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Earlier this year I took part in a session at CAA called 'The Work of Art Criticism in the Age of Ezines and Blogging'. The session organisers described it like this: Historically, critical writing that is intellectually stimulating and theoretically grounded in sources considered to possess quality and significance has been recognized as ¡°good.¡± Today, however, ¡°criticism¡± is found on e-zines and Facebook, and ¡°critics¡± range from respected professionals to casual bloggers. Art criti¡©cism has become globally accessible. Has this widespread acces¡©sibility resulted in qualitative changes? This session welcomes papers that examine the endless proliferation of ¡°criticism¡± and the multitude of ¡°critical¡± sources now available on digital sites such e-zines, blogs, and social networks, and that investigate the changes that these new critical sites have compelled within critical writing itself. Who are today¡¯s ¡°authorities¡±? What ques¡©tions should critics ask? Has the critical voice changed in this age of digital production? Do the old rules apply, and should they? How should the academic world help students navigate the universe of available sites and develop critical-thinking skills and valid critical methodologies? I asked the participants ¡© a couple of whom I know have been watching this month's discussion unfold ¡© to offer some thoughts on what so-called digital art history or criticism might be. Below I'm forwarding some of Renee McGarry's thoughts. She and I share a lot of the same views about what constitutes digital scholarship in art history and what is simply the digitisation of art historical work. In our papers at CAA we both talked a lot about what is different about working with digital and internet based technologies¡¦. Historically, critical writing that is intellectually stimulating and theoretically grounded in sources considered to possess quality and significance has been recognized as ¡°good.¡± Today, however, ¡°criticism¡± is found on e-zines and Facebook, and ¡°critics¡± range from respected professionals to casual bloggers. Art criti¡©cism has become globally accessible. Has this widespread acces¡©sibility resulted in qualitative changes? This session welcomes papers that examine the endless proliferation of ¡°criticism¡± and the multitude of ¡°critical¡± sources now available on digital sites such e-zines, blogs, and social networks, and that investigate the changes that these new critical sites have compelled within critical writing itself. Who are today¡¯s ¡°authorities¡±? What ques¡©tions should critics ask? Has the critical voice changed in this age of digital production? Do the old rules apply, and should they? How should the academic world help students navigate the universe of available sites and develop critical-thinking skills and valid critical methodologies? - See more at: http://digitalcritic.org/2013/02/digital-art-criticism-at-caa/#sthash.z7ZOHM 8M.dpuf Historically, critical writing that is intellectually stimulating and theoretically grounded in sources considered to possess quality and significance has been recognized as ¡°good.¡± Today, however, ¡°criticism¡± is found on e-zines and Facebook, and ¡°critics¡± range from respected professionals to casual bloggers. Art criti¡©cism has become globally accessible. Has this widespread acces¡©sibility resulted in qualitative changes? This session welcomes papers that examine the endless proliferation of ¡°criticism¡± and the multitude of ¡°critical¡± sources now available on digital sites such e-zines, blogs, and social networks, and that investigate the changes that these new critical sites have compelled within critical writing itself. Who are today¡¯s ¡°authorities¡±? What ques¡©tions should critics ask? Has the critical voice changed in this age of digital production? Do the old rules apply, and should they? How should the academic world help students navigate the universe of available sites and develop critical-thinking skills and valid critical methodologies? - See more at: http://digitalcritic.org/2013/02/digital-art-criticism-at-caa/#sthash.z7ZOHM 8M.dpuf Historically, critical writing that is intellectually stimulating and theoretically grounded in sources considered to possess quality and significance has been recognized as ¡°good.¡± Today, however, ¡°criticism¡± is found on e-zines and Facebook, and ¡°critics¡± range from respected professionals to casual bloggers. Art criti¡©cism has become globally accessible. Has this widespread acces¡©sibility resulted in qualitative changes? This session welcomes papers that examine the endless proliferation of ¡°criticism¡± and the multitude of ¡°critical¡± sources now available on digital sites such e-zines, blogs, and social networks, and that investigate the changes that these new critical sites have compelled within critical writing itself. Who are today¡¯s ¡°authorities¡±? What ques¡©tions should critics ask? Has the critical voice changed in this age of digital production? Do the old rules apply, and should they? How should the academic world help students navigate the universe of available sites and develop critical-thinking skills and valid critical methodologies? - See more at: http://digitalcritic.org/2013/02/digital-art-criticism-at-caa/#sthash.z7ZOHM 8M.dpuf Historically, critical writing that is intellectually stimulating and theoretically grounded in sources considered to possess quality and significance has been recognized as ¡°good.