Over the past few weeks, the Aspen Art Museum has been hosting what it calls “crit sessions.” Local artists come to the museum with a piece of their art and have it critiqued by their peers in a constructive and safe environment. Last week, Sam Durant spoke to artists about the proper way to have one of these sessions.
Durant is an art instructor at the California Institute of the Arts. In more than two decades of teaching, he’s learned a lot about the best ways to talk to people about art.
“I don’t even like to identify myself as a teacher, or what I do as teaching,” said Durant. “It’s learning together.”
At the end of the day, though, he still is called a teacher, in addition to being an artist. Being an artist, Durant said, is a title which puts you out of what he calls “everyday life”.
“Culture in general is separated from the sort of everyday experience that people have,” said Durant. “In that separation, I think that creates the possibilities for misunderstanding, for intimidation, for fear or whatever. That makes people think it’s irrelevant to their lives, which is unfortunate.”
There is no one key to critiquing art, according to Durant. The first step is get past the purely visual and aesthetic elements and to think about what the art makes you feel.
