The importance of critical judgment in uncertain disciplines: A comparative case study of undergraduate fine art visual practice

Abstract

Criticality is an important means to negotiate uncertainty, which has become a characteristic of teaching and learning conditions in postmodern times. This paper draws from an empirical comparative case study conducted in the uncertain discipline of fine art visual practice, where critical judgement and meta-cognition are important for professional contemporary art practice. Charting the curricula intended by staff and the culture experienced by students, the paper considers the relation between the espoused theory of criticality in two art schools and their theory-in-use within assessment structures and cultures. Emphasis is placed on the significance of such approaches to criticality for the student experience and their learning engagement. Emerging discourses of ‘subjectivity’ and a lack of development of student meta-cognition indicated that, at an undergraduate level of study, the curricula of these cases are unwittingly underpreparing their graduates for operating with agential criticality as they enter the uncertain context of contemporary art.

Mixed metaphors, mixed messages and mixed blessings: how figurative imagery opens up the complexities of transforming higher education

“…In her concerns with how the formal adult curriculum impacts artists' creative and critical development, Belluigi (2015) developed a visual narrative methodology (in collaboration with an artist and a psychologist -see Meistre & Knoetze 2005;Meistre & Belluigi 2010) to create the conditions for artist-students to express, explore and communally interpret their storied experiences of the assessment practices of fine art higher education curricula in South Africa and England (Figure 3). A concern of the study was that by not situating the artist within interpretative process of assessment, the curriculum was enforcing a docility at odds with the educators' intentions, unwittingly denying the artist-students' agency and responsibility for how their artworks operated in the world (Belluigi 2017a).…”