Browsing by Subject "Art criticism"
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Item Abstraction, expression, kitsch: American painting in a critical context, 1936-1951(2007) Price, Justine Dana; Shiff, RichardThis following is a study on abstract painting: the critical reception and analysis of painterly practice--performative, experimental, dissenting--in New York from 1936 to 1951. By metonymy, this study also looks at the figure in the political realm via the critiques offered by socially-oriented critics at this time (some of whom were also art critics). As the boundless secondary literature on this period has noted, the painting of the New York School would "triumph" with "stunning success" by the late 1950s. In other regards, the subject of this dissertation is that of failure. The revolution (or, "the idea of Revolution") that had been hoped for by so many left-wing radicals in the 1930s never quite came to pass or, later, went horribly wrong: first in Spain and then elsewhere. "Modern art, like modern literature and modern life," Clement Greenberg concluded in a 1948 essay on the Old Masters "has lost much." Greenberg's essay on the Old Masters appeared in the same number of Partisan Review as Hannah Arendt's essay, "The Concentration Camps." This is the generation of critics, intellectuals and artists who bore the brunt of articulating the unspeakable horrors of the Camps and the Bomb--manmade places and events that were "beyond human comprehension." This study is also about belief, of kinds: a Modernist belief in the agency of the artist, in the discernment of the critic, and of a "superstitious regard for print," to which Greenberg referred with irony in a 1957 essay (artists didn't always believe what they read, he would conclude). Irving Howe, the founder of Dissent in 1954, supposedly once quipped that, "when intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine." The dissertation at hand contains a number of kinds of critical statements: ones of ambiguity and of skepticism, and others of crisis and disinterest, directed towards art objects and elsewhere, and expressed by writers at mid-century, some especially subtle and acute. Modernist belief, even if betrayed too often, allowed these critics often to escape velleities, or other empty gestures, in their writing.Item The evaluation of contemporary art with art historical and market criteria : the 3C Model(2011-12) Richter, Till Florian Alexander; Shiff, Richard; Magee, Stephen P.; Barnitz, Jacqueline E.; Rather, Susan W.; Mahajan, VijayFor the most recent contemporary art no art historical or price records exist that can testify of its value. However, the market for contemporary art is enormous and the art historical interest in it is equally important. If we can find out how to evaluate contemporary art, it will further the art historical understanding, the market transparence and the sales of contemporary art thus having an influence also on the creation of art (William Grampp). The art historical verdict and the market verdict are linked. This has been proven by a number of economists (Frey, Galenson, Grampp). The question is how they are linked. Basically, both art history and the market contribute to the creation of value in art. What is it that makes art valuable? What are the criteria used in art history and in the market to evaluate art? The focus is on European and US American art between 1970 and today. Evaluation, be it aesthetic or financial, is a process of decision making. Decisions are based on criteria that must be conscious at least after the decision is made (Clement Greenberg). In the art world, certain decision makers are more influential than others. Therefore the dissertation analyzes the most influential positions in art theory and in the art market and distills the essential criteria used. The dissertation seeks to advance the research on this fundamental question of the evaluation of art through a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary study than those previously undertaken. It presents a model that integrates the most important criteria from both sides and allows a more reliable evaluation of contemporary art. The 3C Model explains the ensemble of Quality-Value-Price through three criteria: Change, Connectivity and Context (Time, Space, People). The 3C Model can be used as a general basis in the discourse on value and quality. It is a structural method that can be applied to almost any art from any period. The model is exercised here using Gerhard Richter, François Morellet, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Sophie Calle and Pipilotti Rist as examples.Item Henri Rousseau, 1908 and after : the corpus, criticism, and history of a painter without a problem(2012-05) Haskell, Caitlin Welsh; Shiff, Richard; Charlesworth, Michael; Childs, Elizabeth C.; Clarke, John R.; Henderson, Linda; Peers, GlennThis dissertation considers Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) as a painter and as a figure of discourse. It addresses the longstanding concern of Rousseau’s resistance to interpretation and proposes that this derives from Rousseau’s incomplete fulfillment of the professional obligations of the artist, specifically, from his failure to motivate his work through the pursuit of what modern art critics commonly called “a problem.” Rousseau did not practice painting as artists of his day did, and because of this difference—first articulated by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1908 as an absence of artistic inquiétude—he entered the discourse of art with unprecedented susceptibility to reinvention. The Rousseau we know today, the Rousseau who was a miraculous modernist in the interwar period, and the Rousseau who emerged in the context of the avant-garde in the earliest years of the twentieth century share little besides a name, and this frustrates any effort to write a coherent history of the painter and his pictures. Rather than propose once again Rousseau’s recuperation into a traditional art-historical narrative, this dissertation tells the history of a maker who produced admirable images but fulfilled few other author-functions, and it tells the history of writers who, compensating for Rousseau’s authorial deficits, produced a new artist, a new body of work, and widespread puzzlement about the place of each in the history of modern art.Item How do three public school art teachers in Texas use art criticism and discussion to teach contemporary art in the K-12 classroom(2014-05) Garfield, Samantha Rebecca; Bain, ChristinaI conducted a case study to observe three art classes at various campuses throughout Austin, Texas in order to observe how art criticism methods were used to guide classroom discussions about contemporary art. By engaging in art criticism in the classroom, an instructor can ultimately enrich the teaching and learning of art. They can also assist students in learning to subjectively evaluate images from their everyday lives, reinforcing the value placed on thoughtful description through art education. Learning how to turn an evaluation from a judgmental and careless acceptance or dismissal into a thoughtful analysis can suspend indifference and re-invigorate the potential educational aspect of time spent in the art classroom and expand the scope of learning outside the arena of art. The value of using contemporary art for these evaluations, as opposed to more traditionally recognized artists, enables the art lessons to become integrated into a social and cultural context and can integrate social studies, political science, and any number of other concentrations into arts education.