READ CHAPTER 33 (BEING CLOSE TO YOUR WORK, BEING TOO CLOSE TO YOUR WORK), CHAPTER 37 (CRITICISM, CRITIQUE, CRIT, CRITICALITY, KRITIK), CHAPTER 38 (TALKING ABOUT COMPOSITION IS EASIER THAN TALKING ABOUT RACE) FROM ART CRITIQUES: A GUIDE.
WRITE A 1-2 PARAGRAPH COMMENT SUMMARIZING YOUR RESPONSE TO THE READINGS. INCLUDE AT LEAST ONE QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION.
What I really took away from the first chapter was that all critiques and responses can hold the potential to be helpful but in extremely different ways. Artist's can give you their critiques from a POV of understanding how the process works and knowing what it's like to view and analyze art in the way we ourselves do, while other can give you the perspective of a non-artist which is often the main audience, so this can provide a general feedback for the question " is my work showing what I want it to?" I think the second chapter makes a very good connection to the first by explaining and talking about, in a very clear way, what critiques and the different way can provide. This allows for us to utilize this and make the connection back to our work and it can be useful for your person work.
ReplyDeleteI think this relationship between technicalities and mean gin can be sometimes overlooked, so I think reinforcing that can be extremely helpful, especially with certain works of art. It also gives you a different way to think about the future direction of personal work and how you want to accomplish it.
Question: Do you think there are instances where technical concepts and meaningful concepts are mutually exclusive or is there a constant overlap in one way or another?
I enjoyed reading all three chapters, and I feel like this information is helpful to process and discuss before future critiques, especially ones that will involve the Art Department and CFAM staff. For example, Chapter 33 spoke of the importance of the critique as a means of "distancing" yourself from your own work. Sometimes, as artists, we spend so much time thinking about our ideas, what messages and meanings we want to convey, or how we're conveying significance through the media we use that we don't see the effectiveness of what we're doing or we lose track of that connection between meaning and technique. As noted in the chapter, teachers who are also artists themselves are helpful in a critique, because they have the experience to be able to articulate your reasoning behind certain artistic choices. Simultaneously, other faculty, such as art historians, share a different perspective that can help you look at your art more objectively. In Chapter 37, the author explains the different terms connected to "critique". I'm familiar with most of the terms, such as criticism, art criticism, and critique, but the other ones were new to me. I thought it was really important to understand the different nuances that are attached to each term.
ReplyDeleteFinally, in Chapter 38, the author warns the readers about the difficulties in critique concerning technique and meaning. While I understand that in some cases teachers may not be comfortable talking about meanings of sexuality, gender identity, and race, I feel that here at Rollins we are more willing to approach these subjects, especially with Brianne and Emily's work. This chapter also prompted some questions from me that I want to discuss with the class. How do you think the Art Department at Rollins handles critiques about students' artworks that deal with issues of sexual and gender identity as well as race and ethnicity? Do you ever worry that critiques of your work are too focused on technique and media? Or, are they too focused on meaning? Do you think technique is more important than meaning or vice versa? Or are they equally important?
Even though its late, I felt it was still appropriate to respond to the chapters. After reading Chapter 33, I gathered that artists often spend so much time with their work and ideas that it can lead them down a winding path that they may not have intended to pursue in the first place. Personally, I realized that I may be too enveloped in my own work as I have spent large amounts of time researching my ideas but the viewers will not have as much experience with the idea as I would, especially since Christianity and the Bible are not familiar to all people. Chapter 37 was interesting because I never considered the distinct denotations of each word related to "critique," and I also learned that choice of language is important when distinguishing between types of criticism and critique techniques. In Chapter 38, the author describes the tendency to focus on technique and the subject matter of a work during critique instead of the content and ideas when they are difficult to elaborate on or discuss. I believe that my idea of feminism in Christianity is relatively straightforward, but people may have difficulty engaging with the biblical aspects of the work since not everyone is familiar with the stories. However, I believe this chapter perfectly describes critique for my work in screenprinting because I am dealing with religious and BDSM imagery, and many of my classmates do not feel comfortable with the sexual topic, so they focus on the composition itself. For discussion, is it essential for the artist to steer the critique in a certain direction when the discussion has strayed too far off path?
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