Why art cannot be taught a conversation

And by that I mean the strangeness of the art work, the fact that it’s visual, the fact that it tends to be something that doesn’t fit very easily with ways that people talk.. So I had t

Note to readers who find this online:

This This conversation was held at Cork Caucus, Cork, Ireland, 2005, and published in Cork Caucus: On Art, Possibility, and Democracy ([Cork]: National Sculpture Factory and

Revolver, 2006), 247–59 This is a partly edited version; the definitive version is in Cork Caucus

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The book that’s mentioned here is Why Art Cannot be Taught Several sections of it are free

online on the site https://saic.academia.edu/JElkins/Papers

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Why art cannot be taught – James Elkins

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Editor: Never one to shirk from discussing the most controversial topics, at times bordering on the politically incorrect, (and) yet with an undeniable capacity for

generating serious conversation, here - trying to burst one of the principal bubbles of the Caucus itself - the widely published author and Professor, James Elkins,

broaches the prickly subjects of why art can't be taught, nor reduced to merely talk

In conversation with several local artists and international participants, he supports his argument by reference to literary criticism, through recourse to the Kantian

origins of critique, and finally by focusing his claim on the difficulties encountered in the so-called crit (critique) session That the conversation deteriorates to a minor pitched battle - in the garden of the Convent which housed the Caucus Centre - for art being "very, very rational" on the one hand and " ninety-nine percent irrational" on the other, we find productive for making plain once again, the caesura parameters of the middle section of the book

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James Elkins: When Tara asked me to do something I thought a reasonable thing to

do that doesn’t get discussed much in the art world is basically talk about how hard it

is to talk about art And by that I mean the strangeness of the art work, the fact that it’s visual, the fact that it tends to be something that doesn’t fit very easily with ways that people talk So I had this notion that we would talk about two things in particular that make art really, really hard to address: one of them is; why art can’t be taught and the other subject is how hard it is to talk about art in critique settings, or

critiques About half of the book I wrote called Why Art Can’t Be Taught actually ends

up being about critiques, because critiques are, I think, one thing that sets what we

do apart from stuff that gets done in most other, if not all other, fields that would be taught in colleges and universities I know some people sort of deny that; they would say that art is something that you can talk about in the way that you talk about

physics or chemistry, that you get better at it and so on The fact is that no other field

in universities or colleges, has critiques for its examination system If you are a physics student, you don’t get freewheeling conversation at the end of the teaching period, with your adviser and then they decide, OK, you’re ready for the next year You get questions, serious questions But for some reason, it doesn’t work that way

in art

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One of the things to conclude from that is that art doesn’t have a step-wise set of things you can learn to go from one stage to another Nobody can agree what that might be in art It can’t go that way, it has to go through these conversations that end

up being called critiques The second subject would concern how conversations about art are irrational And my own take on this is that an art school critique, or a serious kind of conversation about art, is just about the most irrational thing you can

do and still be speaking right I think they are about ninety-nine percent irrational, but

it is possible to figure out some things about them and to try to keep a bit of control over them and that’s what I end up writing about in the book The question is a

practical one, for how in the world do you make sense out of what’s happened when you’ve had a critique

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I have a little list of reasons why I think critiques don’t make sense: a list of eleven These would be things to fight against So, in my classes I wouldn’t say to anybody ‘I like that, that’s good, that’s bad’, but the conversation is about the conversation How

do you talk about art, how have people talked about your art in the past, what kind of things have they said, have they made any sense, could they have made more sense, would there be a way to make some sense out of them? In my class in

Chicago what we do – and I’ve taped a bunch of critiques and typed out the

transcripts – is to slow them way down by reading them Of all the different

suggestions that I have to improve art conversations, that’s the best one I think

The first one of eleven is that nobody knows what an art critique is, as opposed to other kinds of critiques The thing to know about the history of critiques is that the word comes out of the Kantian critique, and what Immanuel Kant meant by a critique

was completely different from what anybody these days means by critique A critique

in his way of thinking was ‘an inquiry which tells you the limits of your thinking’ It’s not to judge, it’s to find how far you can think, where you have to stop This kind of critique is in the background of what we call critiques, but obviously something

fundamental has changed because, in what we call critiques, the point is to judge If you do a pure Kantian critique you don’t judge

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In the eighties there was a movement in the art world to try to turn critiques into the old fashioned critique An art critic’s job was supposedly not to judge anything but only to understand the conditions of their judgment, to understand what is was that led them to make judgments That was a movement in post-structuralism and of course it doesn’t work, because you can’t encounter an art work and say nothing about it except why it is you feel you might want to judge it That’s too much navel gazing So if critiques have something to do with judgment and not just the Kantian sense of figuring out the limitations on your own thinking, then the question is ‘well, what are the terms of judgment’ – so you have then a wide-open field of possibilities

