Three-Block

This guide overviews an iterative art feedback process. The process uses “blocks” as perspectives the audience can adopt as they offer feedback AND the artist can adopt as they revise. Three-Block treats both the artist and audience as “participants” in the process. 

Three-Block is not all-inclusive. I use this process for a few specific reasons: 

1. Consistent format: Participants can organize both external feedback and their own internal thoughts in the same block format. The method is structured so participants are not confused about their roles at any point of the process. 

2. Independence: Some forms of critique – especially in contexts like poetry workshops - require an element of live interaction between the artist and their reviewers. Three-Block can still clarify insights from a Reviewer without the direct involvement of the Artist. This is designed to bring the critique process closer in alignment with contexts like art history, in which live feedback between the Artist and the Reviewer is at best impractical and at worst impossible, when it’s desirable at all. You can’t ask Shakespeare to take notes from your seminar and submit a new draft later - but you should be able to critique his writing the same way you critique a living artist’s work. 

3. Streamlined focus: Three-Block minimizes speculative tangents that can distract from the work during review. Or at least it delays those tangents in a constructive way. This helps the participants start with what the work is and move towards what the work could be without confusing the two. 

4. Intentional design: Breaking a critique into the blocks can also help participants consider artworks as both aesthetic objects they can approach with their own taste, as designed objects with intentional technique or method, AND as cultural objects they can approach with context. 

“Blocks” are actionable and inform each other but can remain distinct. As you read more, write more, and encounter more art, you may find you prefer one Block more than another. And some discussions encourage you to stay in some Blocks more than in others. But using all three Blocks makes sure you don’t miss something obvious about the artwork. 

I outline each Block’s potential uses with examples from a variety of media to emphasize that the Blocks are not limited to a single medium. At the end, I use the Blocks in a cohesive example with a poster for illustrative purposes.  

Block 1: See as the Audience. What is here? 

This block focuses on the features that are most obvious. Think of elements like: 

• Medium: Are you looking at a painting? A novel? A video game? Another essay?  

• Subject matter: What does the painting depict: a character, a location, an object, all of these, none of these? 

• Audience premises: What can you assume your audience knows about the artwork before they interact with it, or by reputation?  

• First impressions: What elements do you first encounter when you experience this artwork? What immediately comes to mind? What is in front of you? What are your instinctive emotional reactions to the work, without judgement? 

Don’t feel rushed. Take some time to gather your thoughts. 

Identify the format of the work, the title of the work and name of the artist, date, and location the work was made (if that is relevant). 

If the work is written, give a brief synopsis, focusing on macroscopic topics in the work but not themes. 

A video game often has box art and instructions that a player can read before they play. “Your character moves through a maze to eat all the white pellets while avoiding all the ghosts. If the ghost touches you, you lose. But if you eat the special pellets, you can eat the ghosts instead for a limited period.” This type of overview is appropriate for this Block. 

When reading, it may be helpful for your own notes before the critique to briefly summarize each paragraph of a lengthy work for better overall clarity. You can more easily identify major plot points or subject matter. 

Describe what you are looking at as if no one else in the room is looking at the work. 

Block 2: See as the Artist. How does the artwork work? 

This block focuses on the techniques, construction and development of the work. Think of elements like: 

• Pacing: How quickly can a reasonable audience member experience this artwork? Movies and music have inflexible runtimes (unless you don’t watch/listen to all of them). Video games and books have flexible runtimes (e.g. if you’re speed-running or reading a book quickly). Paintings don’t have runtimes. 

• Composition: Where are elements placed in the audience’s view (foreground/mid-ground/background; top, middle, bottom; left, center, right; beginning, middle, end)? What effect does that placement have on the audience’s understanding of the subject matter? 

• Techniques: What methods and aesthetics does the artwork adopt? If the painting is impressionist, pointillist, hyper-realist, what does that mean? If the book is a satire, what is the book making fun of – and does the book actually make fun of it? If the movie is a mystery, do the clues lead towards the mystery’s answer? 

