3.3: Critical Perspectives

Art criticism is part of the intellectual tradition in most cultures. Each of these traditions provides key concepts and methods of analysis.

• Structural criticism considers art as a system of elements that are composed together, like a language or set of repeating forms. Artworks are comprised of stable, recurring cultural codes that an art critic decodes.
• Deconstructive criticism focuses on the differences among artworks that prevent them from forming stable structures of meaning.
• Formalist criticism analyses the material and perceptual attributes of art and its associated experiences.
• Ideological criticism seeks out power and social imbalances. For the artist, art is a way to perpetuate worldviews that need to be challenged.
• Feminist criticism focuses on gender inequality and roots out forms of patriarchy that appear in art.
• Psychoanalytic criticism traces the patterns of conflict between consciousness and the unconscious and seeks aspects of personality in the art that are beyond subjective control and which subvert social personas.