Chapter 5 Suggestions
    
    
    
    It is every author’s duty to balance negative criticism with positive proposals. In
    
    this chapter I am going suggest some ways to rethink critiques, to make them more effective and clear. I am not saying that these ideas should replace current practice. As I argued at the close of chapter 3, I’m interested in observing what happens in art classes, not in replacing one curriculum with another. The ideas I will describe in this chapter are tailored to allow students and teachers to understand what happens in critiques. They are topical medicines or clinics for specific problems, rather than plausible substitutes for critiques in general.
    
    Tinkering With Critiques 
 Most of this chapter will be occupied with an idea I will call the chain of
    
    questions. But before I start, I want to propose a few whimsical ideas. I don’t mean these to be too serious, although I think there are places where they might be just what is needed. 
 First, here are a few suggestions for things to do with critiques, from the student’s
    
    point of view:
    
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    • Take an artwork done by someone else, and place it among your own. See what
    
    kind of stories the critique panelists come up with in order to explain how that work is one of your own. 
 • Have a friend stand next to you in a critique. Don’t tell the panelists which of
    
    you is the artist—tell them that at the end of the critique, you’d like them to guess. 
 • Have someone play your part at the critique, and listen in the background
    
    without identifying yourself. Note how the teachers react differently to the actor. If you’re a man, ask a woman to play your part; if you’re white, ask a Latino or an AfricanAmerican. 
 • Present someone else’s work. Choose someone whom you don’t know. Do your
    
    best to represent that person’s work as your own. 
 • Present work that you dislike (old work, for example) as if it was your newest.
    
    See if you can convince the panel that you think it’s good work. 
 • Present the chronology of your works in reverse order. See if you can convince
    
    yourself, and your teachers, that you’re going forward with your work. 
 • Borrow your opening speech from someone else. Present that person’s concerns
    
    to to your teachers, as his or her interests were your own interests.
    
    
    
    Some of these suggestions might need a little help from the faculty, especially if
    
    you’re in a small department and most people know you or your work. I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to make fun of the faculty (that would tend to break down conversation, which I am assuming is not a good idea). Each of these suggestions can be
    
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    arranged so that it is not belligerent. The idea is to learn more about how you and your work are seen, by changing something about yourself or your art. If these strategies work, they will tell you something about how to control viewers’ responses—always an important thing to know if you’re serious about becoming an artist. 
 Second, here are some ideas from the point of view of the faculty:
    
    
    
    • Try saying the opposite of what you think: anytime you have an opinion, instead
    
    of saying it, formulate its opposite. 
 • Try speaking as if you loved Andrew Wyeth, or Norman Rockwell, or some
    
    artist you don’t like. Don’t name the artist (that might make it too simple to argue against you), but try to make a convincing case for the artist’s sensibility. 
 • Try speaking as if you were Pollock, or Picasso, or some artist you know well.
    
    Don’t necessarily pretend you are the artist, just try borrowing the artist’s language.
    
    
    
    These ideas, too, are tools for understanding other people’s responses, and they
    
    can also help illuminate your own habits of thinking. You’ll learn something about your own habits and judgments by taking on someone else’s. (And of course you can always tell the student afterward.) 
 It is also possible to think of alternate critique formats. In this book I have been
    
    thinking mostly of standard MFA- and BFA-style critiques, in which one or more teachers (the “panel”) talk to one artist. Sometimes the room is filled with other students, and sometimes it’s private. There are also larger class discussions in which each student
    
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    takes a turn saying something about her work—but those are not really full critiques. Here are some suggestions for new kinds of critiques, which could work in undergraduate or graduate settings:
    
    
    
    • A critique in which the panelists are only allowed to ask questions about the
    
    work, and are not allowed to pass judgments or tell stories. 
 • A critique in which the panelists cannot see the work until it has been discussed
    
    for ten minutes. 
 • A critique in which the panelists must look at the work for ten minutes without
    
    speaking.
 
 • A nonverbal critique, in which panelists have an hour to create a work of their
    
    own, in response to what they see. (At the School of the Art Institute, we once had a painting teacher who never spoke: she just took the brushes from the students’ hands and painted over their paintings.) 
 • A critique in which panelists are not allowed to see the work until the student
    
    decides they are ready for it.
    
