Arts Criticism Pedagogy for the Twenty-First Century

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Arts Criticism Pedagogy for the Twenty-First Century Adam Versényi (bio) For a number of years now, I have periodically taught a course on arts criticism. Here, I offer my observations on the conception, practice, and aesthetic approach of that course and others as models for navigating arts criticism pedagogy in the twenty-first century. I attempt to write through the many challenges and changes to the practice of arts criticism since the early 2000s, and particularly in the past few years, in terms of the pedagogy of arts criticism. What does it mean to write arts criticism in the contemporary world? Why does it matter? What is its purpose? Who is it for? What form should it take? Is there a difference between a nationally oriented versus an internationally oriented arts criticism? How do we broaden the critical voices heard as we strive to broaden the stories seen and told—and are the two symbiotically linked? This essay focuses primarily on the purpose, form, and critical voices heard in arts criticism. From the beginning, answering these questions means establishing a distinction between writing a review of a performance and writing a piece of criticism. While students are most familiar with the form of a consumer-oriented review—a piece of writing meant to aid the ticket buyer in deciding how to spend their hard-earned pay on entertainment—I seek to instill in my students the notion that in the course we are only interested in criticism that "helps": helps the audience member approach and understand the work; helps the artist learn what is or is not successful in conveying their artistic intent; helps the critics themselves clarify their own response to a given performance and comprehend its complexity. The pandemic has forcefully focused our attention on the fact that access to arts training in higher education, let alone the ability to enter the field, has historically been limited to either those who have independent resources or those who are willing to subject themselves to penury for an extended period. Consequently, perhaps the most important function of teaching arts criticism at the undergraduate level, where I spend most of my time, is to create a knowledgeable audience for the arts, one that understands how work is created and the positionality of both themself and the artists whom they are responding to, and one that can create a lifelong practice of meaningful dialogue between the work and themselves. My conception of both the purpose and the practice of arts criticism derives from my perspective as a practicing dramaturg for the last thirty-seven years. As a dramaturg, I am interested primarily in how meaning is conveyed in performance; and as a member of a production's creative team, I seek to find the most effective artistic means to express the production's intentions while simultaneously looking for the most effective ways to explain those intentions to audiences and prepare them to receive the production in an accessible and informed manner. This inside/outside position—deeply knowledgeable of the creators' artistic intentions while at the same time viewing those intentions from the perspective of an audience member who lacks that information and needs thoughtful, accessible contextualization—also informs my approach to teaching arts criticism. The first portion of my arts criticism course introduces students to different approaches to writing criticism of visual art, theatre, film, dance, architecture, photography, and music. In the second half of the course, students participate in a criticism workshop where they write and rewrite their own criticism of performances, exhibitions, and architecture on campus and in the area. The final exam consists of revisions of two of the essays written during the criticism workshop, plus a revision of an essay on a performance that the entire class has seen. The syllabus for the most recent iteration of the course, taught in Summer 2022, can be found here. [End Page E-11] Since I began teaching this course in the early 2000s, both the performance and particularly the arts criticism landscape have greatly changed. Arts criticism has largely been eliminated from most major daily and weekly periodicals. There has been an explosion of blogs and online criticism...