Why art cannot be taught a conversation

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 ! 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 ! ! Why art cannot be taught – James Elkins ! ! 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 ! ! James Elkins: When Tara asked me to something I thought a reasonable thing to 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 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 ! 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 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 you make sense out of what’s happened when you’ve had a critique ! 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 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 – 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 a pure Kantian critique you don’t judge ! 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 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 ! 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 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." ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! Maud: It is a hovering kind of a word too It allows you to suspend judgment (Maud took out rest of this piece) ! Tara: It’s a waiting stage, a willingness to engage ! James: Or, to defer judgment ! 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 ! Tom Curtin: Maybe you’re just waiting to see what everyone else has to say first ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 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 ! 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 ! James: Now you are beginning to sound like a high-modernist ! Sarah Iremonger: Yes, does that not open the possibility of intellectual snobbery? ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 anything except to start to formulate the questions that you want to ask about the thing ! 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! ! 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 ! Maud: I got out of the country because I felt that everything was much too confirming might this word be confining? ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! 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 ! Maud: I did teacher training, and you 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 ! 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 ! 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? ! Jan: You can check You read art criticism; you are a clever person You should be able to understand where they are coming from You are playing the role of the naive cynic and you're not If you are interested you can find out ! James: The kind of thing that I would be claiming here is that in the world of contemporary art you are in a place which is particularly treacherous in terms of interpretive communities If you go to the Louvre and you stand in that crowd of people that are looking at the Mona Lisa, you’re pretty safe in interpreting the oohs and aahs The kind of thing that I would be arguing is that this is particularly treacherous in contemporary art where things shift and change very quickly and groups are often very small and hard to check So I’m saying, it’s relative I’m not claiming the social contract is negated ! Daniel Jewesbury: From what I remember of reading Fish, he maintains that any principled position is ultimately bogus and that it is a kind of self-delusion anyway Are you going along with that? Your use of the word ‘idiosyncratic’ suggests that anybody who speaks from a certain position is, by virtue of that position, bogus or suspect ! James: I wasn’t trying to say that exactly, and I wasn’t using that part of Fish’s interest I was thinking more of sources of consensus among people hence the Mona Lisa effect I also feel funny about saying that anything is bogus, because you can be a really interesting interpretive community of one, your principles can be quite ironclad as it were Its more a matter of how the social contract is operating when you’re in a group that is shifting and changing ! Sheila Fleming: I have to say that as a student, reading anything published or someone else’s writing gives you the opportunity to check your own eye and knowledge Sometimes even an Aidan Dunne (art reviewer for the Irish Times) article helps, even though it might not be as fulsome, and he has to write for a certain public and in a certain kind of way ! James: One of the biggest disagreements we had at the Ballyvaughan “States of Art Criticism” roundtable — that is, the even that will be the core of the book of that name, which is vol in the series The Art Seminar, which I am editing at UCC — does this need a note to explain what it was? was between people like me who wanted to think of all kinds of newspaper art criticism along with ‘academic criticism,’ and people on the other hand who did not want to include the Aidan Dunnes of the world, because it isn’t serious art criticism Some people just want to say that that is different from what they would count as serious criticism, but perhaps its more a matter of having a text there that you can think about, it's relative This was a disagreement that we didn’t resolve ! The sixth reason is that critiques are very emotional The critique is not a situation where you can be detached, because the artist, of course, is very close to their work It struck me a couple of years ago that one of the ways you could think about a critique is that it’s like a seduction The student is trying to get their artwork to be seductive, but you also don’t really want that to happen because what you want to is get a certain amount of feedback You want to learn something It is always nice to sell a work, but what you’re really looking for then is an arc of immediate enthusiastic acceptance followed by an amicable separation ! The seventh reason critiques can be difficult is that they are like a number of other conversations with which they can be conflated or confused For example, a critique can be like an exercise in translation, because you’re trying to translate something visual into something that is verbal You’re trying to translate the critique from the way you talk into the way the person is talking, so it can be like a conversation between two people who are not fluent in the different languages each other (are) is speaking There have been some things written about critiques as story-telling The problem with that is that at some point you usually want there to be some truth in that the critique is not just a story-telling time, it's also a situation in which you want to be getting across something which is true ! I think my favourite of these is that critiques are often a lot like legal proceedings, because you set out the evidence that your work is really good, that its ‘not guilty’; if you have someone who’s not convinced by that you have to argue your case The difference, of course, is that the artwork doesn’t get freed or executed at the end of the critique, its more like the way legal proceedings take place in Kafka – they just go on and on and on and there’s endless evidence and there’s endless ways to argue ! Jan: What I am trying to say is