    
    
    Any of these could throw light on the usual critique format. If you try them, you’ll
    
    want to make sure that you can control the situation enough to assure that it uncovers new meaning, rather than just demonstrating some obvious truth—for exmaple, that it’s frustrating to keep quiet for ten minutes. You might also use these suggestions as topics for conversation—they can be mentioned during critiques, rather than implemented. (As
    
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    a student, you might ask, “Would you have rather stayed quiet for a few minutes, to give you a chance to think about the work?”) 
 All these suggestions—for students, for teachers, for alternative critique formats
    
    —are ways of increasing control. It is also possible to deliberately relinquish control. The teacher, or the head of the critique panel, can tell everyone to say whatever comes into their minds. People can tell anecdotes, or say whatever the work reminds them of, as long as they say something. I call this kind of critique free association, even though it is usually more like conversation. At its purest, with no discernible leadership and no questions in response to what other people say, a free association critique is indistinguishable from an informal conversation. Some students resist it, thinking that it is not teaching, or that it is not a proper way to respond to art, but others speak highly about it, saying that it leads to all kinds of unexpected insights. It may seem that this would be a particularly bad idea, since it eschews all control and makes rational analysis impossible. But it mimicks the way we naturally think about art, mingling private associations with irrelevant thoughts and sudden inspiration. Certainly a great deal of contemporary art criticism is essentially free association, in that it isn’t tied to a single line of inquiry. Because it is so fiendishly difficult to control a critique—and so hard to know what control is—it sometimes makes sense to tell everyone not to make sense, not to follow a line of argument or pursue a given subject, but to speak freely about anything and everything.
    
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    The Chain of Questions 
 Most conversations about art alternate between dull and creative, repetitious and
    
    insightful, superficial and deep. Occasionally someone will say something out of the blue that’s really interesting, and everyone will fall quiet for a moment thinking about it. This is the art of conversation. It’s pleasureful to vary the speed and difficulty of the conversation, and if it isn’t sufficiently varied, it gets dull. The free association critique (or conversation) acknowledges the natural human tendency to want to wander. From Montaigne onward, undirected thinking has had a special place in the arts. It makes sense because it is what we usually do, and it is often what art provokes. Things are different in academia, where everyone is dedicated to straight, hard thinking. Inspiration counts, but so does the insight born of a protracted inquiry directed at a single topic. This is—to reprise a term from the first chapter—the ancient art of dialectic: you ask, you think about the reply, you ask again, you rephrase the question, you go on, pushing and inquiring, without changing the subject. Essentially, the difference between this kind of questioning and a typical art critique is that dialectic questioning explores a series of questions on one topic, rather than a list of questions on different topics. (This is also closer to the original meaning of “critique,” as Kant used it.) Though it is artificial and sometimes difficult to manage, a dialectic inquiry is an optimal way to make sense of the world. 
 Later I will propose a kind of critique that is entirely based on dialectical
    
    questioning. First, however, I want to suggest how dialectical inquiries can function in normal critique settings. In particular, a concerted attack on a single issue can redress a
    
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    problem that is endemic to critiques: teachers say things just once, and then drop the subject before anyone has a chance to follow up on what they’ve said. Instructors try to provide as many insights as they can during a critique, and that means that many of them will not be developed. There is a serious drawback to satements that are just “thrown out”: the student does not always know why the statements were made in the first place. “You might want to try more blue,” or “That seems a little odd,” are typical statements in critiques: they are judgments with no explanations. Almost any statement that occurs in a critique has this characteristic: it does not include its rationale. 
 Sometimes a teacher will know her reason for saying something, and will be able
    
    to produce it if the student asks. “You might want to try more blue because the green is a bit overwhelming.” But notice—and this is the crucial point—that even this is not a complete explanation. It remains to be said why blue is better, and why any one color should not be overwhelming. There is an important difference here between the reasons for statements, which are the explanations that the teacher comes up with when she is asked, and the unexamined assumptions or dogmas, which are deeper explanations that the teacher has never thought about. In this example the reason is that green is overwhelming, and the unexamined assumption behind the reason might be something like this: “Single colors should not be allowed to dominate.” 
 As a student, you can get at your teacher’s reasons and unexamined assumptions
    
    by asking what I’ll call a chain of questions. It seems to me that our natural habit of making judgments without giving reasons, and without searching for the underlying assumptions, is the single most important source of confusion in critiques. After a
    
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    lifetime’s experience with art a teacher has a battalion of ideas about what makes art good in general and what makes certain kinds of art good. In general teachers are largely unaware of these ideas: they know a few of them, but the vast majority go unnoticed. So when a teacher says something about a student’s work, chances are very good that the student will not understand quite why the teacher said what she did, and that the teacher herself will be unaware of the assumptions that led her to make the judgment. 
 The typical things people say about art do not just pop into their heads, but are
    
    suggested by unconscious assumptions about what constitutes good art. (In Freudian terms, these assumptions are not unconscious, but preconscious: that is, they’re not instinctual drives, but things of which we are temporarily unaware.) The reasons for statements are usually easy to epxlain, but the assumptions may be hard to get at. It is helpful to look at the relation between judgments, reasons, and unexamined assumptions a little more closely. 
 Judgments are what normally occur in a critique. After a few questions, a panelist
    
    may say, 
 
 — I think that this film has too much playfulness about it, it’s goofy. Let’s say the student or another instructor questions the judgment, in order to
    
    elicit a reason. There are many ways to bring out reasons, but the best is just to behave like a two year old and ask “why”: 
 
 — Why is that bad? — Well, because it starts out seriously, but then it ends up careless.
    