• Atmosphere: More than the most readily apparent reactions from Block 1, what emotions does the artwork evoke? What parts of the artwork evoke those emotions? Look for textures, especially dissonant textures. Look for ironies, jokes and other foreshadowing. Look for light and dark colors, bright and dim hues. 

• Ephemera: Is this artwork meant to be shared with an audience of multiple people? Is it recorded in a medium or is it bespoke, like a live performance? 

• Legibility: How easy is it for you to identify/understand the subject matter from Block 1? 

What specific effect or argument is this work trying to achieve? Does the work achieve that effect or not? Is the effect potent or not potent? Is the effect efficient or not efficient? 

What techniques, tools, movements, or types of evidence does the artwork use? What major themes appear in the work? 

For writers and poets: think of the granular decisions about vocabulary and typography. How is a line constructed with enjambment? How do images mesh, harmonize, clash with each other? If you have experience with close reading from your literature classes, this block is an opportunity for close reading.  

How was the information collected? Start with what the work does well/what parts are helpful and why. Then explain what the work does poorly/what parts are unhelpful and why. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques, in general? How do those strengths and weaknesses apply to this work? (e.g. “Animation, as a medium, is good at expressive facial expressions and body language, but this cartoon makes all the characters move like robots with blank faces.”) 

If you have to use specific terminology, define it when you first use it. Minimize jargon whenever possible to maximize reader understanding. Explain things in a way that shows you understand them. An art history essay expects you to define terms as you use them to demonstrate understanding. For more technical reports, that terminology guideline is largely bypassed because you can assume the reader has the technical background needed to understand the jargon. 

As an example of this: a chemist writing a report will know that the report is likely for a STEM audience and will not need to review many basic concepts or define some specific terms. A film critic with a lay audience cannot use a lot of film terminology in a review because the audience hasn’t gone to film school and does not know what those terms mean. 

Think of positives and negatives. What are characters told to do, or told not to do? What conclusions are the audience lead towards, or lead away from? What parts of the work feel certain and decisive? What parts feel confused, spontaneous, ambitious? 

Look for comparisons to draw out more description. For example: “The jokes are funny but not corny;” “The brushstrokes look haphazard at first but aren’t random;” “The level design isn’t intuitive. It forces you to explore every nook and cranny.” 

If the art changes subject, what does the audience understand next about the larger whole work? 

Block 3: See as the Historian. Why does the artwork do what it does? 

This block focuses on the artwork in larger contexts. Humans have been making art for millions of years. Any given artist is not the first to make something like their art. This is not a mark against their originality. It’s a reassurance that they do not have to start from scratch every time they make art. 

Think of elements like: 

• Genre: Is the story a horror/romance/drama/mystery? What elements from Block 2 help you know that? Does the artwork create, embrace, or reconsider – or have some other reaction to – expected tropes for its genre? How does the artwork compare to similar artworks in its genre? 

• History and Biography: Does the author’s life inform how the artwork was made? If the artwork references nonfiction history, how accurate are the references? Does that accuracy impact the artwork? 

• Heroics: Who are the heroes and villains of the story? Are there features of the heroes and villains that help the audience distinguish them? Do the heroes and villains stay in those roles throughout the story? Is the hero a friendly plumber with a mustache, and the villain a spiky-shelled reptile monster? Is the villain bigger and scarier than the hero? Do other stories give their heroes mustaches and their villains spiky shells? 

• Archetypes and Beats: Does a character die and come back to life after performing a heroic deed? Does a solitary character have to make friends? Does a rich character have to find out money isn’t making them happy? Does a character achieve peace through humility and recognizing their strengths? Do characters who don’t make these changes suffer for it as villains? 

• Technology and Audience: A king might commission a painting just for his palace and family. Ceremonial clothing might be for a specific community ritual. A selfie might be seen by millions of people. Characters who are accustomed to one type of technology might encounter a new technology they don’t understand. 

• Adaptation, Dialogue and Serialization: Is the artwork based on another artwork? How does the second work reflect, comment on or reconsider the first? How much does the audience have to understand elements from the first work to understand the second? 

Some of these elements have more influence on artwork than others. And the list is not exhaustive. 

