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NEW-MEDIA-CURATING  October 2013

NEW-MEDIA-CURATING October 2013

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Subject:

FW: The work of art criticism in the age of ezines and blogging

From:

Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:26:22 +0800

Content-Type:

text/plain

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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!

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