CartArt Writing Against the Grain:
Towards a New Criticism Instructor: Sean TatolProgram: Art & Curatorial PracticeCredit(s): 1Date: May 17th, 24th, 31st, June 7th.Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: Art criticism has become a hot topic recently, after a long period of repressed dormancy in the art world. Even the forces that formerly sought to smother criticality out of existence now give lip service to the need for criticism. However, this has not coincided with an improved understanding of criticism’s means or ends, which sets the stage for an impotent “critical turn.” This Seminar will seek to remedy that blindness by studying the history of contemporary art’s move away from criticism alongside examples of criticism’s successes and failures.
Neither the Left’s self-satisfied identity politics nor the Right’s reactionary provocations present a way back to art as something more than political signification, and we must recover precisely the terms of art’s irreducibility if a new criticism is to emerge. To do so, we must understand how those terms changed in the later parts of the twentieth century, how they degenerated into inarticulate relativism, how that relativity expresses itself (even in those who seek to resist it), and how it can be possible to apply new terms of valuation in a hostile climate.
Session 1. The rhetoric of contemporary art: Beginning approximately with the battles around Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” come to terms with the expansions of art discourse from the ’60s to the trap of 2010s contemporary art as diagnosed by Suhail Malik in “On The Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art.”
Session 2. The indecision of contemporary art criticism: We will look at examples of art writing’s inability to engage with contemporary art or set up concepts for adequate discussion while diagnosing the nature of its impasse.
Session 3. The possibility of a new art criticism: We will consider how criticism can reconcile grounded historicity with the awareness of its own relativity, updating judgment without falling into a stale conservatism.
Session 4: Presentation of final projects
IMAGE: Arshile Gorky, Untitled, 1944
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