“Reactions to art typically stop at the neck,” Smith argues in a taped interview before her Shenkman lecture. Most people believe they are not art critics, and yet we often have opinions about everything is mass society. While we are all critics of pop culture, we become uncomfortable when asked to critique art culture. If we are lucky, we can have intense reactions to art, exclaim our pleasure for a piece, and follow it up with talk, comparison, and advocacy. Exploring visual pleasure, we discuss how criticism is the process of making what’s implicit explicit. How do things work? What is their power?
Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. Rev. and Expanded ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