¡± Today, however, ¡°criticism¡± is found on e-zines and Facebook, and ¡°critics¡± range from respected professionals to casual bloggers. Art criti¡©cism has become globally accessible. Has this widespread acces¡©sibility resulted in qualitative changes? This session welcomes papers that examine the endless proliferation of ¡°criticism¡± and the multitude of ¡°critical¡± sources now available on digital sites such e-zines, blogs, and social networks, and that investigate the changes that these new critical sites have compelled within critical writing itself. Who are today¡¯s ¡°authorities¡±? What ques¡©tions should critics ask? Has the critical voice changed in this age of digital production? Do the old rules apply, and should they? How should the academic world help students navigate the universe of available sites and develop critical-thinking skills and valid critical methodologies? - See more at: http://digitalcritic.org/2013/02/digital-art-criticism-at-caa/#sthash.z7ZOHM 8M.dpuf From: Renee McGarry <> Date: Thursday, 24 October 2013 21:51 To: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: The work of art criticism in the age of ezines and blogging Hi Charlotte, Please forward these comments onward and outward! I've been thinking a lot about these questions as the month has unfolded. Lately I've been feeling bombarded by the concept of "digital art history" and then also confronted by the strange binary of the discussion that occurred after our CAA 2013 session when so much skepticism about the "accuracy" of the internet came to light. There was a lot of "never trust WIkipedia" that came out of that, and I've heard it echoed again and again since then, with a colleague even stating that he doesn't allow his students to use any internet sources in class. So, then, what is digital art history, and how do we get people to "trust" it and how is it different from just content transfer from one medium to another? I'm particularly interested in this as I'm transitioning my dissertation, which concerns Aztec sculptures of plants and animals -- a decidedly not digital topic, to a Scalar "book". Setting aside questions of access, part of what I really disliked about my dissertation was the format, that it had to someone be linear for people to read and understand it. This struck me as particularly ridiculous given the fact that I dealt heavily with Aztec manuscripts, which were generally read in a less-than-linear format. I've chosen as part of the digital companion (which, trust me, the minute it's beyond a sketchy work in progress and is actually a Work In Progress, everyone will have access to) to allow for a non-linear reading of the project and an exploration of the images and ideas in a way that might dramatically change the reading of my work. In this project I've sought to both return to the way the Aztecs read and then also accommodate the way we read now. But does that significantly change the content? And does the content become somehow less reliable than it is when you take the -- non circulating -- book off the shelf? Is this even digital art history, or is it just digital content production? What if I had created the Scalar project first and the dissertation second? When I think about digital art history I'm left with a lot more questions than answers. Like, why do we care so much about data visualization as a methodology and how does that privilege Western, early modern - present day art in ways that we don't talk about? (For example, how do I create a data visualization of such a limited data set that you find in the pre-Columbian period? Why would that be valuable?) Does blogging "count"? Is digital art history, without digital methodologies, just another way to say public art history? Can art history only be practiced by art historians? This is sort of becoming all over the place at this point, but I'm very lucky that part of my position involves working with faculty to facilitate the use of technology in teaching and learning and in their scholarship -- and with some strange luck I only work with art historians and art critics. It's incredibly gratifying to watch a number of them turn to digital projects over the course of the past 18 months, and in ways that have dramatically shifted the ways they teach from just "Here is a PowerPoint I put on the internet" to "This is a project that allows students to generate online content rather than just consume it" so I know that more traditional art historians are learning to navigate this terrain somehow, and I hope that conversations like this help more people join in. Thanks for this conversation, CF!