7. The Relevance of Art Criticism in Aesthetic Reception of Artworks (original) (raw)
Related papers
What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art
(Peer-reviewed Journal) Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, 2019
[Peer-reviewed article by two scientific committee members of the magazine] This essay seeks to provide an idea of the basis of the main theories of contemporary art criticism. It begins with the assumed knowledge and tradition of the Academies of Fine Art, with their ideal of beauty and classical structure. The importance of such traditional references has its origin in the Renaissance in the 16th century, in Florence with Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), in Haarlem with Karel van Manda (1548-1606) and, above all, in Paris with Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) of the French Royal Academy, which established the first strict rules for the fine arts and was a reference for Europe as a whole. Academies of Fine Art were established in the major European capitals, and from the 19th century, in the Americas and worldwide. The themes and rules presented over the course of history always related to the functions of art and the legacy of classical thought as tradition. However, values and ruptures, ethics, ideologies and political ideals, and the progress of science have conditioned the fundamental importance of the renewal of Western thought. This essay concerns the decline of tradition in the arts, the lack of ideologies guiding modern art, and the transition to contemporary art. The main theories that marked this transition period-20th and 21st century-are analyzed with respect to the art, its criticism, and the theories to the understanding and transformative sense of artistic creation. Such creativity usually appears strange or transgressive to the public and primarily to be seeking a legitimation of the artist's autonomy of choice and freedom of thought. On the whole, this essay presents the main aesthetics notions relating to the critical analysis of traditional European cultures and, more recently, American ones too. American culture, in which the languages of art are based, is analyzed for its effect on occidental philosophy. Both theories of art and contemporary aesthetics are emphasized so as to better understand the work of art's current aim with regard to the discernment of theoretical, prescriptive, and ideological thinking in the visual arts. Cite as: Wagner, Christiane. 2019. “What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art.” Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, nº 1, (March): 68-82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5168105
The Role of Spectatorship in Art outside Market and Critics Rules
This article wants to highlights the role that spectators can have with their feedback in redefining new curatorial pratices. The case study is 27metricubi a public art project made by the italian collective AAA, where the audience was engaged using the procedure Mazzaro-Scarin. The procedure developed by the artist Alessio Mazzaro with the psychologist Andrea Scarin, is an evaluation and engagment stategy composed by two assessment questionnaire (one for audience and one for artists) and a public meeting. It aims to investigate the effectiveness of new curatorial practices, to understand how the spectators perceived them and to improve them. The procedure is even a trigger to activate the spectators, a way to bring them to express what they think about the art works. Collettivo AAA is collective that build new spaces to experience Art outside market and critic rules. 27metricubi is a steel cube of 3m side assembled in a public space for 2 days and then disassambled and bring to a different city. Every day it opens for 4 hours and during this period it hosts 12 artists. The artists can partecipate in the project through an open call, the first 24 artists that applied, exhibit.
On Art, Audiences and Evaluation
A spectre of evaluation is haunting the arts. The relationships between artists and their audiences are being mediated by an ever-more complex system that determines the value of art. It’s a system driven by a conglomeration of experts: gallery directors, critics, historians and academics. The challenge for the arts is how to negotiate the new pressures to evaluate itself while also inventing new ways that artists, artworks, a non-exclusive audience, experts and the processes of evaluation and judgement might connect with each other.
2005
The belief that art stands independent of the social process and that the artist is free from the obligations and standards that are part of the cultural ethos is both misguided in theory and false in fact. Yet the claim of freedom for art, not for artists alone but for the functioning of the aesthetic sphere of culture, captures the vital core of that activity. This is because the arts have the ability to engage us in experience that is rich in perceptual awareness and in resonance of meaning, and such experience always has a social aspect and social content. What the arts offer society in achieving this experience, however, can only be realized when artists are free to pursue their own course, to explore their creative perceptions and to embody them in their work. The value of a work of art, then, has a social dimension, yet it leads to a paradoxical conclusion: Only when art is free from social constraint can it make its unique social contribution.
Art Criticism and Its Lingua Franca
Platform, Vol. 13, No. 1, On Criticism, Autumn 2019, 2019
In this essay, I draw attention to the knowledge and skills of the English language on a native level to suggest that the dominance of the English language has installed a particular habitus in art criticism. I point out that prioritizing native speakers in art criticism—in a position of writers and editors etc—limits possible stories and voices in an already closed art world. This leads to the more general question concerning the aim and objective of art criticism. Is it something more than interpretation, analysis, research on art for professionals, or taste-making and shaping public attention to the art market and collectors? Art criticism has a very ambiguous status; it operates according to the cultural and economic capital which comes along with the order of belief, appreciation, knowledge, recognition, prestige, honour, glory, authority, and language (Bourdieu, Blanchet). But at the same time, it is also a part of the profit oriented world treating writing, writers, and language as products and commodities, making art professionals very often struggle in precarious conditions of work. Stable and well-paid positions for writers and editors do exist of course but they are very limited. If then art criticism is also a place to discuss crucial issues like equality, racism, climate crisis, decolonization and so forth, who is going to write about that? And—what is also connected with that issue—who can afford to be an art critic?