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    Often this is where things end, both because the critique moves on to another
    
    topic, and because the speaker may not be aware of any further explanation. The judgment that has been made is this:
    
    The film is too playful. 1. Judgment
    
    It is possible to generalize a little, and restate the reason for this judgment as follows:
    
    Films like this should not start out serious and end up playful. 2. Reason
    
    Note that the reason is not the end of the line. There is an unexamined assumption behind it, something that drove the speaker to believe that films like this should not turn playful. To evoke it, the student might ask another “why” question: 
 — Why is it bad that the work begins seriously and ends silly?
    
    As a rule, assumptions are usually unexamined—that is, the speaker has never thought about them—and so this kind of question can be difficult to answer. The response might be a disguised elaboration of the first answer. The teacher might say: 
 — I think the work promises to take itself seriously, and then ends up flippant.
    
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    That does not explain why it’s undesirable to have the work turn silly, and so it is necessary to rephrase the question and ask again. In this case another teacher might ask the question, instead of the student : 
 — So does that mean you mistrust the artist?
    
    And let us assume the answer is simply: 
 — Yes, I suppose so.
    
    Then you might guess that an unexamined assumption behind the reason might be:
    
    A film like this should not be devious. 3. Unexamined assumption
    
    Like many unexamined assumptions, this one is ambiguous. The assumption might also be: 
 
 
 
 — Any film should not be devious. — Any work of art should not be devious. — This one film should not be devious in this way. — Any work of art should not be devious in this way.
    
    Or perhaps openness is really the issue, and the assumption should be something like: 
 Or: 
 — A work of art should not lie. — A work of art should not hide its intentions.
    
    Or it may be a more personal issue:
    
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    — A work of art is bad if it succeeds in tricking me.
    
    These alternatives could be explored after the critique. At this point, however, there is enough information to conclude that the speaker dislikes being tricked, and that consistency, seriousness, play, trust, and intentionality are all concepts that need further exploration. 
 The principal difficulty in going further is that evoking deeper unexamined
    
    assumptions is like pulling teeth. Even when the teacher doesn’t resist the “why” questions—after all, they can seem rather rude—she may not answer in a helpful way. Let’s say that the student, or the other teachers, continue to press the issue, and the teacher finally offers this explanation: 
 — I like things that are flip, I just don’t like the way it’s done here.
    
    In that case, the exchange might continue this way: 
 
 
 — What seems wrong about the way it’s done here? — It’s done without thinking, too quickly. — Do you think that work which changes from serious to unserious should do it
    
    seriously, or carefully? 
 Notice that it’s getting more difficult to frame the questions. Say the answer is
    
    “Yes.” Then the instructor believes something like this: “Work should change moods from serious to underserious in a serious or careful manner.” This is another unexamined assumption. And what lies behind it? Again we have a number of choices: 
 — Seriousness takes precedence over silliness, and seriousness should control
    
    both what is serious and what is not serious.
    
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    — Seriousness is fundamental, and playfulness is dependent on it. — You need to be very careful where silliness is concerned.
    
    The deeper unexamined assumption may be any of these, or several others. Say the assumption was “Seriousness is fundamental, and playfulness is dependent on it.” (This is, incidentally, a very common assumption.) Does anything lie behind it? Maybe; it could be something like this: 
 — Seriousness is part of sanity, and silliness can be destructive of sanity. And so
    
    the deepest of the unexamined assumptions would be:
    
    Sanity is an ultimate good. 4. Final assumption or axiom
    
    This final assumption could better be called an axiom, since like the axioms of mathematics it cannot appeal to a higher authority for justification. (You can’t argue sanity is good, because you can’t argue from the opposing point of view of insanity.) Philosophers also call statements like this dogmas, unexamined terms, givens, and postulates. Here I am defining “axiom” as a statement that stands without justification, not because the speaker is unwilling to think further but because she cannot think further. Axioms are usually less interesting than reasons or unexamined assumptions because they are things known to everyone. They are sometimes endoxa, universal trivial truths, akin to “Don’t go out in public without clothes.” Typically they are applicable outside of
    