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Take an example at hand In the convent, presumably you would have religious or ethical judgments that you would be after In some philosophic settings you would have critiques where the point would be moral judgments You could have critiques

in education settings where the point is pedagogic judgments The problem with art world critiques is that nobody knows what the terms of judgement are I think there might be some agreement that we don’t want to just say that the work is good or bad although that would be a perfectly legitimate kind of judgment And there might be some agreement that we don’t want to say that the work is beautiful or not, but that’s

a classical Kantian aesthetic judgment so that’s a legitimate kind of thing but the art world doesn’t do much of that either At least in Chicago my students are totally allergic to beauty; they don’t want to be told their work is beautiful, its like being told its kitsch, its bad or its useless So then, if we’re also going to have no aesthetic criteria, no judgment of beauty, we’re left with a really strange bunch of terms for our judgments and the most interesting one is the word "interesting."

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When somebody says to you that your work is really interesting, as far as I’m

concerned anyway, this means nothing It‘s like a placeholder; I will say add to this in

a moment That’s a kind of art world evasiveness, it’s not really quite a judgment yet,

it’s like a pseudo-judgment And you could make a little list of these: powerful, that’s always a good thing to say Who doesn’t want their work to be powerful, but then again, exactly what does that mean? Authentic, your work is authentic, which means what? It’s a good thing you’re not a sham! Moving, your work is moving, but what does it say, why is it moving, what is it moving about? Inventive and original are sort

of avant-garde criteria Difficult, that’s another avant-garde one, But then as with the others, the content of the judgment is missing In my mind they’re all connected with the fundamental one of interesting, because they are all more or less content free You would have to then go on and ask what made them that way, and interesting is good for social reasons because if someone says your work is interesting, one thing that they might mean is that they don’t want to turn around immediately and run away They are willing to stay there and look at it a little while, so interesting also means something might happen later, that the work will keep them there somehow

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Maud Cotter: I think it’s interesting when it prompts you to see things differently in it, when it opens other perceptual possibilities…if I use that word about somebody’s work it’s because it makes me see the world in a different way

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James: If a person says it is honest, it can be totally dishonest if you hate the work and because you can't say that, you say ‘oh that’s interesting’ It can also be

passively dishonest if you can’t think of anything else to say but the honest

interesting, I think it is like that, it means that something’s happened which you don’t know how to put into words yet

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Maud: It is a hovering kind of a word too It allows you to suspend judgment

(Maud took out rest of this piece)

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Tara: It’s a waiting stage, a willingness to engage

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James: Or, to defer judgment

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Maud: Sometimes if you see something that has had an effect on you, it has to go down and come back up the next day Its maybe only a day or two later you get another signal

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Tom Curtin: Maybe you’re just waiting to see what everyone else has to say first

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James: A question of holding back I think in a social situation, with friends and

visiting a studio, I think interesting would probably be honest In a school situation, in

my experience, interesting is usually dishonest, because one of the things that art students don’t always realise, is that if you have an instructor who’s over the age of thirty/thirty five, they’ve probably seen work like yours a lot before If you have an instructor that’s pushing up towards sixty they’ve certainly seen what you’re doing before, and so one of the challenges for art instructors is to try to be enthusiastic, engaged, polite and all the rest of that, and ‘interesting’ is really handy for that

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Jan Verwoert: I hate to sound like a critic here, but I think that ‘interesting’ comes into art critical discourse at a very precise point in the history of aesthetic discourse, the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the terms ‘interesting’ versus ‘boring’ mark a very significant transition from an older vocabulary of what was ‘beautiful’ and not

‘ugly,’ which was the Classical aesthetic where art is believed to be a manifestation

of natural beauty It appears first with Friedrich Schlegel It’s a shift in aesthetics from the Classical to the Modern, where the new paradigm is exactly what you have said: that art is no longer primarily judged in terms of whether it articulates natural beauty but whether it touches us To speak about the interesting and the boring in a sense confirms that you have entered the modern age I don’t find anything phony about it

It is the primary judgment operative in modernity and there is nothing wrong about being modern

