Street Art Assessment 3
Outline:
This assignment is designed as a conventional written critical analysis (as you might encounter in any Arts based subject). Primarily we want you to demonstrate an expansive understanding of the academic material on the reader.
This doesn’t mean just jamming citations into the paper, it means we want you to demonstrate you have read the core material, understood the subtleties of the arguments and then applied them thoughtfully and critically to the topic.
You may choose any of the provocations or questions below to respond to in your essay. If you use an image that is not your own, please cite it as well, following appropriate citation guidelines for images.
Specific essay topics to write on:
- What is street art? What is graffiti? What is public art? Is there a distinction? Can there be a conclusive definition? What are the factors which determine it? Create or refute the possibility of a single theory to explain these art forms.
You will need to take a concept from the reader (or your wider academic reading) and apply it to either:
- A specific street artwork or image in public space (for example a specific advertising billboard would be OK). An essay in this format would typically take the form of a critical visual analysis of an individual artwork or image, utilizing specific academic content from the reader to support or structure your argument.
- Street art or graffiti practices more generally. Your theoretical scaffold might be used to explore the cultures around street art and graffiti, but should still include explicit references to the theoretical scaffolds within the reader (or broader academic reading).
- Although not directly ‘street art’ if you want to, I am happy for you to analyse a broader aspect of public culture (for example homelessness, street performance, skate boarding, urbexing etc). One of the focuses in the class is the way street art changes the possibilities for public space and transgresses normalising social conduct (sometimes for pro-social outcomes). I am happy for you to look at other cultures in public space that reutilise or transform the space.
General Advice
On this type of essay, really the most important marking criteria is to demonstrate engagement with material from the reader (or other academic sources). You will really need to read the academic material on the reader. It’s important so your assignment can evidence learning outcomes from the class (which is part of the function of the assessment), but it’s also important to help develop your critical thinking. The politics of public space is a very advanced discipline; there is a lot of academic discussion built up over many generations of thinkers. Using these ideas to scaffold your argument can help advance you past a generalist understanding of public space. It doesn’t really matter what position you take, but it does matter that the argument is well thought out and supported by other findings.
Secondly, it’s important to demonstrate ‘independent critical thinking’. This really means understanding the subtleties of original papers and then being able to critique them effectively.
You will also be marked on the coherence of your concept/argument/thesis. A good way to improve your writing here is to try to summarize your central argument into a single concise sentence that you could explain to a friend.
Collect your thinking for the essay, write out a plan of what to say and then develop a clear, tight piece of coherent writing.