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    art—they are principles that apply to art and to life. For these reasons, axioms are usually not as much help as unexamined assumptions. 
 Though I find the four-step sequence of judgment-reason-assumption-axiom is
    
    widely useful, it goes without saying that it is not always four steps. In particular, assumptions and axioms can be effectively the same. Any of the “ultimate terms” of criticism that I listed in chapter 4, such as “interesting” or “powerful,” could also be put as assumptions or axioms (see p. xx). When people say work is interesting, powerful, moving, authentic, inventive, compelling, gorgeous, or stimulating, the assumption is that interesting work is good, or moving work is good, and so forth. These might be axioms, because people would be hard-pressed to say why a good artwork is compelling, or why it’s good to be moved. 
 It also happens that the judgment and the axiom can be one and the same. Many
    
    things about the chain of questions can be questioned. But it’s helpful to begin with it in mind, since it provides a very helpful reference for discussion. Here are the four links, then, with their salient points:
    
    Judgment Reason
    
    A statement made in the course of a critique The justification given when someone asks
    
    for it Assumption The unexamined or uncognized principle behind the reason and the judgment The endoxa, the general truth that supports Axiom the assumption. Often axioms have little to do with art
    
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    The four-step chain of questions.
    
    Thinking about the chain of questions clarifies a couple of things. First, the chain can be followed to a final link. There is no circularity or infinite regression. Instead, almost everything that is said in art critiques utlimately depends on unexamined assumptions and axioms. I like to think of this like a stream: the individual judgments are like little rivulets, and they converge into streams, which finally converge into rivers, and empty into the very large and common oceans of axioms. The chain of questions also shows that the number of assumptions and axioms in art teaching, like the number of large rivers, is not infinite. People in the art world sometimes assume that visual art has an infinite number of meanings, but in practice it turns out that our thinking runs in a relatively small number of channels. Art discouse is more limited and conventional than we might wish. 
 Unexamined assumptions and axioms can be collected the way one might collect
    
    stamps. There are a large number of them, but I suspect that in any given art department or “interpretive community” there are really not that many. Here are some that were listed by one of my students (Kirsten Lindberg Benson); they dominated the discussion in two painting critiques, without every being mentioned or questioned directly:
    
    Paintings should be primarily concerned with space.
    
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    A painting should have unity. It is helpful to use other painters as sources. History is archaeology (and therefore not useful). One can never be sure when a painting is finished. Disruptive qualities are good in a painting. Sensuous paintings are good. Spontaneity is good. Old styles of art need new zest to keep them going. Unexamined assumptions in painting.
    
    
    
    One of the interesting things about pursuing the chain of questions is that the
    
    assumptions are often real surprises. An artist who thinks of herself as postmodern might also make judgments that depend on some very old-fashioned assumptions. This particular list has some entries that seem dated, like “Sensuous paintings are good.” It is the nature of axioms and assumptions to catch us unaware (they are, after all, “unexamined”), and it stands to reason that the general operative principles of our intellectual lives should be older, more dated, than the neologisms we have picked up from the latest art magazine. 
 I have taught a number of classes on critiques, in which students practice finding
    
    assumptions and axioms. In one class a student said he thought one of his assumptions was “It is good to put effort into artworks.” But that can’t be the final term in a chain of questions, because it is not apparent why effort should be good. I suggested that effort
    
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    might be moral, and he said perhaps that was it. But then his axiom would be something like “Good art is moral”—an unsettling thing for a postmodern artist to say. Another common assumption is that good art can hold our attention for more than a few moments. But if that is pressed, it sometimes turns out that the underlying axiom is that we should be entertained, and then the axiom might be something like “Art relieves boredom.” Again, the axiom is unexpected, and it throws light on the teacher’s habit of asking students to make works that hold the viewer’s attention. 
 In practice, it is not usually a good idea to press teachers for assumptions and
    
    axioms. People make judgments, and they are usually aware of their reasons, but they often don’t know much about the assumptions that are behind the reasons. As Nietzsche said, Socrates was one of the most annoying people who ever lived because his ultimate purpose seemed to be demonstrating that everyone, including himself, really knows nothing. Talking about the chain of questions can be annoying in the same way because it reveals how little of our reasoning we really understand. Luckily there are ways of studying assumptions and axioms without being too frustrating or insulting.
    