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James: I agree with you half way I think the history is exactly right and the whole history of what counts as boring is also a very interesting thing I would just be a little bit careful about saying that it’s not phony, because there are so many terms of judgment, not just the aesthetic turn to the Romantic, not just the turn to Modernism

as you say, but there are so many other terms, the ethical, pedagogical and all the rest of these terms and they get mixed up in art critiques so much that it can be messier than you suggest You see, I’m not disagreeing with you, but it seems to me that it doesn’t solve the problems that actually come up in art conversation There can be all kinds of reasons why someone uses this word and its many synonyms and false friends, as they say I think there is a kind of flora and fauna of judgment, but you’re absolutely right that, if you trace it historically, you do have that moment in

which that turn takes place and I think you could find at least one or two others You could talk about a turn in the Renaissance from a theological truth to a secular truth – something Derrida does

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Jan: I would just say that, in very pragmatic terms, these words are a port of entry into the discourse of modern art It’s the tools we have and they haven’t been

replaced yet so we can’t help using them After that, you have to give reasons, and people can check whether you are talking bullshit or not It’s just a way to open up a discourse, it’s a gesture, and afterwards, what you say has to be verified in relation

to the object and then everything becomes very rational because everyone will be able to see whether you talk nonsense or not Whether what you are saying makes sense in relation to the object

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James: Now you are beginning to sound like a high-modernist

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Sarah Iremonger: Yes, does that not open the possibility of intellectual snobbery?

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Jan: No, everybody can check It’s very democratic, everybody with an aversion to bullshit will be in a position to judge what you say

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Maud: But doesn’t a language bend and evolve to suit everybody’s individual

aesthetic? I think in some ways, being an artist and finding a way of talking about your work is about forging a language around your work, making it an individual space But while there is the personal aesthetic, there is the grammatical almost structured way that you are talking I am beginning to believe less and less in things that exist as they are, and more and more in the complete relativity of everything I can't say that I’d be thrilled to systematise my thinking in any way I think the only way of finding a way forward is to somehow evolve a personal language and then maybe get that challenged

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James: One of the things that happened in the last twenty years or so in criticism is the appearance of locutions of the sort; ‘my work addresses this, my work opens this question, my work interrogates, my work explores, my work unpacks’ (one of my favourites), or ‘I can’t unpack this now’ (the academic version) If you look at these things when they come up in art writing, usually nothing follows It doesn’t say what it

is that is actually being explored You say ‘my work explores gender relations’ but what was the content of that exploration? So again, without saying that I disagree with this, it’s the forms of it that matters and there’s something new about that

particular coyness that wasn’t there before, although it’s in the same historical fold for sure

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Since you brought up this genealogy, (would read better as – ‘since this genealogy

has been brought up,)I have a little list here of four different kinds of critical

orientations from the literary critic, M.H Abrams In the forties he wrote a book called

The Mirror and the Lamp, which is still a fundamental book on literary theory and

literary criticism The first of four different orientations of criticism is mimetic, and for him that means that you judge an artist’s work according to how well it matches nature The second one is pragmatic criticism, criticism intended to help the artist please, delight, move or instruct Pragmatic instruction would be a way of helping people to get their work in the world, have it speak more effectively

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The third is what he calls expressive That is criticism intended to help the person to make the work be more expressive That is a romantic idea The last critical

orientation is what he calls objective criticism That is when the person who’s doing the talking is trying to talk only about the work In the art world this is usually called formal criticism, although that would be technically a little bit different Objective criticism is when you pretend for the purposes of conversation that there’s nothing outside the art - that the art is all you’re talking about, its form and structure, its composition Abrams says that these four, the mimetic, the pragmatic, the expressive and the objective, constitute the field of criticism I think the last one of those is a fiction; there’s no way to talk just about an artwork without bleeding into these other kinds of critique That can be helpful, because what tends to happen is that people quickly veer from one to another in ordinary conversation so fast and in such a

confused way that the task becomes whether you can tease them apart

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The second reason why critiques are difficult is they are often too short I think it would be reasonable to say that when you step into someone’s studio for the first time and you see the work, unless you know what to expect, it’s going to take you at least five to ten minutes just to get your bearings, and then at least another twenty minutes to ask pertinent questions and you’re probably not going to run out of

questions for half an hour or an hour, at the minimum So for me, ten or fifteen

minutes is not enough to do anything except to start to formulate the questions that you want to ask about the thing

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Tara: Are you aware of Static’s project as part of Cork Caucus? It’s called

EXITCORK and is devised by architect and artist Paul Sullivan and Becky Shaw It will basically result in every fine art graduating student in Cork’s Crawford College of Art, getting two reviews of their final year show from critics, writers and arts

administrators in Cork They want to expose how criticism is dished out, who gets reviewed and why and make transparent the views of the movers and shakers within Cork and the international art world, which are often not transparent But they also want to make transparent the difficult position those making judgments are put in as they open themselves us to judgment by the reviewed!

