Rubr-icks

Remember Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted"?  Well, if you didn't you can catch up here.  The Cliff Notes are that the artist team surveyed different countries to find out what they wanted to see in a painting, then they painted it.  Not-so-shocking conclusion: the paintings were dreadfully boring.  That's my favorite demonstration of what happens when you try to make art quantifiable.  The first thing to go is the.....magical thingie, the special sauce.  That which cannot be named, let alone measured. The thing that inspires and changes forever the consciousness beholding it.  The thing that gives a work of art LIFE and keeps it from being a husk, bereft of illumination, vision and feeling.

Well, its happened, the unthinkable moment when I transition from a young, vital and relevant mind to being an old fogey nostalgic for the good old days. Of art school, I mean.  (SIDE RANT: And no, I am not at all nostalgic for some of it--mainly the presumption that my professors, coincidentally (hahaha) almost all older white men, lorded over the very definition of art and I had to swallow it whole.  When they said I could question it, apparently they only meant insomuch as they could reassert their power and make me look like a moron, or worse, an illustrator or decorator! The game was definitely rigged-- I could tell because there was always this ineffable idea of "artistic excellence" lurking around telling some of us we somehow didn't measure up to their standards.  This "standard of excellence" was based on a historical narrative trajectory of European Art in which things got overthrown generation by generation in some Oedipal race towards....something... it began with a Greek Kouros and ends with a urinal...or actually with Marcel playing chess with naked women.  This standard dictated who got to play the game with the big boys, a.k.a. gatekeepers, dontcha know. I could see right where I fit in and I can't even play chess.  In my mind, the most egregious proof of this is modernist abstraction, which was "invented" by some dudes in the early 20th C.  They were met with horror for, like a second, then wide acceptance ensued (Invented, in this case, means stealing something that already existed for eons in an an ambivalent attitude of reverence and irreverence that boggles the mind.) I hope you are laughing your head off at how utterly absurd, how incandescently presumptuously superior that supposition was.  I am. This, I DO NOT MISS. End side rant)

Sigh.   I miss something about art school, though...

Yesterday, I attended a meeting on RUBRICS at one of the schools I ad-junk at.  They already require these, but ours wasn't good enough, hence the workshop with its carrot of a free sushi lunch.  Over and over again they stressed our criteria had to be measurable.  Over and over again,  I head the expressions "the student's success" and "our (meaning the instructor's) expectations" and how could we be clearer about how the students could meet our expectations so they could be successful. Yikes, so much focus on SUCCESS!  And Meeting My Expectations!! WTF!   Frankly, I don't have a set of universal expectations in terms of art students. I seek to reject authoritative models not reinforce them with steel and concrete! We used to encourage students to feel safe experimenting, which is code for "its OK to fail"...but no more! Now I not only need to have Expectations About Their Success but I get to codify it too!  Good grief.

Rubrics, btw, are assessment tools, so we can be more accountable for our grading processes. And the  single good thing about them is that students contesting their grade will butt up against the iron wall of the rubric, which will someday also calculate their grade based on numerical values input into the program (Canvas, at all three schools I teach at).

I wanna be crystal clear that if there's one thing I understand, it's that paying 50k+ per year for something demands some sort of accountability. I'd want it if I were paying.

Another possible upside is technique. Assessing technique is do-able. But, as we all know too well, art school is deskilled in favor of a more conceptual approach (and that's a rant about the perils of Cartesian thinking for another day) but maybe this rubric thing will be a reason to bring it back?  Of course, the generational damage is REAL...so finding skilled practitioners is a issue.  But not impossible.

 

That said, what's happening to art school is so horrible and upsetting to me that I could scream...and maybe never stop.  First of all, I find it odd that all these things we do to demonstrate that we are actually teaching something substantial, such as rubrics, seem to prove the exact opposite.  What they prove, at least to me, is that the things that are insubstantial  are the ONLY things that actually matter. So there.  I know I cannot prove my case.  Except art will prove the case for itself. So, yay.

 

Repeating for clarity: the more we assess art, the more we will prove that what we need art for as human beings is not assess-able. Tell me, dear reader, do you worry about the artists GPA when you go to a museum? Does it matter if they met their teacher's expectations for success?

Pardon me for saying, it can be very hard for me to see these rubrics as somehow liberating us from fascism and not just utterly entrenching in a whole new universe of it. I can see with my own eyeballs and hear with my own earballs how the students have some weird Stockholm Syndrome regarding grades.  So, I beg of you, how is this new granularity going to alleviate this when in actuality, they can now obsess on a whole excel spreadsheet of detailed potential failures and/or gold stars for robotic adherence?

I predict the ineffable will not be denied.  I predict that studio classes will have to include as a category something like "Authority of Artwork" which is where the unquantifiably subjective will hide and probably cause trouble. However, it will be reduced to one row in the spreadsheet, irrevocably minimizing its importance.  But!  I can almost hear you squeak: is art not 99% percent perspiration (measurable in actual physical ounces!) and 1% inspiration?  Does not the rubric reflect...reality?  Well, unless you get off looking at sweaty people and measuring their sweat, I would propose that that eeensy 1% constitutes 100% of the reason anyone wants to interact with art. So, there's that. And really, at the end of the day, every artist wants to know if their art is "good enough" on the magical unicorn scale, not the research, attendance and participation in crit scale.  Everyone wants their artwork to be chock full of excellence and lacking in succulence*.

I almost forgot one of the most important things! How something like rubrics and grades affects the students!! Oops.  Well, reinforcing extrinsic rewards has been proven to kill one’s joy for a pursuit. Read about it here. One quickly (and by "quickly" I mean instantly) learns to go for the cookie rather than to enjoy the process that leads there, not to mention it creates dependency on thinks like cookies and outside validation. The art itself becomes collateral damage. In fact, I think I read somewhere they actually resent it!

Presumably students go to art school because they already kind of love art. Its hard to sustain that in a world that actually really doesn't want to support that.  But hey, by the time they graduate, the administration will have gotten their $$$.

Anyway, below are some rubrics for you to download and use in your classes in case you need them. 

The first vertical row is the criteria we are assessing.  Then read across for what constitutes the scale of SUCCESS (tm).

FOR GOD'S SAKE CLICK TO EMBIGGEN!

The first is for the ineffable stuff.  The second rubric needs some 'splainin'.  It reflects art's dirtiest (not-so-well-kept) secret: the art world is very unfair and life can be unfair. And poor art school is so earnestly trying to be fair and yet tasked with "preparing students for real life"...such an irreconcilable paradox!  We try to compensate, but this rubric will let you know the unvarnished truth.

Also, it is what's known as a weighted rubric.  That means each box has a numeric value that can be used to calculate a grade.  Do I need to remind you that this must reflect exactly what's on the syllabus in the "Grade Assignments" section? And they all must add up to 100%. Don't forget that or you will certainly regret you were ever born.  Have fun teaching art!

 

*"Succulence", not to be confused with "succulents".