    Transcribing Critiques 
 My first suggestion is to study critiques after they have happened: tape them,
    
    transcribe them, and then study them at leisure. That is how I generated the various excerpts of critiques in this book. Taping is very helpful, but it has to be done carefully. Most important, you have to preserve anonymity: instructors are not apt to talk naturally if they know that everything they say is going to be scrutinized afterward. In my
    
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    experience the best solution is to have the student tape the critique, and then change everyone’s names when the transcripts are made. None of the students in the seminar that reads the transcript should know who the speakers were; they should never hear the tape, and all the names should be expunged from the transcript. (For example, if someone says “he said,” that can be replaced in the transcript by “[speaker X] said.”) When the artist is present in the seminar, he or she should be cautioned not to give any clues about the identities of the other people in the transcription. The best transcripts, therefore, are those that are several years old, so that the artist and most of the panelists are not known to the students. (Most of the critiques I have excerpted in this book were made between 1990 and 1995. They’re still just as valuable as when they were made, and the identities of the speakers are now nearly impossible to guess.) Aanonymity doesn’t hinder analysis, and it helps assure everyone in the department or the school that the instructors are not being critiqued behind their backs. 
 It may seem that the loss of the nuances of speech would impair the usefuleness
    
    of the transcripts, but it turns out that virtually everything having to do with content can retained without knowing about gestures, body language, and untranscribable mumbles and hrumphs. I think it is best to use italics and scare quotes for emphasis, to transcribe words such as “sort of,” “um,” and “kind of,” and to put in ellipses […] when speakers hesitate; but in general I have found that the non-verbal parts of speech have less meaning than I had thought. (This is an interesting disproof of the common notion that spoken nuance and body language are all-important.)
    
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    Sometimes it is difficult to make sentences out of what the speakers say. Panelists
    
    in critiques are usually trying to express the most difficult thoughts that come to their mind, and it can be truly surprising to find how seldom they speak in complete sentences. It is my experience that people only speak in complete sentences when they have very little to say. A paragraph’s worth of information virtually never comes out as a string of grammatically correct sentences. Yet we are oblivious to syntactical transgressions in everyday speech, and we automatically edit what we hear into subjects, verbs, and predicates. In this respect, the project of transcribing can be an illuminating lesson in the difference between the spoken and written word. What should be done, for example, with this speech:
    
    K
    
    You could also be printing on plexiglass or any other support that is not that doesn’t have one of the main connotations that I can think of about glass is fragility or breakability.
    
    
    
    So I mean how do you justify its use maybe given your ideas given that aspect of that particular material because it’s not a hand-held object and you don’t you know you don’t impose any of these qualities about the material on the viewer I mean then I would question the use of that as a support.
    
    This is not at all unusual—in fact, I chose it almost at random. The question is how much is read into the passage when it is punctuated. If I edit it this way:
    
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    K
    
    You could also be printing on plexiglass or any other support that is not, that doesn’t have… One of the main connotations that I can think of about glass is fragility or breakability.
    
    
    
    So I mean, how do you justify its use? Maybe given your ideas, given that aspect of that particular material… Because it’s not a hand-held object and you don’t, you know, you don’t impose any of these qualities about the material on the viewer. I mean, then I would question the use of that as a support.
    
    Am I imposing a sense that was not intended? I have found that the best strategy is to transcribe the critique, and then give both the transcript and the tape to the student and to whichever faculty members are willing to participate, so they can check it. In general this issue, like the problem of transcribing grunts and body language, is significantly less important than it might seem. Most punctuations will not radically affect the sense. 
 There are other practical difficulties. When a panelist says, “I like that one there,”
    
    the transcript needs to have a bracketed interpolation identifying the work, and it needs to be keyed to a slide of the work. For that purpose it is essential that the student review the transcript and identify which works the panelists were indicating. All in all, transcribing takes time. The tape machine has to be good quality, since a low-quality microphone will miss a great deal of dialogue. It takes me an average of five or six hours to type out a forty-five minute critique: not because I type slowly, but because the transcription requires numerous decisions about punctuation. Slides have to be taken of the artworks, preferably soon after the critique before they are dispersed or altered. Then the
    
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    transcription has to be given to the artist to be checked. The slides have to be labelled to correspond with the way they’re referred to in the critique. 
 All that takes work, but then the transcript can then be studied in a classroom
    
    setting. Members of the class can read the parts as if it was a radio play, with someone showing the slides at the same time. In doing this it needs to be made clear that the purpose is not to continue the critique by adding more judgments to those the panelists have made. There needs to be a vigilant separation between the juridical statements in the critique and the descriptive statements in the analysis. A good way of putting this is that the function of analyzing transcriptions is to understand the critique, not the artwork. 
 It can also be tempting to disparage or make fun of panelists who are, after all,
    
    thinking on their feet. Most things that most of us say sound stupid when they are analyzed too carefully. So although it is sometimes useful to say that a given panelist had no particular idea in mind, or that a given statement was particularly obvious, unproductive, or confused, it is essential not to assume that any member of the class would do better. 
 The main advantage of going to all this trouble is that it slows down the critique.
    