Engaged Art Criticism 7 Propositions
Brand New Life, 2016
Art has never been written about as much as it is today in daily newspapers, international journals and on online platforms. At the same time, commentators have for quite some time now identified a sustained crisis of art criticism. In order to not give the last word to diagnoses of the end of art criticism, Pablo Müller and Ines Kleesattel outline possibilities of and approaches to an art critical practice today.
About Art Interpretation and the Situation of Contemporary Art
The task of artistic interpretation has always been an arduous task in art history, criticism, philosophy of art, aesthetics, and a wide range of humanist studies. An incredible amount of academics within humanities devote themselves to comment upon art and curiously enough have turn art criticism into one of the essentialisms of a work of art, even above art creation. To this extent, it seems that we have reached a point in which it could be possible to affirm that there are even more art critics than artists, a relevant fact that we should consider to ponder upon. Because, can you imagine an artist interpreting their own work and reflecting upon the intrinsic meaning of his/her own work of art? In this paper I will try to address the issue of the complex situation in which contemporary aesthetics is immersed, focusing specially in the difficult relationship between artists and art critics as well as the role they play in their " internalized job " as mediators between art works and art viewers and their self-consideration as " meaning revealers. " It is true that there are many cases in which literary theory is even more fascinating that art works themselves, but how is it possible than one simple poem or artwork gives birth to thousands of pages of printed matter? The truth is that in the contemporary era it is quite impossible to find artistic productions disconnected from artistic analysis. But curiously enough, nowadays we live in a time in which the act of interpretation has gone too far, to an absurd point of entanglement that is difficult to elude. Nowadays, contemporary criticism is an amalgam of reflections upon –isms that has reached a theoretical space of unanswearability. It makes no sense at all to continue on that line of constant accumulation of abstract ideas about artistic meaning revelation. At the core of the purpose of this essay I would like to state the inherent incongruences in the persistent intentions of " understanding " art.
Are there Bad Artworks? Some Views on the Negative Evaluations of Art
Chitrolekha Journal on Art and Design, 2018
The general purpose of this paper is to investigate the character of negative evaluations of art through two basic questions, which are to be answered by a historic and a cognitive/structuralistic approach, retrospectively: Do negative evaluations of art have an absolute and permanent character and can negative evaluations block the cognitive process of the creation of aesthetic experience? The definitions of artworks both as value-carriers and as the means of renewing creative and philosophic thinking are used as the basis of an argumentation that reaches the conclusion that negative evaluations of artworks are only temporary as they may change with the passage of time. Moreover, cultivated perceivers of bad artworks may gain deep aesthetic experience because of their effort to justify their negative evaluations, in which they are reminded of the principles of genuine art, due to our structuralistic thinking process based on binary opposites.
The plurivocity of art criticism
Academia Letters, 2021
Art criticism is a controversial activity, born from the Kantian necessity and subjective universality of judgement and historically marked by the word "crisis". The constant and eternal "crisis" of art criticism has been attested and demonstrated several times since Idealism. For over a century, art criticism has been taken as an empty activity that does not offer examples that can be taken as more than an exercise of trial and error, reduced to mere descriptions or so-called biographies. The meta criticism expresses this eternal state of "crisis". Lionello Venturi in History of Art Criticism, back in 1936, attributes this situation to the severance between aesthetics, history, and criticism, that is, the many aspects of the relationship between the public and the work of art. This severance points to the influence of positivism, to the absence of a link between theory and praxis. Thus, the "crisis" that accompanies art criticism can be perceived as some collateral effect of the very thought that originates it. The subjective and circumscriptive character of Kantian philosophy is the first symptom of this situation. Kant establishes the birth of art criticism by overcoming a technical notion of art and consequently of a prescriptive aesthetic. He does so by neglecting the object, transforming judgement into a formality concerning the subject, motivated by something exterior. Within this context art criticism's praxis stumbles upon two main difficulties: the attempt to search for the truth of experience through discussion, regardless the impossibility of accessing the noumenon; and the attempt to encompass the phenomenon without incurring in relativism. Both difficulties are surpassed by Kant's theory, but only formally. Therefore, art criticism is born as a possibility of this discussion but without a direction to guide its realization. Giving the metaphysic structure that grounds art criticism, "crisis" is the result of a posterior focus on the object that leads to the understanding of limitations and difficulties brought up by it. Therefore, art criticism assumes a task that contradicts its underlying