Just as another non-exhaustive example: If you’re writing about the 1984 Stephen Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park with George”, it’s probably helpful to know: 

• who Stephen Sondheim is,  

• what musicals Sondheim had written by 1984, 

• what “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is, 

• who Georges Seurat is, 

• what pointillism is, 

• who Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters are, etc. 

This is part of Block 3 because an audience member who does not know all those things can still watch “Sunday in the Park with George”, recognize it as musical theatre, and consider what the musical does well/not well from Block 2. 

Explain what the movements and contexts are as they appear. What qualities would you expect from those contexts, and how does the work match those expectations? How does the work connect to other literature and works in the author’s body of works, its genre and its field? 

This is a great section for turning the work as it is into the work as it could be. We can identify alternatives the artwork could take because another artwork has done it before. 

Does the work develop a new idea/test an existing idea/provide context for ideas? 

What does the work imply? What paradigms or imperatives motivate its contents? What influenced the work? What is influenced by the work? How does the work expand an existing idea or test an idea or develop a new idea? Does the idea make sense in its context? 

When helpful, what are the artist’s personal political, social, moral contexts? Why this subject matter in this way? This is sometimes helpful, (e.g. early 20th century American writers that use subject matter directly from their lives), but this information is not always available or relevant. 

If the artist alludes to other art, other cultures, other ways of thinking – do those tell us something useful about the art? 

If other people have talked about the artwork before, do those perspectives tell us something useful about the art? This section is a place to consider other reviews – especially contemporary reviews if the artwork is older. 

What does the food remind you of? If we’re making a New York cheesecake, it’s probably helpful to know why it’s called a “New York” cheesecake, what the typical ingredients are. What other types of cheesecake are there? Are there other foods that use the same ingredients to make different types of cheesecake, different desserts, different foods entirely? 

How does the work connect to/parse with your relevant personal experiences? If you want help pinning down an abstract idea or community norm, your own experiences can sometimes offer an empathetic lens. This is connecting the work to a personal context in the same way as previously done with biographical or historical contexts in Step 3. But beware: your personal experiences are not always relevant or appropriate to the work. This is just one other variation you can use as you need it. 

It is often just as important to understand what a work does not mention as what it does mention. We can read subject matter, techniques, styles the artist likes and doesn’t like. But what they don’t consider, what they assume as truth, what they may even deliberately ignore, are also revealing. This is true for the artist and even truer for the reviewer. 

Let’s do an abridged example: James Montgomery Flagg’s “I want you” poster, made in about 1917. 

The off-white poster features an Uncle Sam - a stern old man with a white goatee, dressed in ruffled red, white and blue formal wear – pointing directly at the viewer. The text at the bottom of the poster reads “I want you for U.S. Army”, with an additional smaller caption “Nearest recruiting station”. Red and blue stripes frame the outside of the poster, but the background is blank. All focus goes towards Uncle Sam’s face, his hand, and then the text. 

The Library of Congress lists the art medium as a “lithograph”. This means the original drawing was chemically bonded onto a stone template and pressed onto the poster paper. Flagg based Uncle Sam’s face on his own face, so the poster takes on some elements of self-portrait. Uncle Sam is depicted in the middle of a pose, a technique art historians sometimes refer to as a tableaux vivant, a living picture. He gestures towards the viewer, breaking the fourth wall in a sense. The poster takes advantage of its medium, with intense focus on the foreground and lower third for most of its information. 

This poster is a piece of American iconography. While the pose is similar to a contemporary British recruiting poster, “Uncle Sam” is a character that personifies the United States itself. The character even has countercultural roots as a specific anti-war slant on military affairs during the War of 1812. Uncle Sam appears in propaganda, advertisements, and political cartoons from World War I – this poster was adopted for the United States’ entry into that conflict. It was a symbol both for military recruiting and efforts on the home front, like rationing and manufacturing. Uncle Sam wants the viewer to buy war bonds or vote for a specific candidate as much as actually enlist. Even at the time, the image was malleable. This pose has served many other purposes since then, including as a poster for World War II, an anti-war poster from the Vietnam War, and the basis for the US Forest Service’s Smoky Bear ad campaign.  

