Why?
We have now spent some time understanding visual literacy and going even deeper to understand different layers of “texts” (think connotations and latent text). Most of this has been in service of better understanding the intricacies of the imagery you create. However, we can’t overlook the importance of the written word in stepping up to offer critique, and helping out when the imagery isn’t doing all of the conceptual lifting. An inarticulate designer will struggle with clients, have difficulty selling themselves, and will miss opportunities that are more obvious to keener designers. A designer who can express themselves, think critically, and competently verbalize their ideas will be head and shoulders above the pack.
Required
Read: Use your time this week to begin work on the Writing Exam. The resources below will help you find the answers you need to answer the questions. You can save, exit, and return to the exam as needed, so you can take it in stages.
- Course Style Guide
- Chicago Manual of Style
- Italics: when to use quotation marks and when to use italics, refer to this chart.
- Punctuation: for instructions on when to use hyphens, en-dashes or em-dashes, quotation marks, etc., view The Punctuation Guide.
- Hyphens: for how to appropriately use hyphens, refer to this chart.
NO SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS REQUIRED FOR THIS SET.
The required readings above and Writing Exam are extensive enough.
Supplementary Readings
- Art/Design Criticism & Art/Design Journalism
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Reflecting on the Mistakes I’ve Made as an Art Critic, Hyperallergic
“Art critic Seph Rodney considers on his reviews during the last few years and what he may have gotten wrong and why.”Writing a Review of an Exhibition, A Short Guide to Writing About Art
“Writing a review requires analytic skill, but a review is not identical with an analysis. An analysis usually focuses on one work or at most a few, and often the work (let’s say Picasso’s Guemica) is familiar to the readers. On the other hand, a review of an exhibition normally is concerned with a fairly large number of works, many of which may be unfamiliar.” Note: I don’t agree with all of Sylvan’s views on what to include in a review, so read this with a grain of salt. There is some very useful information in here, though.SuperScript, The Walker Art Center
Note: This site contains a number of essays and presentation videos. “In May 2015, the Walker Art Center and Mn Artists hosted Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, a three-day conference of panels, keynotes, and a blog mentorship program, all dedicated to pondering the present and possible futures for arts publishing online. To complement the proceedings, the Walker and MnArtists collaborated on a series of commissioned essays features thinking by some of the field’s most incisive voices on key topics not addressed within the live event, published in the months following the conference. This page documents the entirety of this inaugural experiment.”Art Criticism in the Age of Yelp, Rhizome
“In a writing style that picks up on both the casualness and directness of reviews on Yelp, Droitcour manages to avoid many of the pitfalls of art reviewing, those traits (convoluted sentences, overly grand claims, reliance on jargon) that have led to the many essays putting art criticism to death. Could Yelp be the answer for some of the stylistic issues with criticism? It’s hard to ignore the prevailing tone in Yelp reviews. As they refer largely to experiences, they are highly subjective; every other sentence begins with ‘I,’ and they include a lot of storytelling and little information.”Post-Internet Art Criticism Survey, Kunstkritikk
“So do we need a new generation of writers to do justice to a new range of subjects/crises? Yes, though all these new materialist, object-oriented, speculative, ecological, network ideas are spreading rapidly, they are still oddly invoked to reignite old ideas of critique, resistance, utopia and the like—invoked to save what’s lost. Not that I personally subscribe to all of these new ideas, but at least they should serve to challenge, if not debunk, the latter. The imperative of resistance, for instance, does not just hark back to ‘68, but even to World War II as pointed out by philosopher Michel Serres. So if you’re not into resistance, you’re a corrupt ‘collaborateur’.”Art Criticism in the Networked Age, Kunstlicht
Note: This is a publication with numerous articles. “It is within this context that art criticism–which has professed itself to be in a crisis since Flusser’s time of writing at the very least–is to maintain itself. The current condition of art criticism is exemplary of these hybrid times: traditional art criticism seems like an anachronism, a relic of the enlightenment project. But at the same time, the need for art criticism is still urgent–perhaps more urgent than ever.”Has the Internet Changed Art Criticism? On Service Criticism and A Possible Future, Rhizome
“Look at the title. I’m asking has, not 'how.’ Contemporary art is still in the early stages of the digital shift that other industries have already experienced. To better understand what might be happening to art criticism, we should look to other fields and assess the structures that have developed as a response to the internet’s effect.”Hyperallergic, at Age 9, Rivals the Arts Journalism of Legacy Media, Nieman Reports