    If a seminar class reads a critique like a play, it is possible to pause after every speech and analyze it according to any of the topics I introduced in the previous chapter, or according to the chain of questions. In general, the panelists’ unexamined assumptions become much more apparent than they were in real time, and so their judgments will be easier to understand.
    
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    When a critique is confrontational or disjointed, reading it slowly can show how
    
    one person might be trying to build bridges to another person, or evading the possibility of responding directly, or inadvertently obstructing the dialogue. Sometimes reading transcriptions makes everyone in the class into a critique doctor, with proposals for how the critique could have been salvaged or improved, or what people should have said at any moment. 
 In my classes we read critiques very slowly: we get through a half hour critique,
    
    which is about eighteen typed pages, in a three hour class. It might seem that at that pace it would be possible to make a great deal of sense out of the dialogue, and sometimes it is. But often it doesn’t help much, and it seems that no matter how slowly we read, the critique remains incomphrehensible. Sometimes there is no way to understand a person’s train of thought, and no way to see why people respond to eachother in certain ways. Why does speaker X say this to speaker Y at this moment? Why doesn’t speaker Z listen? Often there is no answer to that kind of question. 
 Studying transcribed critiques is fascinating, but it is not a panacea: it takes a
    
    great deal of effort and preparation, and sometimes the only moral that can be drawn is that the critique was somehow doomed from the beginning, or that it will never make sense, no matter how carefully it is studied. At the same time, transcription is the best tool I know for examining how art is taught.
    
    The Exploration of Meaning
    
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    Here is another idea. It is possible to organize a special kind of critique that is
    
    ideally suited to dialectical questioning. In this kind of critique, which I call the exploration of meaning, people are only allowed to speak about meanings: it’s the opposite of the disorganized free association critique. Exploring meanings is intensive and exhausting, and it needs to be done in a carefully supervised forum. In the example excerpted below, a class of twenty-five people looked at a single work for three hours, trying to name and understand every single meaning that occured to them. No discussion of anything except meaning was permitted, and to simplify things the artist did not talk. (In other sessions, the artists contributed their own analyses, talking about the meanings they saw and their own intentions, but it is simpler to begin with a session where the artist doesn’t speak.) No one in the class was allowed to suppose that the work was not finished, or to bring up questions of display or the marketplace. No one was allowed to advise the artist: the discussion was purely descriptive. There was no talk about technique unless it bore directly on meaning. 
 When a critique like this is announced, there are generally two reactions: either
    
    people say it will be impossible to talk about a single work for three hours, or else they think that three hours is nowhere near long enough, because meanings are infinite and one could go on forever. What actually happens is that three hours is just about enough to satisfy everyone in a class that they have explored every meaning that they could think of or that is worth exploring. That result is unexpected, and it is sometimes exhilarating: for the first time, students feel that they really understand a piece of art. Needless to say, that feeling is an illusion, but the discovery that meanings are not infinite is real. As I
    
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    suggested in regard to the chain of questions, viewers normaly think along very conventional lines, and it is possible to find most or all of those lines in three hours. Students and teachers can then see what appears to be, for that particular class, as the sum total of a work’s meanings. 
 I have found that the best way to organize one of these explorations of meaning is
    
    to divide the class into three stages. First is a half hour or an hour in which students are encouraged to say any meaning that comes to mind. This avoids the imposition or appearance of inappropriate rigidity. The instructor and several volunteers write down everything that is said. At the end of the half hour there is a break, and in the second stage the instructor and some of the more involved students get together and try to classify the various things that have been said. A provisional outline or list of topics is then used to direct the inquiries in the third stage, which again involves the entire class. Sometimes stages two and three need to be repeated. Ideally, the critique should not end until everyone has said everything they can think of—and it is especially important not to end when people become exasperated, exhausted or bored. 
 Though this is a very artificial way of talking about artworks, I find it is a
    
    productive opposite to the habitual ways of responding to art, which are unorganized, undirected, and can operate at a relatively low energy. The shortcomings of this method are a lack of pleasure and a certain narrowness (because advice, formal analysis, biography, anecdote, and friendly smalltalk are excluded). Its payoff is a sense, rare in art history or art criticism, of having at last understood everything about one’s reactions to a
    
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    work, from the first few seconds of confused impressions to the wall of boredom that sets in after an hour or so. 
 In this example, the class saw three large, quasi-abstract monoprints that formed a
    
    single triptych. The first stage is when everyone is encouraged to list whatever meanings come to mind.
    
    A
    
    Okay, let’s get started. I think that we should start the way we always do, with some free association. Anyone have any comments on what you see,
    
    B
    
    positive or negative? Well, I see those two round forms in the one on the right as two suns.
    
