The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design

Chris Brisbin, Myra Thiessen, Chris Brisbin, Myra Thiessen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317225935
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design presents an in-depth exploration of criticism and criticality in theory and practice across the disciplines of art, architecture, and design. Professional criticism is a vital part of understanding the cultural significance of designed objects and environments that we engage with on a daily basis, yet there is evidence to show that this practice is changing. This edited volume investigates how practitioners, researchers, educators, and professionals engage with, think about, and value the practice of critique. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary authorship from nine countries - the UK, USA, Australia, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, and Denmark - this companion provides a wide range of leading perspectives evaluating the landscape of criticality and how it is being shaped by technological and social advances. Illustrated with over 60 black and white images and structured into five sections, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design is a comprehensive volume for researchers, educators, and students exploring the changing role of criticism through interdisciplinary perspectives.

PART I

1

CRITICALITY; OR WOE IS ME, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR!

Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen

It may seem strange to some to ask what criticality in art, architecture, and design is good for. Is it not so deeply embedded in creative practice that it just . . . is, was, always has been, always will be? Why do we need a book to explore the idea of criticality, especially one that attempts to open up questions about criticality across creative disciplines? That criticality, criticism, and critical thinking are essential to creative practice is not contested, but rather we ask whether it is still doing its job. In a world saturated with information, ‘post-truths,’ and ‘fake news,’ perhaps we have never needed to rethink criticality more than we do today. Creative practitioners must acknowledge their role within the capitalist systems that societies are built on and question what their works says about the world and what the designed/manufactured world says about them, not only as creative practitioners and thinkers, but, more importantly, as global citizens.

That brings us to question the form that criticality has perhaps adopted in the wake of different cultural, social, ideological, and economic drivers, such as capitalism. Are the ways we have traditionally engaged in criticality through critique and criticism dying a slow and painful death, or did they dissipate a long time ago? Are the media and popular press simply ghosts of criticality in its heyday? Is it merely a hollowed-out husk of once-robust platforms for social and cultural critique? Or, is it just that criticality is no longer recognizable and/or relevant to creative practitioners or the public? These questions point to issues present today that are, arguably, in stark contrast to criticality’s history, where architecture critics, such as Herbert Muschamp and Jane Jacobs, once wielded considerable power influencing thinking and advocating for those without a formal voice or platform (the public and the city), promoting only the most exemplary and meaningful of built environments whilst simultaneously holding to account the beliefs and actions of some designers, architects, planners, government bureaucrats, politicians, and developers. Critics today do less forensic interrogation or social advocacy, and more descriptive journalism. The rigor that was once the norm is today limited to a select few. By failing to cast a critical gaze as an organized whole upon our own production, creative disciplines may find themselves fundamentally disconnected—and practically irrelevant—to the public they idealistically serve. Criticality, we argue, is a tool through which to engender productive and engaged societies, and more productive and engaged creative professionals operating within it, but only if used with intent.

There is no doubt that globalization has changed the way we live, interact, and consume, which has had a substantial impact on how we define and construct culture around the world. Traditional approaches and critical practices are not likely to continue to operate in the same way, with the change in thinking currently observed in societies. Bill Readings observed some time ago that criticism is no longer relevant to the institutions it once called home, such as universities and governments, since generating culture has taken a back seat to productivity models that prioritize capital gains. As a result, the critic’s authority and qualifications have been deemed intangible, aloof, and irrelevant to the organizations that they primarily operate under.¹ In addition, criticism—it is suggested—is no longer relevant to define an idealized ‘public good,’ because the language and principles expressed by contemporary design critics speak less and less about the everyday questions that surround life in our cities and focus more and more on commodity, consumerism, and popular culture.

This rather dire prospect for criticism does not change the fact that engaging with criticality is an integral part of professional creative practice where the translation of ideas or design responses into outputs, such as buildings, drawings, images, communications, artifacts, or any form of creative production, is the fundamental goal of creativity. However, with increasing accessibility of more populist genres of writing, such as newspapers, magazines, and online formats like blogging, wikis, and chat rooms have given a voice to the layperson and public as a whole, criticism therefore is no longer strictly the domain of academics or the professional critic. It has been democratized whereby social and digital media platforms have become the trolling grounds of the lay or popular critic, but, rather than echoing the rigor and socal advocacy demonstrated by Muschamp and Jabobs, the result is a groundswell of criticism that is overwhelmingly uninformed, shallow, and based in self-centered opinion.

We recognize that there are strengths and opportunities revealed when gateways policed by elitist ‘tastemakers’ are opened; however, there is also rise for concern when subjective opinion is preferred over rigorously researched arguments grounded in existing knowledge and empirical evidence. The result could be that the relevancy of critique has been hijacked by the Facebook era of instant gratification and rapid pace of social media streams. Arguably, this environment is not conducive to sustained critical thinking, making it more difficult to generate productive critique, knowledge, understanding, or culture. Instead, what can be observed are instantaneous streams of opinion that comment on all facets of human experience but are limited in their capacity to contribute to culture, thus compounding criticality’s growing irrelevance.

