Evaluation as Devaluation: The Labour of Critique in Fashion Education

Abstract

A “critique” means something quite different in the art and design classroom than it does in the seminar room: an event of assessing students’ artwork. The monopolization of critique as a labour of appraisal serves to enforce that the hours fashion students spend crafting wearable garments are not remunerable labour hours but intangible investments in their own professional and personal development, installing a quite literal distinction between the material work created by the student and the immaterial work of the tutor to assign, guide, and grade it. This pedagogy helps naturalize the asymmetrical distribution of time and obligation through which the arts university precaritizes faculty in short-term work contracts while imprisoning students in long-term loans. By licensing its monopoly on critique to instructors within the studio-classroom so they may evaluate and thereby devaluate the work of students, the university insulates itself from solidarity between its different constituencies.