First-Year Writing Seminar: The Critic as Artist in the Digital Age

Catalog description

What does it mean to write seriously about art when the critic has to compete with a plethora of pixilated images and quick-handed posts on social media that cater to our ever-shortening attention span? How can long-form writing about art still reach and affect us in a world that favors mass-consumed visual representation on the Internet? How can the art critic create new forms of writing that use the digital landscape but bypass its shortcuts? In this course, we pursue these questions by exploring the complex relationship between art and criticism in the past and present. We study texts by major writers who have written with great poetic skill about artists and their art, including Oscar Wilde on Turner, Marcel Proust on Vermeer; Gertrude Stein on Picasso; Antonin Artaud on Van Gogh; and Jean Genet on Giacometti. We discuss miscellaneous reflections on art by exceptional poets and critics such as Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Wisława Szymborska, as well as influential essayists such as Walter Pater, John Ruskin, Paul Valéry, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Jeanette Winterson, and Teju Cole. We investigate different approaches to writing about art, the artist, and the creative process, and gather assets to break free from conventional criticism through the poetic use of language, style, and form. We visit art exhibits and analyze the reviews they received. Each student will be asked to chronicle their personalized, in-depth, weekly observations about art by producing a notebook. Writing about art, as we shall see, is an art form in its own right.