Areas for Action, led by “experimental artist” Oliver Herring, National Art Education Association conference, New York City, March 4, 2017.
This week, September 10–16, is National Arts in Education Week—an annual event established by Congress in 2010 to celebrate the value of the arts in education and gain broad support for it. On what grounds could any civilized member of society object?
The answer is that the value of arts education largely depends on the quality of the works that are presented for study. And the sad truth is that far too many arts advocates and educators have uncritically embraced the “avant-garde” and virtually any work that has made a mark in the contemporary art world, regardless of its intrinsic merit or its reception by ordinary people, including many serious art lovers.
Most pronounced in the field of visual art education, this lamentable tendency was all too evident at the annual conference of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) earlier this year, attended by more than 7,000 art teachers from around the world.
Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Yellow), 1994–2000, on Metropolitan Museum roof. High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating; 121 x 143 x 45 in. The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection © Jeff Koons.
The NAEA’s official statement of purpose refers to the “power of the visual arts to enrich human experience and society.” But the contemporary examples featured at this year’s convention provided little enrichment. They ranged from inanities such as the “Balloon Dogs” of artworld superstar Jeff Koons to a chaotic “open-ended participatory performance, improvisatory sculpture, and real-time collaborative artwork” overseen by “experimental artist” Oliver Herring (above), in the free-for-all spirit of a 1960s Happening.
Scarcely any sessions dealt with exemplary art of the past. Nor were contemporary artists included who have chosen to perpetuate the venerable tradition of Western painting and sculpture. Yet their art is far more likely to appeal to a broad public than the “cutting-edge” anti-traditional work touted by today’s cultural establishment and accepted by far too many who are involved in art education.
The problem is not limited to the visual arts. A prominent example is Richard Kessler, a longtime arts education advocate who became dean of the world-class Mannes School of Music in 2011. An ardent champion of the avant-garde, he has departed from Mannes’s historically conservative stance by establishing a performance space for “experimental music” at its present parent institution, The New School.
Kessler regards the experimentalist John Cage (1912–1992) as a “great” composer, whose “most important work”—his notorious piece 4’33” (in which a pianist sits motionless at a piano for that amount of time)—can teach us something. According to Kessler, it can teach us to “critically engage with silence as a renewable pedagogical act.”
Such woolly thinking should give pause to advocates aiming to incorporate the arts into the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educational movement. Might the non-arts counterpart of John Cage in STEAM be a scientist sitting before a blank page or an empty test tube, critically engaging with emptiness as a renewable pedagogical act?
The avant-garde mentality of many arts education advocates is further muddled by political aims and assumptions. Kessler—who formerly headed the Center for Arts Education (a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting arts education in New York City’s public schools)—once dubbed me “the Joe McCarthy of Art Education.” Why? Because I had dared to suggest, in the Wall Street Journal, that the primary aim of art education is not to achieve the elusive goal of “social justice” but to teach about art.
Moreover, as I had clearly implied, a “performance piece” praised by a leading art educator in which the purported artist distributed specially equipped sneakers to assist illegal immigrants waiting to cross our Mexican border was an instance of political activism, pure and simple—not a work of art.
Kessler argued that I was exaggerating the politicization of art education. As he saw it, only a “handful of art professors” were teaching about social justice—not enough to merit concern. The latest NAEA conference has proved him wrong.
A plethora of sessions were devoted to achieving “social justice” through art education, with little thought given to the caliber of the purported art involved. One session actually advocated shifting the focus of art criticism to “analyzing social justice issues” outright. Future art teachers, it recommended, should use art criticism “to foster critical thinking . . . about pedagogy and social justice issues.”
As I’ve argued in Who Says That’s Art?: A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts, the proper and urgent subject for critical thinking in art education in today’s culture is the question of what qualifies as art and why—not the complex socio-political questions involved in issues of “social justice.” Such issues enter into the thorny realm of politics and are entirely beyond art teachers’ professional purview. But the question of what art is and why we value it transcends politics.
Nearly fifteen years ago, I published an article asking “Where’s the Art in Today’s Art Education?” [full text]. The question remains. It merits particular consideration during National Arts in Education Week.
FURTHER READING
“Art Education or Miseducation? From Koons to Herring,” Aristos, August 2017.
Hello,
This post reminded me of a question I’ve had in mind that I’ve been dealing with recently. I’m curious to know what you think of the common Postmodernist/contemporary tendency to treat the material medium (i.e., paint, drawing tool, etc) as a subject-matter in itself. For example, the brush stroke or mark making is given more focus or attention – even more value in some cases – than whatever is actually being depicted (whether still-life, landscape, portrait/figure, or something perceptually disintegrated, i.e., visually abstract). It’s an approach to visual art which is instructed in many art schools across the country, including mine.
This parallels what you and Louis touched on in chapter 3 of What Art Is in the context of Rand’s take on subject, meaning, and style, where you stated: “[c]ontrary to ‘most aesthetic theories,’ in which ‘the end—the subject—is omitted from consideration, and only the means are regarded as aesthetically relevant,’ Rand insists on the primacy of the subject.”
