Three Approaches of Art Criticism

Three Approaches of Art Criticism
1. Marxist Approach
A Marxist approach help to deepen the appreciation or understanding of an art work
by revealing the historical context of its production and the relation of a work of art
or of an artist to society. Art, just as any other human activity, is always created within
a specific social and historical context, and this will impact on the art work itself. This
is why Marxists argue that one can only begin fully to appreciate and understand a
work of art by examining it in relation to the conditions of its creation. One example
is using Dialectics in critic of art. Dialectical materialism argues that understanding
the world cannot proceed from fixed definitions of its component parts. We have to
start with concepts as tools with which to examine the world. But these concepts
should be regarded, at least initially, as provisional, needing to be checked and refined
in the light the material evidence. Better concepts result in better questions that can
be used to explore the real world. This fruitful interaction between ideas and the
material world of which they are a part is particularly required if we are to
understand such an elusive concept as art.
2. Feminist Approach
Consciousness-raising brought knowledge about women's experiences and
subjectivity to the fore front as a
political strategy towards changing the extant ("patriarchal") perception and
roles of women in society. Current feminist art criticism which utilizes
neo-Marxist, semi logical, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic methods to
analyze the social construction of women. Feminist art criticism is a political act,
allows for the development of a consciousness about women based on their
experiences and subjectivity,
and seeks to clarify and undermine the role of social institutions in defining
women. Feminist criticism should not be understood, however, as a singular
approach to interpreting art. While the goals of feminist critics are equal
opportunity, recognition of women's voices and experiences as valid and
important, and fundamental changes in the social, political, economic,
cultural, aesthetic, and belief structures which cause men and women to be
treated differently, the bases named above reify as three different strands of
feminist art criticism, in which each characteristic or basis becomes a strategy
towards achieving the goals of the feminist movement. One great example are the art
works of Frida Kahlo.
3.Psychoanalytic Approach
Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and
later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the
secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a
manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular
character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are
projections of the author's psyche.
One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature,
as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-
thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us
by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic
language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented
symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic
speech".
Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved
emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may
well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life,
sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the
characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed
indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as
"symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several
thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety
located onto another image by means of association).
Sources:
https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/theory/item/2626-what-
do-marxists-have-to-say-about-art
https://www.marxist.com/marxism-materialism-and-art.htm
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1172&context=mzwp
https://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/psycho.crit.html

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