Reading Thierry de Duve’s essay about Art Education I finally came to realize why I felt so uninspired at the end of college. In When Form Becomes Attitude, he talks about deconstruction as the new form of teaching art in college (this essay is from 1994 but it’s still pretty true, at least at RISD).
There are a couple of problems here. It is the method of deconstruction that has evolved with postmodernism that smothers art students into quiet despair, or else it drives them into a drunken stupor by the end of senior year. According to this model there is always a way to take apart verbally a work of art (or anything else) and to figure out what it is about. It presupposes that categorization is an inherent factor of critiquing art.
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