Art Critiquing and Art History, and their
Effects on our view
Even though art critiquing and an art historians are two vastly different groups in the gallery art field. An art critic needs a thorough knowledge of art history and an art historian needs to know how to critic a piece properly otherwise both will fail their purpose.
Art historians study and write about works of art. They may also deliver lectures on art history, advice on art; look after historical and contemporary art collections, and research and present exhibitions.
Art Critics however give their bias on how they feel about an artwork, they are less factual and give emotional responses, and they give the piece their emotional reasoning behind what caused the artworks to be created by the artist. Sometimes the written word can take on a life of its own as once in print it can influence peoples perceptions of what to see in a piece of art.
What I see is that Art Critics have been struggling to keep up with the rate at which art has evolved in the last 50 years.
Analysing a painting these days to get print space must have a degree of commercialization and therefore be overdramatised; to make it newsworthy this sometimes gets in the way of educating and clear precise analysis.
Patricia Piccinini critiques issues in society in many of her exhibitions, her personal ideas about what could happen if we meddle too much in biological sciences, cloning and stem cell research are paramount to supporting the exhibits.
The sculptures in her exhibitions have human qualities, but manage to also seem very foreign and distant from reality. This is the possibility of our future, designer surrogate mothers, made to care for endangered species, infants as shown in “Detail”,2004, where the creature is manufactured to help protect endangered species as well as repopulate. But then we see the complete opposite in “Foundling”,2008, where the subject is an almost completely human-like being but has a nose...