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James: I think these problems are hard in school and they’re hard in this kind of setting but I think the place where they’re really the toughest is when you’re out there

in the world as an established artist and you have a bunch of friends who like you That can be the most dangerous thing of all, because then you just get a lot of pats

on the shoulder That can be seriously dangerous, asphyxiating even

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Maud: I got out of the country because I felt that everything was much too

confirming might this word be confining?

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Sheila Fleming: The development of that now is the amount of open submission shows around the country even compared to ten years ago I think we are in a

developmental stage here, there are so many opportunities; perhaps the writing and the critical environment will come after

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James: Perhaps, but the art world is also full of really overly short notices and overly polite social gatherings The politeness phenomenon extends to newspapers too In

a country this size no one wants to write something nasty and wake up the next morning and be in the same place

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Anyway, number three is a distinction between people who report thoughts after they’ve thought them up and people who discover their thoughts while they’re

talking This latter is a really common type Art is confusing so its excusable, but there are a lot of people out there who have an invisible microphone in front of them and will just talk and talk and talk The problem being they are discovering what they think while they’re talking, which is desperately confusing from a student's point of view It's much better from the artist’s point of view if you get your friend or your teacher to just be quiet for ten minutes and only then say something, in order to minimise the chances that they’re discovering their own thoughts while they’re

speaking That’s a basic thing about any kind of human interaction, but I think with art it’s exacerbated because new art is meant to be a bit confusing so it can make talk about it doubly confusing

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The fourth reason critiques can be difficult is that teachers make their own art works which are different from yours, which means, when it comes right down to it, that the teacher doesn’t like your art work because if they did they would have made it So there is a negative judgment right there to begin with, and this of course goes for anybody who sees anybody else’s work who is themselves an artist Would read better as who are themselves artists

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Rory Mullins: One of the things that came up in the Static workshop was people realising that we all had one student to review and some people went into the room and immediately went ‘I hate this, I can’t review it.’ They realised they were incapable

of even seeing what was there, so not even getting to the stage of critiquing it

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Maud: I did teacher training, and you do educational psychology, psychology of attention and retention and all that business, and you’re supposedly taught how not

to be prejudiced When you’re teaching children you have got to be alert to their individual minds They are all so incredibly different If you don’t make a leap into their unknown you can damage them, because you pre-determine and pre-judge where they’re going to go, developmentally It’s a little bit like that with art

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James: There’s a brilliant essay called Boutique Multiculturalism (Ed: it’s an essay,

and essays are usually not italicized; they’re usually in quotation marks Even if this

is house style, please change it — thanks.) by the literary theorist Stanley Fish His claim is that none of us is a multi-culturalist, that in other words, none of us is really a pluralist who’s willing to like everything else The example he gives is the fatwa

against Salman Rushdie He says imagine you’re an Islamist who’s spent their entire life studying Islamic culture and you’re really deeply sympathetic with it and then you read about the fatwa, well, you’re not gonna pick up a gun and go out and try to find Salman Rushdie Why not? Because you’ve drawn a line there somewhere, and what Fish says is that everybody has a line like that, and therefore no one is what he calls a strong multi-culturalist; everybody is a boutique multi-culturalist just picking and choosing a nice little bouquet for yourself which counts for you as your

tolerance It’s a very provocative, cynical thesis but the parallel in the art world is a good one

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The fifth reason is that teachers make very idiosyncratic pronouncements And here I would also take a bit of theory from Stanley Fish Fish is famous in literary criticism because he invented what’s called ‘reader response criticism’ He wrote a book arguing that there is no text in the class Reader response criticism means that a text has no intrinsic properties but it is what people bring to it In Fish’s way of thinking, every artwork has value because there is what he calls an interpretive community, a group of people who’ve more or less agreed on what its values are But those

interpretive communities can shift and change and nothing intrinsically belonging to the artwork can ever control what people say about it Generations can come and go and people can say anything about anything that they want Even when artwork seems to be eternal, take Rembrandt, Rembrandt only has the qualities he seems to because the interpretive community is so enormous It consists of two billion people over three centuries who love Rembrandt for the same kinds of reasons But when you come to contemporary art, interpretive communities are really small – and this is something that may come up in Gayatri Spivak’s lecture too, dimensions of

democracy hinge on this - the art-world is of course small and within it you have people doing problematic practices that are not understood by the whole art world And they are not only small but also evanescent; people change, a group can

change its judgment about a work very quickly, month-to-month, minute-to-minute

So reason number five that art critiques are hard to understand is because you can't tell, unless the person is wearing a badge, what interpretive community they

represent; are they just representing their one psychotic self or are they representing

an interpretive community that have followed geometric abstraction since the

twenties, or something more stable still?

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