“More than a million people read Hyperallergic each month, says Gueyikian, who is publisher. The site’s revenue last year was $1.5 million, an increase from about $1.1 million in 2016, he says. The couple have invested personal savings into the business and have yet to pay themselves full salaries. Their first profitable year was 2014, and they have been primarily funded by ads since, breaking about even each year, Gueyikian says 'Essentially, they are one of the few, if not the only, commercially viable, native-to-online publishing institutions to emerge in the last decade,’ says Sky Goodden, editor and publisher of Momus, an online publication that emphasizes art criticism.”ARTS.BLACK: An Editorial Note, Temporary Art Review
“Though we are in the age of ‘democratized media’, its facilitators and content are hardly reflective of the artists, and the individuals who consume it. The lack of Black writers in the critical arts realm influences an industry that is completely one dimensional.” - Structuralist/Post-Structuralist/New Criticism
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The Intentional Fallacy, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
“The claim of the author’s 'intention’ upon the critic’s judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions, notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard. But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The present writers, in a short article entitled ‘Intention’ for a Dictionary1 of literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any length. We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes. It is a principle which accepted or rejected points to the polar opposites of classical 'imitation’ and romantic expression. It entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic’s approach will not be qualified by his view of ‘intention.’”Criticism and Truth
“Written in 1966 in response to an attack on Barthes’s Sur Racine, this polemic answers many of the charges brought against French New Criticism by conservative, academic, 19th-century-oriented critics: lack of ‘objectivity,’ fondness for ‘jargon,’ indifference to the author’s intention, etc. More positively, Barthes outlines some key concerns: plurality of meanings; analysis, based on linguistics, of the structures of possible meanings; the idea of a science of literature; and the dynamics of reading. Though some of the issues are specific to the French literary-academic situation, the bulk of this brief essay is a lively and accessible statement of an important modern critical position that is worth reading.“The Death of the Author
"This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is ‘explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even “new criticism”) should be overthrown along with the Author.”The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
“In this erudite and imaginative book, Umberto Eco sets forth a dialectic between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts.”
- Writing About Your Own Work
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No Longer Interested, A Blade of Grass
“I’ve worked to strike the phrase ‘I am interested in’ from my vocabulary. It is not easy. For years I have heard fellow artists explain their practice beginning with: ‘I am interested in notions of…’ ‘I am interested in the intersection between…’ ‘I am interested in questioning…’ I searched for the phrase ‘I am interested in’ in connection to ‘artist statement’ and was embarrassed at how far reaching this crutch phrase is among my peers.” You can follow up this reading with any of the other 15 essays from the same series, linked to at the bottom of Steve’s essay.Writing an Artist Statement? First Ask Yourself These Four Questions, The Guardian
“Academia is only one part of the art world, says Daniel Blight. To reach wider audiences, let’s find an alternative to artspeak.”“Don’t Quote Deleuze”: How to Write a Good Artist Statement, Artspace
“Writing about art is hard. Writing about art that you made can be even harder. We hear artists say, ‘If I knew how to describe my work in words, I’d be a writer, not an artist.’ While this may be true, what’s ‘truer’ is the fact that at some point, you as an artist will be asked to write an artist statement—and whether or not it is good, will matter. So, what makes an artist statement ‘good’? Whether you’re applying for a residency or grant, or you just want to perfect your elevator pitch, here are a handful of things not to include in your artist statement, plus a few tips to make the process a little less excruciating.”The Anti-artist-statement Statement
“I hate artist statements. Really, I do. As an artist, they are almost always awkward and painful to write, and as a viewer they are similarly painful and uninformative to read. I also don’t know who decided that artists should be responsible for writing their own ‘artist statement.’ Maybe it was an understaffed gallery in the 1980s, or a control freak think-inside-my-box-or-get-out MFA program director, but regardless of how this standardized practice came to be, the artist’s statement as professional prerequisite (at least for artists who have yet to be validated by the established art world) has long overstayed its welcome. And I don’t think a new one should be required in its place.”In Defense of the Artist Statement, Hyperallergic
“As a writer who works with visual artists, I was inspired to address Iris Jaffe’s recent post, ‘The Anti-artist-statement Statement.’ [. . .] Don’t get me wrong: I don’t need an artist’s manifesto or moral judgments or childhood stories. And I definitely don’t want to waste time reading clichés, artspeak, or cool-sounding phrases spit out by an arty robot. Someone else, like the gallery, can be responsible for informing me about historical or cultural context. All I want from an artist statement is a link between the work and the artist. When this is done honestly, the result is original and authentic. It’s simple, but there is so much resistance that the simplicity is overlooked.”
Response Questions
There is no reading response required for this set since you will be working on the Writing Exam.