• Template 1: An Installation Film PDF DOC
• Template 2: An Affectionate Career Summary PDF DOC
• Template 3: A Wise-Ass Yet Fawning Review of a Major Show PDF DOC
• Template 4: A Visually Rewarding but Now Unfashionable Painter PDF DOC

The Critical Templates available on this page are intended to stimulate the nascent field of Artificial Criticism (AC). Based on the work of professional critics published in leading journals, these templates provide a long-awaited abstraction layer between the opinions of the critic, however smug, and the details of artistic creation, however predictable.

The AC community generally divides into two major camps: the Robot Builders, who seek to replace human critics with AC software engines, and the Critical Self-Sufficiency Movement, which seeks to free critics from the imaginative subservience to creative artists that, for so many centuries, has exposed the field of criticism to disdain. As incompatible as these goals may seem, both groups should now discover a common methodology through the use of common tools: these templates.

The utility of these templates for the Robot Builders should be quite obvious. While the "holy grail" of AC software developers--an engine that responds directly to the work itself, perhaps through a combination of cameras, microphones, and symbol recognition technologies--remains some years in the future, we see no reason to postpone the deployment of a parameter-based AC engine. While a human would still be need to "look at" or "listen to" the work, there would be no need for this person to be a professional critic, highly-trained to "digest" and "respond to" complex aesthetic situations. Instead, a low-wage worker--perhaps an art student in a developing country--would enter the details of the work into a user-friendly GUI (graphical user interface), and these details could then be imported into one or more of the templates.

AC developers from the Critical Self-Suffiency Movement should find these templates equally useful. To create an autochthonous work of criticism, untethered to the pre-existing work of any so-called "artist," simply fill in the placeholders with the details of some fictitious work you would like to praise, or, as the case may be, disparage.

Usage note: in these templates, the word "verb" is used as a verb. Its meaning is, simply, "to verb."

Legal note: These templates are disseminated without permission and in open defiance of any applicable copyright law. If a critic feels that his or her critical opinions, when stripped of references to the particular works under discussion, still possess enough originality to deserve copyright protection, that critic is welcome to contact the OT!OM! Legal Department (legal@otomproductions.com).