Everyone’s a Critic: Writing about Art & Culture

With the rise of social media and online self-publishing platforms, everyone can be a critic, but not everyone’s perspectives shape the larger cultural conversation. In the mainstream, we’ve seen a groundswell of creative production by artists, writers, and makers of color, but the profile of professional cultural critics remains predominantly white and male. And it’s not the identity of the critic in itself that is at issue, but that established critics tend to be unfamiliar with the artistic, intellectual, and conceptual ideas that animate the work of many contemporary non-white artists. In this course, we will read and analyze cultural criticism that centers marginalized perspectives, and illuminates aesthetics and creative practices that engage with race, indigeneity, gender and queerness. We will identify and practice interpretive strategies that resist and re-contextualize dominant ideas of cultural value.