Over the course of a two-day intensive, we will visit several art exhibitions on view in Rome and each in different contexts, including commercial galleries, public museums, non-profit private institutions, and art in the public sphere. When looking at these exhibitions, we will focus our attention on the development of skills to understand, analyse and write about both individual artworks and exhibitions as an intricate whole.
We will be looking intently for what the artist is trying to say and what they are actually saying, what the work reveals about society and our current condition. Thinking critically, we will also examine the nuances of display, studying a show’s framing of the artist, and how institutions sculpt artists’ biographies and practices to engage with current ideas in art and presumed affinities of the art audience.
While developing the ability to describe, analyse and interpret artworks and exhibitions, we will also look at examples of significant art criticism to see how critics’ written words affect the ways we see and understand art. Today, art criticism no longer adheres to a single, dominating approach; rather, contemporary criticism is marked by a plurality of perspectives, including feminist, social, political, literary and personal. We will focus on examples in which criticism is written more experimentally, to encourage students to develop their own unique writing style.