Anything Can Be Art: Running a Critique That Goes Somewhere
Ms. Reyes teaches Art 1 - 30 students, 50-minute periods every other day. Critique has stalled at “I like it” and “it's good.” Today Priya shows a photograph of a friend's worn sneaker placed on a paint can in the hallway and says it is art “because the artist says so.” Marcus says it is not, because “anybody could have done that - there's no skill.” The class splits, and three students stop participating. Ms. Reyes has twenty minutes left. The district standard requires students to “use art criticism to interpret and evaluate works of art,” and her current rubric awards credit for a “thoughtful opinion.”
1. Name the positions in play and design a 20-minute structure that turns the disagreement into inquiry rather than a vote.
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Priya is making an institutional claim - status conferred by an artist's declaration or by the art world's acceptance. Marcus is making a skill-and-effort claim, which is closer to a craft criterion than to formalism. They are answering different questions, which is why the argument cannot resolve.
Spend the first five minutes separating the questions on the board:
- What is this object, and what is it about?
- By what criteria should it be judged?
- Who decides which criteria apply?
Then run a tight protocol: two minutes of silent looking and writing; three rounds of “claim plus evidence from the image” (not from the artist's intention); one round of steel-manning the other side. Ask Marcus whether a work must be difficult to be meaningful, and Priya whether an artist's say-so alone makes something worth looking at. Close with one sentence from each student naming the criterion they are using. That sentence is the assessed product, and it takes ninety seconds to collect.
2. Rewrite the critique rubric so it grades reasoning rather than which side a student takes.
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Four criteria, each scored 1–4, with an explicit statement that either position - or a third - can earn full credit:
- Clarity of claim: can the position be stated in one sentence someone else could disagree with?
- Use of perceptual evidence: does the argument cite something observable in the work, not only intention or reputation?
- Engagement with a counterexample: does the student address the strongest opposing case, not the weakest?
- Consistency: are the criteria applied the same way to this work as to a work the student already admires?
Two cautions. Do not reward verbosity; a short, consistent argument should beat a long, shifting one. And do not let “it's subjective” close the inquiry - that taste is personal does not make all arguments equally good. Keep an anchor set of three anonymized written responses from previous terms so students can see what a 2 and a 4 actually look like before they write.
3. What studio task the next day keeps the three disengaged students in the conversation and connects the critique to making?
Read the worked answer
Give a one-period task that does not require anyone to defend a taste preference in public: photograph or draw a mundane object twice - once recorded indifferently, once deliberately framed, lit, or placed so that it is about something. Then each student writes the criteria by which the second version should be judged, and swaps with a partner who applies those criteria to the first version.
This does three things. It converts the abstract question into a decision students can make with their hands. It makes the institutional claim testable - if framing alone changes what a sneaker is about, students can say precisely how much the artist's declaration is doing. And it gives the three quiet students a route in that runs through making rather than through argument, which is often why they stopped participating in the first place.
Post the resulting criteria on the wall for the rest of the term and refer back to them at the next critique.