that when I work as an art critic, the situation I find myself in is mediating between a subjective case or a totally subjective story and the relative objectivity of the public That is exactly how Kant describes aesthetic judgment, in his Critique of Judgement On the one hand, every artist has some subjective story to tell and, on the other, an objective audience or press; some kind of language in which to make themselves understood, and in that language you can always trace the more or less objective steps that someone is taking toward that end In that language you are always mediating between the subjective which is the story the objectivity that comes through the story and which is told, and the audience that is addressed So the problem that I have is that I see all the problems you are describing but I see them as a task and as a challenge ! James: I’m not sure if I would disagree with that The point I make in the book is that art critiques are actually absolutely wonderful because they’re ninety-nine percent irrational ! Jan: It’s not ninety-nine percent irrational It’s very, very rational James: Well there we might disagree ! Jan: I would say it’s just different from official rationality, that it is a constructive form of rationality In every artwork you go from A to B to C, and maybe in a very idiosyncratic way, but if you analysis of that kind, you can perhaps understand why someone has taken certain steps You can describe that, and, of course, in describing, someone else can judge whether your description makes sense or not James: I think you are an interesting person because you are very idealistic and optimistic ! Jan: No I am totally pragmatic ! James: But your pragmatism is very optimistic because the art world would often be considered a place where these kinds of encounters, adjudications, comparisons or references to interpretive communities never take place A lot of people would say, you may have a review in frieze and another one in Parkett, but where is the person who is gathering them together to see how they fit into any coherent set of claims? A lot of people would say that the art world doesn’t have those people ! Jan: Every reader can check ! James: They can, but it doesn’t happen in print A lot of people would say that the art world speaks in many, many voices and defers this moment I think this is part of an interesting but different conversation I don’t know many critics who, for example, take newspaper art criticism seriously The historians who this kind of work don’t usually bother with newspaper art criticism These acts of adjudication don’t take place frieze does not get quoted in footnotes by art historians That’s the thing There isn’t this moment So I am more cynical And I am happy with the state in criticism where these conversations are separated, but it means I cannot appeal to the notion that there are these moments where people can check to see how this discourse fits with this discourse ! Jan: I strongly believe that For me it is a necessary fiction to maintain some intellectual responsibility It is not idealist I think it is politically pragmatic The biggest contradiction that you face as an art critic is that your work is illegitimate, but also that it is standing fast, calling out to be answered and criticised That’s what’s so exciting On the one hand you feel it is necessary to write this but on the other hand you feel you have to prove it There is always the risk that you might write complete nonsense You can never answer that, you have to keep on writing, but there are readers who can test that ! James: I wouldn’t disagree with anything up to the last phrase Anyway, number eight is that teachers waste a lot of time usually giving technical advice In my experience more conservative art schools would be almost all technical advice about glazes or whatever it is in your medium On the other hand, in art academies and art institutions with an international presence, especially at the higher levels, there can be a reticence on the part of instructors to give any technical advice The assumption being that once you get to a certain point as an artist whatever technical faults you might have are no longer to be understood as faults Both sides of the spectrum lead to problems, and it’s inherently a difficult subject because there isn’t a plausible discourse that can link the technical with the other than technical ! Number nine is that some teachers are adjudicative and others descriptive Most teachers are adjudicative, which means they are out there to judge Other teachers, who are rare but really interesting, are descriptive; their purpose in life is to describe the work as eloquently as they can, and ask you questions without incorporating explicit judgments Usually these two don’t mingle very much ! The tenth is that your presence, as the artist, can be confusing to the people who are writing and speaking and in art schools it’s a common assignment that when you get a critique you're meant to say something first I think that a good way to think about this problem is as something that goes back to German Romanticism: the idea that the point of an Art Academy in the end is to find the student's expressive potential as an individual ! The eleventh and last point that makes critiques difficult is that artworks are unoriginal The problem here is that that a lot of the rhetoric of the art world is geared up to praise things that are original It’s very hard to find words to praise ‘average art’ ! Rory: How many of the flaws would be substantive of the whole process or endeavour of critiquing? ! James: Some of these are pretty inherent Maybe the first one, the kinds of judgments that people say are inherent ! Jan: One thing I don’t completely understand are the implications of what you are saying, what you want, why are you stating what you are saying? ! James: Reviewers of my book said that I should be claiming there are actual fixes, ways to fix critique and turn it into something else In other words, some of these things that turn around and seem to be positive recommendations read as if I was trying to diagnose a problem; that this is what we should be doing But I didn’t any of that, because as far as I am concerned my interest is simply that these things are so challenging They are far more interesting, as it were, than a conversation in a science lab about fixing a piece of equipment, or indeed any kind of conversation that is systematic The lack of system and the unpredictability of it, I think this is really interesting ! Jan: I would describe you as a professor who tries to prove to the world that he doesn’t have to know (what) that he is doing (Laughter) del Suggest keep ‘what’ and keep (laughter) or [laughing] ! James: I like that For if were going to talk about art then none of us are going to be in control much of the time If you were to succeed miraculously in clearing all this up I think it would be much less interesting ! ... 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... 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 and... that you want to ask about the thing ! 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