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    A
    
    Okay, let’s just take this one on the right first, and go through it looking for symbols. Afterward we can do the other two, and then after that I’ll ask for other kinds of comments. But as long as we’ve started, let’s keep going on this one, in this way. “In this way” means for example that is someone says that it’s misguided to look for symbolism their comment will be deferred until the class has exhausted their search
    
    E A
    
    for symbols. Well, I think that purple form is a pair of calipers. Does anyone agree with that, or withIt is always important to see what consensus the observation about the suns? the reading has, to distinguish perverse or idiosyncratic comments from those closer to the “interpretive community’s” position.
    
    The next twenty minutes were spent adding symbolic meanings. At the end I opened the floor to any kind of reaction other than symbolic meanings.
    
    C
    
    I don’t know, I just think theseThe idea of boredom is tricky: it is partly pictures are a little boring. induced by the critique format, and partly inherent in the work.
    
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    A
    
    Uh-huh.
    
    Let
    
    me
    
    just
    
    say
    
    parenthetically that that’s an entirely different kind of reaction, and maybe we might want to think whether or not it belongs—how it belongs—with that list we have just been making. So anyway, I’d like to know if you just thought that recently, or from the very beginning. The question is intended to distinguish the student’s idea from the boredom that was C beginning to settle on the class. Yes, at the beginning, but much less. This is maybe just too much time to F spend on one print. Yes, I see some of the symbols, but IThis comment also has to do with how long really don’t… I really wouldn’t seethe prints can hold a viewer’s attention. them unless we had been looking for A them. So now I think we have another “theme,” to go along with our dictionary of symbols, and that is how long the work holds attention. Any comments on that?
    
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    We went on another twenty minutes exploring the themes of boredom, the importance of symbols, the existence of forms that were not symbolic, the possibility that the prints were not meant to be “read” at all. During the second stage, the topics have to be arranged as best as possible. In this case we began with an unorganized list of topics, including “landscape symbols,” “kinds of abstraction,” “issues of unity and disunity,” “color problems,” “boredom,” and several others. Some were placed under larger headings. “Boredom,” for instance, went under “psychological responses,” which also included “fascination,” “exasperation,” and “mistrust.” The outline was about three pages long. 
 The third stage, when the class reconvened, began with the question of boredom
    
    that had come up in the first stage. (I read the list of meanings that had been arranged during the break.) In general the purpose of the third stage is no longer the collection of meanings but the analysis of unexamined assumptions.
    
    A C
    
    Why did you say this was boring? At first it seemed like a kind ofThis is then the reason behind the judgment; mysterious landscape or a cityscape,actually it is two reasons together. The first and I liked that. It seemed as if itmight be: “I like mystery, and without it I could have been abstract or figurative. am bored,” and the second “I like
    
    A C
    
    ambiguity, and without it I am bored.” So do you think that mystery is goodMaking sure that the first reason really was in a work, or a good thing here? a love of mystery. Yes, well, it’s good here, or it wouldThis is the reason behind the initial have been… judgment, but it still requires explanation.
    
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    A
    
    So why is it a negative thing to stopIt is not clear why mystery and ambiguity being mysterious? You don’t meanare positive values, or why boredom is not. that any work that is not mysterious is less interesting? Can’t a work be
    
    C
    
    straightforward and also successful? No, no, it’s that I get the impression that the panels are supposed to be
    
    A C
    
    mysterious— —that they’re
    
    intended
    
    to
    
    look
    
    mysterious— Yes, and so, when I see that it is notThis may mean that he thinks that the artist’s mysterious, the work quote “fails.” intention has to be carried through in order
    
    D
    
    for a work to be successful. I think sort of the opposite here. I like(This student had been speaking in favor of the piece very much, and I think whatstraightforward work earlier in the critique.) I like is that it is not ambiguous after all, after a while. It is… it says, “I am
    
    C
    
    abstract,” and that’s good. Well, not for me.
    
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    A
    
    Yes, that’s interesting. Let me just stop for a second and sum up the assumptions in these statements (and you can argue with me about them in a moment): that boredom is bad, that mystery and ambiguity areThese three unexamined assumptions should good,—or, as [speaker D] said, bad—,probably remain unexamined for a while, that it is important, or necessary, thatsince they are difficult to think about. In a the artist should follow through onfew minutes they can be brought up again. their intention (and if they mean something to be mysterious, it should be). I’m not so sure about that last one. Why can’t it just make the work more interesting when it “fails” in that way? —but let’s leave that for a second. I want to go back to something [speaker T] said…
    
    The critique continued until we had talked about everything on the outline, and about several new topics that had occurred enroute. Twice during the discussion I read the outline aloud so it could be questioned, and the idea of an outline also became a topic. (In particular students wondered if the work was inimical to any outline.)
    
