Avant-Garde and Kitsch Review
You will read the assigned article closely and carefully. You should formally introduce the article by providing the full citation and identifying the author (who are they?). You will then identify the author’s thesis, object(s) of study, leading questions, types of evidence, and central claims. In essence, you will summarize the article. Be thorough, but also concise. Please discuss how the author constructs their argument and whether it is convincing, or not. There may be a few different theses or arguments in the article. Identify the most important ones and briefly mention others that you deem significant. Do not outline every element of the article point by point. Instead, synthesize and briefly summarize the article content. This is a review NOT a report. You should end with a formal conclusion. I don’t want to know if you personally liked the article. Instead, summarize the article’s strengths and weaknesses.
You should not use first person (I) in this review. Your paper must be 2 pages double-spaced in Times New Roman, 12-point type. You should include a title for your review that indicates your assessment (for example, “The Art of Writing about Art”), your name, and page numbers.
I am interested not only in the content of the article being reviewed and the way that the author formulates their argument, but also in your ability to summarize the text and write a critical assessment of the ideas and theses presented by the author. Think of an article as an argument. Are you persuaded of the author’s ideas at the end or not? Are there elements they could have improved or points where they lost you?
Questions to consider as you read the article and critically analyze it:
• What is the primary object(s) of study?
• What other objects are referenced?
• Does the author reference other scholars or theorists in the text? Who?
• Does the author outline their argument clearly and persuasively?
• How clear is the author’s language?
• What are the main points and key quotations?
Some tips: You will absolutely want to read the article more than once. Take notes, highlight or underline important elements and phrasing while you read. Pay attention to the first sentence of each paragraph, as they may indicate the paragraph’s content. In addition, look for sentences that end with a questions mark. These often indicate “big picture” questions and should be considered as primary or secondary lines of inquiry. Remember that your assignment is to discuss the article’s treatment of its topic, not the topic itself. You should therefore say “This article shows” or “the author argues,” rather than “This happened.”
Your review must include at least three citations from the article. References or citations from the article should be followed by a parenthetical citation. For example: The author claims, “globalization effects art.” (73) There should be no citations to outside material in this review. You must also include one image from an artist that the author references. Provide a caption for the image: Artist, title, date. Medium, dimensions, location. Then provide three sentence explaining whether Greenberg thinks it is “kitsch” or “art.”
Answer Preview
Avant-garde and Kitsch 1939 is an article by an art critic as well as historian, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg divided art into avant-garde and kitsch. The idea was to introduce the concepts involved in making of art. When writing this article…
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