Final exam: Chazen essay grades

In order to grade the Chazen essays in the time limit, I wrote comparatively few comments. Here, then, is a simplified explanation of how grades broke down:

• 5 points: Does not tackle the question and/or undershoots the minimum word count by a large margin
• 6 points: Repeats the biases Larry listed in class without any analytical work to back those biases up
• 7 points: Offers mostly description with only minimal analysis
• 8 points: Leans heavily on a bias with limited analysis
• 9 points: Analyzes one artwork expertly but doesn’t go as far with the second work
• 10 points: Thoughtful, innovative, synoptic analysis grounded in closely-observed evidence from both artworks
• -1 point: Significant grammatical mistakes covered by the 44 Reminders

The modal average is an 8—the commonest analytical fallacy was grounded in the assumption that

Good art = realistic art

Many of the writers who made this argument worked to back it up: realistic artworks are easier to engage with emotionally; a viewer can more directly understand the meaning of a realistic artwork than of an abstract artwork; you need not be as tightly anchored to a specific context to understand the meaning of a photorealistic image; you don’t need to know the history of 20th-century art to understand the dialog in which a nineteenth-century realistic painter intervenes.

Indeed, most of the history of recorded aesthetic judgment has preferred photorealism to abstraction. (Proof: a delightful New Yorker essay on cave paintings in France and Spain.)

However, there are four key problems with arguing that photorealism is inherently superior to abstraction:

1. Reflect on the artworks we’ve encountered this semester. How many of them are realistic? Not Jane Eyre. Certainly not A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Several of the short stories are realistic, but none of the movies. (How many innocent men on the run from federal agents prove their innocence and marry the lovely blondes they meet en route? I’m pretty sure CNN would have covered that story.)
2. And then how do we talk about the music? Are Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story realistic? What would that even mean?
3. And what about the identity argument? Is all realistic art good art? Is every photograph you have ever taken superior to Calder’s tremendous mobile?
4. Daguerrotype photography was available in 1839. Better cameras were commonplace by the 1850s. Why would Thomas Blackwell choose to paint Takashimaya—which must have taken weeks to render to precisely—when he could simply have taken a photograph? (Indeed, chances are better than good that he worked from a photograph when painting the picture.)

Analyses that wrestled with these questions in specific terms did a bit better than those that accepted it as a given that realism was preferable to abstraction.

If you pick up your final exam in the fall and have any questions about your grade on the Chazen essay, I do hope you’ll contact me: I’m always happy to talk about art!

The grade distribution for the Chazen essays looks, for once, like a grade curve ought to look:

Grade distribution for part II of the final exam

(There are no grades below 5. This is part of an attempt to avoid the grade-norming issues we encountered with the midterm.)

Final exam: Part II—the Chazen essay

(The green assignment sheet lists the Chazen essay as Part III.)

The writing staff has divided the grading of the final as we did the midterm.

I realize that this forces you to write for an audience with whose expectations you aren’t necessarily as familiar, but this is a good thing: because you don’t know exactly what your reader will look for, you should write the taughtest and most intellectually daring work you can. Because your reader knows nothing about you, s/he will come to your essay thinking that you might well be the finest writer in the class; all you have to do is play along.

That said, a few of you have asked what I expect for Part II, the essay on the visual arts.

Larry’s lecture last Wednesday hit the two most important points:

• Don’t write that better art = more realistic art: what’s so great about realism? I have a perfectly realistic world out my window; why would I want to see one in an art gallery? If an artist is using realism in the 19th, 20th, or 21st century, why?
• Find the meaning of both the artworks you discuss—or, at least, the attempted meaning; you might well argue that the artwork you like less aimed at one meaning but missed.

Here is just one of a dozen possible structural strategies for this essay:

1. First sentence—a thesis statement of sorts: at a minimum, you can make a simple claim that outlines the rest of your essay, e.g. “Work 1 succeeds because of X; work 2 fails because of Y.” A more sophisticated thesis might say “Good art does X; work 1 does it, work 2 does not.” Perhaps the most sophisticated thesis would claim “By looking at work 1 and work 2, we can deduce a general theory, X, that distinguishes successful art from unsuccessful art.”
2. First body paragraph—a one-sentence description of the first work: who made it and when, its materials and general description; example: “John Chamberlain’s El Reno (1962), a sculpture of painted sheet metal, seems to abstract and aestheticize a car crash.” Then a one-sentence theory of what the artist was trying to achieve and an evaluation of his/her success; example: “Chamberlain seems to have meant to critique drunk driving in America in the 1960s; his sculpture conveys the precarious suddenness of the violent collision of cars, but also suggests the permanence of death.”* The rest of this paragraph should point to details from the artwork that backs up your reading: how do we know the artist meant to communicate X? How do we know that s/he succeeded? Look at every datum you can get your eyes on: the title, the medium, the size, the composition, color and texture, the interplay of forms and tones (lightness and darkness), and every other issue Larry raised in lecture.
3. Second body paragraph—same as the paragraph above, but in reverse: what is work 2, what did the artist seek to achieve, and why did s/he fail?
4. Short conclusion—what does the comparison of these two artworks reveal about art itself?

* This is not what Chamberlain was getting at, I’m pretty sure.

How to uncover what a painting means

In discussion yesterday we put together a chart of denotative and connotative meanings for several of the artworks we encountered this summer:

Work	Denotative (surface) meaning	Connotative (thematic) meaning
Shakespeare’s sonnet 43	I see you as though in a dream	The lover’s vision is shaped by his imagination rather than by the world around him
Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode”	Falling in love with your own imagination can be hazardous	The idealizing language of love in novels traps us in a false sense of what love is

…and so on.

The same process applies to your analysis of a painting or sculpture at the Chazen tomorrow. Every artwork, whether we’re talking about a Dürer or a Picasso, has a surface meaning and a thematic meaning. If you’re looking at a Dutch still life, you have to ask why the painter chose to paint that still life, and why he (it’s usually a he) chose to paint it in that way.

All great art has something to say about the world: a philosophy to espouse or a context to critique. Your job as an art critic is to figure out what that artwork is saying and whether it succeeds.