Cultural
criticism
8 WEEKS, TBD
MONDAYS, 7-9PM EST
VIRTUAL
This course offers seminars adapted from my MFA courses and generative workshops to writers of all experience levels. With ten years of experience writing cultural criticism, I begin with an introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment—originally a lecture I gave at Performa—and range from close-looking exercises rooted in Theravada Buddhism to the building blocks of a party report.
Criticism taught me how to love, how to read the subconscious of a generation, and why Trump won the election a second time. In this graduate-level course we’ll look at a range of cultural disciplines—visual art, literature, raving—and the different modes of writing about them in our world, from criticism to journalism to personal history.
Class
Structure
Every week, we will discuss a selection of writing that will present a survey of different approaches to cultural criticism. Seminar might include a slideshow presentation, a close-reading exercise, or a participatory activity like a guided meditation close-looking exercise or an in-class writing prompt.
Office Hours
Each student may request individual chats, for thirty minutes or so, to talk about writing, essay ideas, career advice, pitching, working through writer’s block—anything at all.
Syllabus
Week 1: Intro to KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
What exactly is art criticism? No philosopher since Aristotle had so articulated the nature of art criticism than Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgment (1790), which laid the groundwork of criticism for the next 200 years. In fact, he believed that man’s ability to judge beauty substantiated universal human rights to be protected by the state. This is what we are doing as art critics. We will explore his definition of beauty, taste, judgment, and “universal subjectivity,” and I will break it down for you as easily as possible.
Week 2: FORMAL DESCRIPTION AND CLOSE LOOKING
Where does authority come from? Your ability to engage with the integrity of an artwork. In class, we will engage in a close-looking exercise, the art of engaging the faculties of thinking, feeling, sensing, and perceiving, drawn from Theravada Buddhist meditation. We will then look at readings that depend almost entirely on the descriptions of art. Sometimes, the description is the analysis.
Week 3: CRITICAL THEORY OLYMPICS
We’re going to survey the entirety of critical theory from the 1900 to today in a single class. Don’t worry if it just washes over you for now, or if you just want to focus on one, the readings will be here if you want to study them later. Critical theory is only important so long as it is a lens or a trampoline to let you see something in a work, it’s never the main meal. Don’t talk about theory, practice it!
Week 4: The review
This is where the action’s at. Orthodox criticism comes in all forms, but its bread and butter comes from the review. Something new comes out, and you write about it, and try to glean something about what aesthetic experience is like today. We’ll look at the three building blocks of a good review: a description, an analysis, and an idea.
Week 5: profiles
Profiles are a form of reporting—that’s why they’re front book—and it’s one of the most intimate ways of getting to know another human being, in some ways better than their friends and lovers. Art imitates life, and life imitates art, and so the life of an artist becomes an indispensable part of their process. In this class, we’ll discuss different approaches to profile writing (when you have access, when you don’t have access) as well as interview techniques on the job.
Week 6: cultural reporting
The point of learning orthodox art criticism is to understand, according to centuries of the practice, how to understand how a cultural artifact presents itself in a moment in time, and its effects on the world, on us. But once you get good at this, you can use turn this practice on any number of cultural phenomena in the world: technology, memes, subcultures, parties.
Week 7: life and art
When does the self become a way to understand what a piece of art means? As an alternative to the analytical mode, the personal essay can be a way of accessing the meaning of a work of art, simply by writing about what a work or works of art have meant to you in your life, over the years. We’ll see how art has helped people heal from grief or how it placates boredom. This is the kind of essay that everyone should be able to write once this class is over.
Week 8: self and society
What is cultural criticism at its core? What we’re really talking about is how to live in a world shared with others. Whether there are historical moments that define a generation, or epochal life narratives that have shaped many of our lives, there are certain writers who can tell their story, while also telling the story of the collective, and define history. The readings for this class are just a small survey of some of the essays that have captured a time, and in some cases altered history. We’re going to discuss how they did that and why, and to what extent this is possible for any writer, and how much of it is luck?
Sign Up Today
Tuition for the course is $550 for eight weeks. Class fees are non-refundable. No application necessary. Class size will be be capped at around twenty-five. Additional classes may be opened on other days due to demand.