It is also true that these very same platforms blur perceptible boundaries between fact and fiction, with an increasing proliferation of advertisements masquerading as newsworthy stories across all forms of mass media (traditional and social). The common thread across these platforms is the global harnessing of information in order to target-sell to specific audiences. The creative disciplines are no different. In this light—faced with a designed world that continues to drift ever more indifferently towards economically driven forms of consumption—as the mediums and media used for criticism today migrate from traditional to new online-based lay critique forums, this edited book, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design brings together chapters to collectively consider a series of relatively simple questions. Is there a future for criticism in art, architecture, and design? And, if there is, whom might and could it serve, and what forms might it take? This book considers why we need criticality and discusses the goals of advocacy. It postulates changes in the perceived notion of audience over time, what role traditional forms of criticism still has, what can be learned from criticality’s history across different creative disciplines, and outlines various platforms for emerging forms of criticism, such as curated exhibitions and online forums (blogs, wikis, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). It also considers the range of ways that criticism is wielded in a variety of different settings, including both creative practice and design education, in order to better understand the application of critique and critical thinking in producing designerly knowledge.

According to Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, criticism “enables a clearer understanding of designs whose strengths and shortcomings . . . those interested in their work may otherwise only intuit or comprehend incompletely.”² The critic’s role therefore is to produce informed accounts of creative works that both evaluate and communicate the cultural value of it to the broader public. In so doing, the critic ultimately holds the creative work’s maker(s) accountable whilst simultaneously advocating for the principles that were applied to affect the critique. However, this definition assumes that the public is listening, or even cares. Gradually, design criticism has taken on the discursive form of conservative info/edutainment, more familiar in product brochures where nothing much of value is said, let alone analyzed or critiqued. An increasing laissez-faire attitude towards the value of criticism, critique, and criticality contentiously maintains a conservative mediocrity and unwillingness to effectively question anything of ‘real’ culturally meaningful importance, such as the buildings, cities, or natural environments we dwell in as part of our daily lives. Houses have become commodities to be bought and sold in indignation of their socially produced cultural role as family ‘homes,’ in which families grow together and build intimate connections over time in their local community and place.

At the heart of this discussion is the question of the critic’s relevancy. Who is the audience of the critic, and for what purpose are their acts of criticism mounted? According to Nancy Levinson, for criticism to be relevant to the public, it must “critique from the ground rather than the ‘tower.’”³ Critics must critique not only about socially popular topics, but also from a perspective of intimate expertise that understands the profound medium- and long-term affects of designers’ decisions on people’s lives. In other words, following Levinson, and Jacobs, the critic should live in, and be part of, the cultural context in which they are critiquing. Levinson’s position is explicitly formed in response to the internationalization of the critic, as she sees it over the last thirty years—the emergence of a mobile critic who does not appear to be grounded in any specific time and/or place, but who only affords the preference to the established cohort of globetrotting ‘starchitects.’ Levinson’s position on the characteristics of a good critic are therefore based on a common ethical investment in the place(s) they live and work. They are, therefore, far more likely to be committed to advocate on behalf of, for example, better built and natural environments where they and their audience also live. From this perspective, the best critic is always the local critic.

However, the critic also needs to contribute in other ways beyond the potential reinforcement of local traditions and culture. Thomas Fisher presents a very different and progressive idea of what the critic should be and do. For Fisher, critics should “strive to be intelligent and political leaders, envisioning different futures, making new connections and providing insightful and unexpected explanations for seemingly mundane things.”⁴ Criticism’s role, therefore, is not just about the informed assessment of ‘things’ already crafted, but also the things yet unknown and unrealized. The critic’s role is to culturally position the work being discussed in relation to its kin and to also speculate upon it as illustrative or projective of potential utopias and dystopias.

But now, after sixty years of too closely aligning criticism with the (perhaps) esoteric indulgencies of theory, the public is no longer able to see criticism’s value and it seems to have lost its authoritative voice. As Friedrich Nietzsche observes: “One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.”⁵ Nietzsche would have us believe that the continued investment in one’s opinion is the ultimate narcissistic act; the purveyance of a culture based in instantaneous gratification that is saturated with information sound-bites and self-referential Instagram ‘selfies.’ Perhaps he is right! Mark Fisher, in exploring his university students’ inability to critically engage with their own education, believes that many of his students exist in a “depressive [state of] hedonia . . . an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.”⁶ At the very formative moment when a creative practice student must be nurtured with the operative value of criticality, it is undermined by an overwhelming current of global indifference. But at this moment, when the rigor of criticism has been widely replaced with the opinion of lay critics, we are also reminded how vital “a searching and sustained critical conversation about the built world”⁷ truly is. The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design aims to demonstrate how a critical engagement with the designed world enables critical engagement with living in that world,⁸ aiming to disturb what Fisher terms the “constant flow of sugary gratification on demand” that fuels the world today.

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design examines and critiques the social values that are embedded within artifacts and systems generated by artists, architects, and designers. It is proposed that these are, or can be, more holistically understood through inter- and multidisciplinary analysis. Traditionally, academics and practitioners working within art, architecture, or design tend to engage in criticism from a disciplinary perspective. For example, in architecture the role of critique in higher education is generally only discussed in relation to architectural education; or, similarly, within art the concern is focused on criticism as it pertains specifically to art education. Artists are rarely interested in the role of critique and criticism in architecture or design education, or vice versa.

The cultural and social value of criticism is arguably changing as a result of technological advances, and it is evident that a more interconnected approach to the way that critique, criticality, and criticism are practiced may be more valuable. The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design explores this changing role of criticism through inter- and multidisciplinary perspectives. It provides a unique and original platform to bridge between related creative disciplines within art, architecture, and design. A main objective is, therefore, to promote a broader understanding of the conceptual and pragmatic functioning of criticality and to generate a new inter- and multidisciplinary knowledge about how criticality is embedded in art, architecture, and design as a creative and transgressive political activity. It also explores the capacity for designed outputs or artefacts (artworks, buildings, illustrations, performance, etc.) to express their embedded cultural values, and encourage inter- and mult...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Index