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    Typically students end in a state of perplexity. They run aground on assumptions
    
    that they are surprised to learn they hold, and they are concerned to discover they cannot understand thoughts that are clearly their own. “Why,” a student might ask, “do I dislike ambiguity?” Confusion is sometimes a goal of art instruction. In general it does not seem to me that provoking confusion is a good teaching strategy, but unanswerable questions are not the purpose of this kind of analysis—instead they are a by-product. The fundamental insight is that inquiries into meaning can be directed and finite. The question, “Why do I dislike ambiguity?” might resonate without answer for some time: but it is a clear question, clearly important and illuminating.
    
    Comparing Critiques 
 One last idea. In addition to transcribing critiques and holding special-purpose
    
    critiques, it is also helpful to compare critiques in different fields. Even within the visual arts, sculpture critiques are generally different from painting critiques, and there are differences between critiques in different media. Outside the visual arts the differences only become greater—and, I would argue, even more informative. I have mentioned the unemotional nature of architecture critiques. The expressive function of the architecture can be entirely bypassed in favor of abstract, historical, or technical considerations such as the relation to the site, the program, the restrictions on building, and the theoretical platform and methodology. In this respect architecture critiques come closest to critiques in non-art fields. The oral examination for the PhD degree is an apposite parallel, since the candidate is not likely to be asked about the expressive force or stylistic function of
    
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    her dissertation, or about her own emotional reasons for investing so much of her life in her chosen topic. The dissertation advisors ask about the content of the dissertation and about its veracity, and they may engage the candidate in heated and even aggressive discussion of its merits. But I do not know any instances in which the committee spoke about the dissertation as an expressive document—as something that expresses the personality of the student. From the point of view I’m taking in this book that omission is curious, and it illuminates how different art instruction is. I find the exclusion of psychological inquiry in these cases equally unsatisfactory, though it is deeply ingrained in architecture critiques and in PhD examinations. It only seems stranger in architecture because we continue to think of architecture as one of the fine arts, and hence as an expressive activity. 
 Another kind of critique that is largely unknown to people in the visual arts is the
    
    music critique, and especially the “master class,” which represents the closest parallel to what happens in the visual arts. In master classes the students, faculty, and a visiting “master” listen while a student performs a piece in part or in whole, and then the master critiques the performance. Often enough the critiques also involve some performance, since the master might take up the baton, sing, or play an instrument to give her own version of what the student had done. That kind of criticism-by-doing is widespread in music and rare in the visual arts. In an ordinary class in the visual arts a teacher might take up a brush to change a portion of a painting, but that does not happen in critiques. Another difference between master classes and art critiques is the relative unimportance of verbal criticism in music. Music teachers and conductors sometimes hum or beat out
    
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    the passages they are critiquing instead of playing them properly. That kind of criticism cannot be repeated in print. A master class instructor may say something like this:
    
    
    
    — I like the part where you go “dum, dum, dum, dee, dum, da, dumdum,” but I
    
    would put more bite into that last beat, like “dum, dum, dum, dee, dum, daaah, dum dum!”
    
    The disadvantage of untranslatability is compensated by the extreme specificity of the critique. It pertains to a single passage, and it seeks to emend a particular way of understanding that passage. The equivalent level of specificity in painting would be a description of a square inch of canvas:
    
    
    
    — I like the way the yellow goes up here [squinting at a tiny patch of canvas], and
    
    this kind of sloppy mixing with the green, and the little scrap of thinness there, and the bit of gloss from the medium…
    
    But visual arts critiques rarely get that specific, because past a certain level of detail, nothing can be effectively put into words. (It would be interesting to try critiques in which instructors made their own versions of students’ works, since that is the analogue to the maestro humming or playing his own version of what the student had just played.) 
 Music critiques are occasionally open, and with the consent of the faculty anyone
    
    can observe. Master classes are the easiest to attend, and some are advertised in
    
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    department fliers. PhD oral examinations are ordinarily closed, but under special circumstances they can be attended, with the permission of everyone involved. Short of that, it is always possible to attend critiques within the visual arts but outside of your accustomed medium—and it is always possible to visit a neighboring college or university and attend their critiques. (Just call the chairperson in advance; I have never encountered any problems.) 
 The principal thing to be gained by comparing critique formats is a sense of the
    
    conventions of your own department, school, or medium. What may appear to be unproblematic or inevitable ways of dealing with artworks can begin to seem like restrictive rituals; and then you’re free to ask whether or not other rituals might not be better.

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