Goethe's Three Questions

Goethe’s Formula for Play Analysis
Conclusion
Istheworkworthdoing?
Howwellhastheartistdoneit?
Whatistheartisttryingtodo?
It’s easier to talk about a football game than about a painting.
Introduction
So you saw a play or movie, and it ended.
Your friend who saw a different movie/play asked
you how it was. “It was good”.
What does it mean when you say “It was good”, or “I
didn’t like it”?
Nothing.

Conclusion
Introduction
You are talking about feelings that you experienced
while experiencing something which can never be
experienced the same way again.
It’s easier to talk about a football game and have
everyone else understand you than to talk about a
painting or a piece of theatre?
Why?

Conclusion
Introduction
A TON of reasons
When we see a football game, we know why we’re
doing it. We know what the people on the field are
doing.
The Titans want to win (though they don’t always
play like it), and we know what winning looks like.
We know what every step of them winning looks like.

Conclusion
Introduction
And sometimes they can fool us, but when we talk
about the game afterwards, we rarely talk about just
feelings, or just emotions.
We talk about the blunders to successes that OUR
team did to either win or lose.
That clarity is
what Goethe has
brought to plays
(and all art).

Conclusion
What is the artist trying to do?
No artist creates work just to create it.
If they do, then they should never share it.
Art is made to be shown, and art is created for a purpose,
even if that purpose is to subvert your notion of art.
Every creation is made for a purpose, and sometimes that
purpose is easy to divine, and sometimes it takes time.

Conclusion
When you talk of the purpose of art, you’re not talking
about the amount of guys the alien ate, or how long the
first act was, or what the jokes were, or whether or not
the two characters get married at the end.
All of those things are how the artist accomplished it, not
what the artist was trying to do.
What the artist was trying to do is the whole imputus
behind making the piece.
The artist was trying to show the triviality of war, the artist
was trying to demonstrate the importance of donating
blood.

Conclusion
Win the war.
Is one way to say it,
but it needs to be
through something.
It needs to be given a
how.
Win the war through
getting women in
the workplace.
OR
Get women to win
the war by working a
man’s job.

Conclusion
This has the
same goal, but
nothing about
this image is
the same as the
last.

Conclusion
This shows the
personality of
the artist.

Conclusion
They can
accomplish the
same goals in
dramatically
different ways.

Conclusion
How well has the artist done it?

Conclusion
This is when we get to interpret the artists’ message
for effectiveness and bias.
If we were talking about a football game, we would
say that the Titans were trying to win. They didn’t do
it very well, because the linebackers allowed the
quarterback to get sacked in the end of the first
quarter, and the kickoff return at the second half had
the returner tackled in the end zone. ß

Conclusion
If you look at the Russian poster (at
top), we don’t see a woman working,
we see a woman trying to be a man
and replace a man in the workplace.
Women aren’t rising up to a new role,
they are replacing a cog that was
missing, and there is a sense that after
war, men will come back and resume
their roll.

Conclusion
If you look at the American poster (at
the bottom), we see a women calling
to her other fellow women to rise up.
Women are asked to show their hidden
power (which they’ve had all along)
and there is a sense that you can’t
unhide that power.
This woman is becoming another kind
of woman, not a woman pretending to
be a man.

Conclusion
Is the work worth doing?
This is the last question, and
where your opinions can really
come through.
You have interpreted what the
artist was trying to
accomplish, and you have judged
how well the artist had done it
(and some of the implications for
the way that they did it).

Conclusion
Is the work worth doing?
Now, after you answered the first
two questions, you can talk about
if the work was really worth doing.
This is deeper than “I liked it”, “I
didn’t like it”, and it is also a lot
more final.
This is, “This poster shouldn’t have
been made.” “The Titans
shouldn’t have played today.”
“This play is why I woke up in the
morning” “This movie said
everything about drug addiction
that I always wanted to say”.

Conclusion
Conclusion
Now while this may seem like a lot, this was only just the
beginning!
This is how we need to talk about the art we see (and the
play analysis which are due in a couple of weeks..), but also
this is an objective way to talk about the art around us.
This takes art away from
people who talk about ‘their
feelings’, and gives it back to
people who want to talk about
what they observe and what
they know.
Part of the reason why art
fails, is because there is a
culture where people don’t
know how to talk about it.

Goethe's Three Questions

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Goethe's Three Questions