Critical Dialogues

Begun in 2016, this yearly twelve-week course offers artists the tools to significantly improve how they represent themselves.

Based on the belief that we can’t think critically if we don’t read critically, the course devotes six weeks to exploring critical texts from various schools of thought. Participants are encouraged to read between the lines to untangle textual strategies of common art world texts—press releases, curatorial statements, exhibition reviews, catalogue essays—cultivating a less naïve approach to how meaning is generated.

2019 readings will foreground feminist critical theory, with excerpts from works by Linda Nochlin, Lucy Lippard, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, among others.

The following six weeks consist of peer critique sessions, for which each artist will write a statement on his or her practice. The crits, combined with the previously studied strategies, enable artists to close the gap between how they see their practices and how they write about them.

Self-awareness is a key step to closing this gap. Once freed from the typical traps—pointless biographism, identity clichés, second-guessing the curator—the texts tell more strategic—and more potent—stories.

Course outcomes:

• Increased fluency in reading and decoding critical texts
• Confidence to critique and be critiqued
• Heightened sensitivity to strategies of messaging and self-representation
• Sharper critical eye on how meaning is produced by art world players