| Due Dates: | Requirements: |
| Working draft: March 9, 2000 Final draft March 16,2000 |
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Choose three articles addressing the same artist, writer, performer or director. Articles may be reviews, descriptions, program notes or academic studies. Identify disagreements or differences in point of view that distinguish these three critical works from each other. Explain which one of the three articles you find the most persuasive and explain why.
In analyzing these three articles, use clues from the context of the article within a larger publication, from the writing style, from the date of publication and from other elements to draw conclusions about the author's frame of reference as she or he criticizes the works of the artist in question. Optimally, you will identify some clear, direct disagreements between these critics, but this will not be possible in every case. Instead, you might need to infer disagreements from their observations of the artwork in question.
Support your argument about these three texts consistently with quotations from the articles in question, and include a list of references at the end of the paper including each of the three articles as well as any additional materials that have helped you in writing this paper. There is an explanation of Chicago Manual format in Barnet, pp. 243-253. We will also discuss this format in class. There is additional information on the format for citing works on the World Wide Web in Barnet, pp. 207-210.
The best way to identify disagreements between critics is to identify a problem associated with the artist in question whether it is a controversy over aesthetic values or ethical values. Some common disagreements about art and art criticism follow, but you might have encountered one on your own that will work even better for this paper. These are not paper topics, but rather, points of conflict that will help you identify different critical stances:
Public funding of art. Which artworks should receive government funding? Who should decide?
Pornography/Obscenity. Should any artistic productions be subject to censorship by the government? If so, which ones?
Popular culture/Elite culture. Is there a place for popular artforms in scholarly art criticism? Can art critics reasonably shun artworks that are extremely commercial and funded by corporations?
Form vs. Function. Should we maintain a sharp division between arts and crafts? Which of these two virtues should we value more in architectural work?
Politics and the art world. Is there a place for political expression in the creation of art? What about in the criticism of art?
As I mentioned earlier, this is just to get you started. The good thing about these issues is that you will find diverse published views on these questions, and they apply to a wide range of artworks in various media.