Tales from the Crit

At Art Center, I have classes in which students from a variety of disciplines crit one another. 'Fine Art' is among the smallest programs at Art Center, so an interdisciplinary course will skew toward other areas - photo, film, and illustration. This can lead to some interesting conversations, as the basis for critiques varies so widely between areas of study. But last week, I got to thinking about what constitutes 'art' in a crit dominated by photo students.

It seems one of the primary functions of a crit for my students is to identify possible uses for what they're looking at. Could it be used to sell a product? for fashion? As an answer to a technical problem about lighting? If no apparent use presents itself, Art Center students will start to talk about the work in question as "fine art". To an anthropologist from Mars, fine art at Art Center sounds like a market segment for objects that don't play well with others, ones that observe no apparent rules, ones that seem 'expressive' in some undefined way.

Because I spend most of my professional life thinking about fine art (to the exclusion of other things, such that the addition of the word 'fine' seems prissy), I come to this conversation with a pronounced bias. In a nut shell, I think it's interesting that something attains art status by not having some properties. To get into the 'art' conversation, I have always thought that an object or activity needed something in excess of the ordinary, not the lack of something.

In his book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught, James Elkins lists the possible 'orientations' crits may follow, and I think this observation is important here. Art Center's students seem most interested in what Elkins calls 'rhetorical' and 'profession' orientations - those that speak to how effective the work is or how well it responds to professional standards. I'm more interested in what Elkins calls 'ethical' or 'teleological' crits - those that consider the life of the work in the world.

My objective here isn't to argue for some absolute method of running crits or discussing art; it's to get a conversation going about how students see the relations between parts of the field. My concern is that students - driven by what they regard as important...grades - will dismiss crits from unexpected orientations. Can they be met half way? Should we be more focused on the long term life of the work or on the short term? Can additional resources be brought to bear on a crit to make it fulfill more than one function?