Art Criticism and Writing
The practice of criticism involves making finer and finer distinctions among like things, but it is also a way to ask fundamental questions about art and life. To pursue both of these functions requires a grounding in art history and aesthetics, as well as a wide-ranging knowledge and curiosity about contemporary culture.
We live in a conflicted time, when the need for criticism and critical thinking is greater than ever, but the practice of these arts is more and more constrained. To avoid a post-critical future, when public matters are decided by fiat and force rather than by deliberation and debate, the critical faculty and ethos must be vigorously pursued.
We also live in an age when images have an inordinate power over us—the power to influence public opinion, to create and direct desire, to comfort and inflame. The critics of tomorrow must study the image in all its manifestations in order to better understand how we are subject to them. An underlying principle of this program from its inception has been that the image should begin to occupy a place in the understanding of life comparable in importance to that occupied by the humanities and sciences.
The School of Visual Arts has a long tradition of employing practitioner/teachers, and this will continue in the Art Criticism and Writing program, where courses will be taught by those who have made significant contributions to the field. We will focus on the essay as form, as well as on shorter forms of review, and learn criticism by doing it.
This program is not involved in “discourse production” or the prevarications of curatorial rhetoric, but rather in the practice of criticism writ large, aspiring to literature.
David Levi Strauss, chair