Critic Workshop
We held a workshop today about what "critic" means, what it means to be "critical". Each student was asked to bring in examples of what they considered to be criticism. We had Diane Arbus photos, New Yorker cartoons, Erik Spiekermann Twitter streams and Bruce Mau quotes. And these only begin to scratch the surface.
The range of examples, images, articles, films showed a terrific spectrum of critical vehicles: from a critical product, to a political cartoon, to Myspace as a critical space, blog comments, Twitter streams, viral culture jamming, and not forgetting newspaper, magazine articles and books, including one made up of solely of covers.
Students were then asked to unpack their critical selections and find words or phrases to best characterise what we might mean by critical. These were broken down various ways ranging from criticism as metaphor to looking at criticism in terms of its immediacy and considering criticism as a form of social awareness.
The workshop felt like an exciting series of prompts, helping us realise just how vast and how much potential criticism has both in terms of its form as much as its content. We've decided to keep our workshop sheets up in class and hope to continue adding to them as our ideas of criticism change and grow.
