Art criticism with youngsters makes me a bit nervous. I’m always afraid that their “critiquing brain” will get ahead of their “art-making brain” and thus they will only have critical things to say about their work before it even gets off the ground. That being said, I learned a few things from this chapter. It was nice to have the author come right out and say that you shouldn’t try and do a college-art class critique with elementary students. I found the sequential breakdown of questions to ask kids (on pages 236-237) quite helpful. Some of our docents (from a science background) at the museum really hate doing the tour of the art gallery and I think I might photocopy those pages to give them a sense of how to ask the kids questions.
The aesthetic questions (pages 241-243) are also somewhat helpful. All of this is just such a shift from the way art was talked about for my last three years at CalArts . I’m not quite comfortable with either way. I know that that is not very articulate. I just became pretty disillusioned with the art-world speak, I found it to be over-analyzed, navel-gazing and all together a bunch of hooey and I really don’t want that to happen to kids. I don’t want them to think that they are stupid or unartistic because they “don’t get it”. I think all of these questions are great- just as long as they don’t subtract too much from the limited art-making time that the kids get.
I think all this will become clearer once I actually start observing elementary art classes.
Oh- and one more thing- I like the idea of the "observing game" mentioned on page 236. Has anyone ever done this before?
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