I did this in three discrete paragraphs, but longer works can take this approach to sections of an essay or chapters of a book. 

Afterword 

We can quickly present a work of art, the techniques it uses, and its context one after another. This helps us think about the work with a holistic lens. We aren’t bogged down in any one block – we have to consider all of them. 

I can treat each of the blocks like their own separate essays within a larger point, like my essay series about Kingdom Hearts. 

The blocks can help guide an iterative critique, like my craft draft about small birds. 

Or I can use the block structure like a heuristic to understand an existing pattern, like my essay about the “thief problem” trope. 

I don’t use Three-Block as it is listed here every time. It’s a general framework that I adapt for my own purposes.  

Jumping to the Historian and trying to place a work in context right away without considering what the work does by itself can lead to unwarranted comparisons. But there are times where the work needs some context up front. There are times where a prominent technique is a useful representation of the work as a whole. 

Subject matter on page, canvas or screen is objective. You can say true statements about “this element is on the page” or “this element is not on the page”. Context of the page, canvas or screen is subjective. The year and location an artist was born, for example, might provide useful information about the work. Or they might not. That's your decision to make.  

These three blocks make sure I am thinking about the work from different perspectives.  Connections between the blocks can create dialectics that give your criticism nuance. Some potential perspectives are listed here as examples of reasonable criticism that you might find by connecting the Blocks: 

• I personally like this painting (Block 1), but it doesn’t use many of the features you would expect from its supposed genre (Block 3). Why is that? 

• Or more importantly: I don’t personally like this painting (Block 1), but it tells us something interesting about its genre or has some historical significance (Block 3). Why is that? 

• This animated short film makes a lot of interesting choices about lighting and shot composition (Block 2), but it’s not a faithful adaptation of its source material (Block 3). 

• The structure looks like a house, but you can’t go inside it. It’s certainly in the shape of a house, and it’s as big as you would expect from a house. But “You Cannot Go Inside This Building” is a public art installation made of 100 cubic yards of solid concrete (Block 1). Each layer of concrete was painstakingly poured by hand (Block 2). 

• This horror short story scares me (Block 1). It uses clinical descriptions of gore – smashed fingers and slashed ankles - to make sure the reader knows the stakes if the villain catches the hero (Block 2). But the movie adaptation removes those depictions and doesn’t replace them, which makes the runtime shorter but also hurts pacing. It feels rushed when it shouldn’t (Block 2). There were certain limits on what the movie could get away with due to censorship practices at the time (Block 3). 

• This video game used cutting-edge technology of the time and made cynical predictions about how people would use the social Internet (Block 3), but it also makes the player uncomfortable because of how difficult it is to make the character move how you want (Block 2). The player gets constant reminders that they are, in fact, playing a video game (Block 1). 

On the other hand: 

• “This movie is a classic” tells me more about the social context of a movie (Block 3) than about the movie’s actual quality (Block 2).  

Poetry is the medium I find myself coming back to the most, at time of writing. Poetry is a medium. A painter may consider themself an artist, but if they mostly make paintings, it would be inaccurate to say they’re a sculptor. Artist yes, painter yes, sculptor no. In the same way, I am writer yes, poet yes, playwright no (for example, and at time of writing). And poems have qualities that don’t show up in other types of writing.  They’re exploratory and not limited to literal subject matter. They often have precise attention to detail and a sense of musicality. And poems are sensitive to revision – there are plenty of resources you can find just for poetry revision. Going into prose expecting poetry, or going into an art gallery expecting extended prose, sets up a failing audience experience. Nobody wants that, which is why you don’t see it. 

The art is not necessarily low-quality just because it does not give you what you want. It’s not high-quality for that alone, either. Sometimes what you want is stupid – or at least better left to other art.  

The reason Block 3 is at the end is so you don’t start reading from what you think should be on the page instead of what is on the page. Even if you don’t like the art (or the artist), you can still understand what the art does. Even if you think the art doesn’t do anything, you can still understand what the art is and why it exists the way it does. Those opinions will certainly inform your review. The Blocks allow you to limit those personal opinions as much as you see fit.