readers' attention and engage their readers' imaginations. Critics want to persuade their readers to see a work of art as they do. If they are enthused, they try to communicate their enthusiasm through their choice of descriptors and how they put them together in a sentence, a paragraph, and an article."
Similarly, Edmund Feldman believes that words are virtually indispensable for communicating a critic's understanding and that "words enable us to build bridges between sensory impressions, prior experience, logical inferences, and the tasks of interpretation and explanation."
Are you incorporating art criticism in your art room? If so, please share your approach or examples. You might just end up with an article in SchoolArts!
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