I once had a highly successful Chicago painter as a senior painting professor lead his critiques by making us guess what he was going to say next. I think he imagined himself a zen master or so above the adjunct role that he was validated in wasting the 400 dollars of tuition we paid per class. He stated simply, “there will be no painting in this class. Painting is done elsewhere and here we will discuss.” These classes were seven hours long.
I packed my canvas and bars and left dramatically. But even in the classes where we painted with a professor’s attention and knowledge and skill being bestowed upon us as we worked, which is what I wanted, the critiques at the end of the week were no more valuable.
Take the foundations of the critique: who is there to give criticism? A professor who is most likely successful, which is at least something. And a group of 20-year-olds who grew up in Dubai, Macau, with trust funds that would leave you slack-jawed, and whose parents didn’t scrounge, save, and cripple themselves with loans, but who sent their offspring to art school to get them out of the house for 4 years. These dummies could eventually become darlings, sure. Your art world constituency. Most likely not. Their thoughts and words were often useless.
The most common audience for an emerging artist to expect to have is the local art sympathizer, an enjoyer, maybe even a dilettante who goes to as many shows as they can, has no artistic profession, or who may even have money and surveys the scene for a decoration for them or their boss. These are the first audience, the most important audience, for any breakout artist. But their sensibilities are nowhere to be found in the academic critique.
What is found are word salad regurgitations of the recent post-structuralist PDFs handed out in elective classes that week. Deleuze, Foucault. “Knowledge” shat out 50 years ago and worshipped as if it was the latest philosophical contribution. There is also brain-dead, Vyvanse-induced, or hungover silence. Silence you can hear the laminate floor shifting in. No one has anything to say. No one cares about your art. They only care about theirs. Remember, they are the next hero. Not you.
You’re staring at a realism painting of a life jacket. A finger-painted mess of shit brown. A painting on cardboard of numbers. With excuses that end in “isms” that justify the work. Once a gal passed off her last-minute butcher paper painting claiming it was “post-colonial”. This goes on for seven hours straight.
Once a kid made a painting that looked exactly like the wall it hung on. Another threaded shoe laces through a loaf of bread, titled it “loafers”. One had a grocery bag tied to the wall with a fan on to make it dance. There were either one-liners or our best attempts at copying what we thought was contemporarily expected by the fine art world. This spurred my coining of the genre, “Looks Conceptual”. You know the stuff, a cinderblock in the corner, a metal pipe leaned against the wall, chain link fence blocking in a bucket with an iPhone playing some sound. Stretcher bars with no canvas, canvas with no stretcher bars.
The most spine-liquifying aspect of the academic critique is how precious we all act with our art. Treating it as highly-considered and delicate. When we answer criticism with, “I think I like that about the piece.” “In terms of.” “Fair enough.” School was supposed to be a workshop, not a reliquary. But I don’t blame students entirely. I blame the unspoken expectations. I suspect everyone felt it too: you should have a show before you graduate. It poisoned every possible constructive step in the process. Because there was no room for growth. We were pretending to be finished.