Good to know that one can expect from a panel to arrive only at a common denominator rather than to appreciate the unique. Thus, not being a winner would be a more desirable position to be in. (my contrary streak)

I understand that in a academic setting there is a need to apply a system for judging progress, skill, the ability to follow rules etc. But if art is to be synonymous with creativity, then how you do something becomes less important then what you’ve done.

Yes I sometimes make a note on what not to forget when I start a painting, but once the (metaphorically) music starts to play the rhythm takes over and I am dancing, no longer paying attention to my notes. My feet or my brushes are taking me where I need to go.

Recently I was on a panel to select winners at a high school art exhibit. One of my fellow judges was an architect and we disagreed on two abstract paintings. The painting that I liked I saw as being entertaining (he laughed at me) and the painting that he liked he saw as being well constructed. We settled on another painting that was reasonably both entertaining and well constructed.

Inspirational comments. Teaching a course on neurobiology (embryonic development/neurological diseases), my major concern, so far, has been to help undergraduates to cope with challenges presented by the original literature. Reading your comments, I am thinking about stimulating more creative discussions of the research (depending, how soon I will reinvent myself as an artist).

When I say that there’s no substantive difference between and among the review practices of various disciplines, I mean that, inasmuch as all the disciplines include training in how to think about problems, they have more in common than it might at first seem. And since all the disciplines are peopled with people, they have the same range of anxieties that go with the territory of being a person.

Certainly, other forms, regardless of their Balkanizing into categories such as “art” and “science” will have their idiosyncratic languages and will have other foundational keys to approaching the work. At a recent SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) meeting, for example, the moderator introduced a process for critiquing that used a similar foundational approach — What is the silhouette of the piece? What are the main colors? How big is it? Abstract? Realistic? Is there a subject? If so, what is it? — before moving into more subjective areas about how these components reveal the artist’s intention and inform or direct the viewer’s reception of the work.

In “A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness,” V. S. Ramachandran has a fascinating chapter on the perception of art, including what he suggests as the 10 universal laws of art. Dr Ramachandran is a neurobiologist and psychologist and, as the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCal San Diego, has been doing some extraordinary work on consciousness. He’s very good at explicating the neurochemistry of thinking and feeling. The chapter concerning art &c (“The Artful Brain”) is available at: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffpiu049.pdf