It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems...
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I just finished James Elkins' "What Happened to Art Criticism?" This very short book, under 100 pages, serves as both a map to the current critical writing world and as a refresher on recent art criticism history.
Elkins' breaks the current trends in art critical writing into seven styles: the catalog essay, the academic treatise, cultural criticism, the conservative harangue, the philosopher's essay, descriptive art criticism, and poetic criticism.
He goes on to describe these different styles of writing and relates them to major critics.
He also reveals each styles popularity with critics themselves, based on a Columbia University Study. What do critics like to write?
I will leave the first two places a mystery for you to discover when you read the book, but the third most popular style, shockingly to me was "poetic criticism"
the goal of which was not so much to reveal things about the art but rather to
create "a piece of writing with literary value."
I guess my egotistical self always hoped that art criticism should be in service to viewer or the artist or to truth or something rather than Writing for writings sake.
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What Happened to Art Criticism? by James Elkins
abiq, October 14, 2006
I just finished James Elkins' "What Happened to Art Criticism?" This very short book, under 100 pages, serves as both a map to the current critical writing world and as a refresher on recent art criticism history.Elkins' breaks the current trends in art critical writing into seven styles: the catalog essay, the academic treatise, cultural criticism, the conservative harangue, the philosopher's essay, descriptive art criticism, and poetic criticism.
He goes on to describe these different styles of writing and relates them to major critics.
He also reveals each styles popularity with critics themselves, based on a Columbia University Study. What do critics like to write?
I will leave the first two places a mystery for you to discover when you read the book, but the third most popular style, shockingly to me was "poetic criticism"
the goal of which was not so much to reveal things about the art but rather to
create "a piece of writing with literary value."
I guess my egotistical self always hoped that art criticism should be in service to viewer or the artist or to truth or something rather than Writing for writings sake.
(3 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)