This section of the chapter is largely dealing with style, but what I’m asking relates not merely to style as a means or mode of execution, but what (materially) makes up or goes into the style itself – the “means of the means,” if you will.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
You raise an important question, Michael, and my emphatic answer is that “mark making” in genuine art is always a means to the end of embodying ideas and values—never an end in itself. As Louis Torres and I further argue in the chapter you cite (and I further argue in Who Says That’s Art?), however, the ultimate meaning-content of a work is a product not just of the subject itself, but of how the subject is treated. We therefore disagreed with Rand’s focus on the subject per se, which led her (foolishly in our view) to deprecate Vermeer’s choice of everyday domestic subjects, for example. In contrast, see my comments on Vermeer’s Milkmaid in Who Says That’s Art? (130-31).
Michael’s question refers to the mode of art-making called “Process Art”. In this art the materials and their uses are intended to be both subject and content. I nearly agree with Michelle on this. My position is that the subject of an artwork might be its materials, or something external to the artwork, and therefore objective; however, the content can’t ever be limited by an artist’s — or anyone’s — intent because it is subjectively apprehended by each viewer.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
As I see it, the traditional distinction between a work’s subject matter and the materials or medium with which it is dealt is a more coherent view. I also think it’s important to distinguish, whenever possible, between a work’s intended content and the meaning imputed by viewers. If the latter is fundamentally at odds with the former, it lacks validity in my view.
I need to spek up again after reading Holly Davis’ comment about “classical” drawing. It’s not at all clear what kinds of drawing she refers to because the variances of style and abstraction in 19C academic drawing are quite wide-ranging. I suspect she means imitative drawing from nature, including the studio model. In fact, students at the academies were carefully taught the difference between nature as it is and the greatly abstracted presentation of nature in art. I suggest The Grammar of Painting and Engraving, by Charles Blanc, (available in English) translated by Kate Doggett, Griggs & Co., Chicago, 1873 (find in rare books or large library). Charles Blanc’s book was very widely used in the 19C as an art student’s Handbook. Its main thesis is the teaching of “The Style”, the Beaux Arts idealization of nature and its symboliizing of moral content. Thus The Style, was mainly a notion about morality in the sense that idealized form was a manifestation of high purpose. In short, formal composition was the expression of moral ideals. This was the early phase of the later, and now better known idea of “significant form” which became the fundamental premise of abstract art (in the West). So, there is a direct line of theory from the so-called classical manner of 19C “The Style” or Beaux-Arts drawing and the emergence of 20C abstract art. But aside from that, one needs only to compare and contrast an accurate drawing from nature (‘realism’) with a academic idealized drawing of the 19C to see vast and quite abstract differences between them. Blanc’s book includes engraved examples. Further, Academy students were usually taught to draw from antique statues (really plaster casts of late Roman copies) which were highly abstracted anatomically). That encouraged students to “see” or project idealized form when looking at actual nature (or the studio model). Of course, there’s nothing really new in this approach of looking at natiure and recording it in idealized, abstracted ways. All of art history shows the different ways in which that has been done, from the earliest cave examples to today. It’s the human way of assimilating and making sense of vision. Finally, to again emphasize the pedagogy of the Academy, one should read Joshua Reynolds Discourses (his lectures as head of the English Royal Academy, Lecture 6 in particular. There, he speaks of imitation and the need to imitate ideas (ideals and the Style) and not works or even “follow” others or nature as such. He proclaimed that “He who follows does not lead”. Oh, yes, there is so much of great value in the academic manner and art pedagogy of the 19C; it is the parent of the present in art, not its antagonist. I think it’s gratuitous and very wrong to imagine today’s abstract (or even avant-garde) art as opposed to the chief values of 19C idealized art. They are united as in a genealogy and today’s students should be taught how they are united — it requires close looking that even children can readily do — instead of building walls of falsity and intellectual prejudice.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
William, in response to your defense of abstract and avant-garde work, there’s a big difference between the 19th century’s classical idealizations and “significant form” that in fact signifies nothing. Moreover, as I’ve documented at length in my book and elsewhere, the abstract pioneers and subsequent avant-gardists were quite explicit in rejecting virtually everything that had preceded them.
My students are taught both drawing directly from life/nature and classical design. When one understands true design concepts present in classical sculpture, or implemented in the painting of DaVinci, or the French academic painters, one can have the understanding to see most (not all) of modern art for what it is: the emperor with no clothes. They can appreciate a modern or more abstract piece that carries a true sense of design and thought, but will not be taken in by the ridiculous or silly.
Mr. Conger,
I have been thinking about your comments. What we deeply share is a desire to lead students to what is beautiful and soul stirring. However, I do not feel that the classical approach to teaching art “closes off” anything at all to our students. In fact, the case could be made that much of the modern approach “closes off” students to a whole world of beauty and inspiration by not exposing them or helping them to see the value of anything deemed “traditional”.
I highly encourage my students to visit art museums and to study all kinds of art. I encourage them to look at non-representational pieces and see if they can find solid principles of design, thought, and color theory. I feel that their study of classical design equips them well to recognize true merit in both representational and non-representational art. However, they do not have to be taken in by what is just plain ugly, silly, or created for pure shock value.
What I also have are classrooms of students excited about art because they have learned to draw. It is not just a few “artsy” kids that get to enjoy the class, but every single student learns how to draw using a step by step classical approach. Every week I have a stack of drawings and paintings brought into me from the kids that they chose to do in their free time at home. I have one high school student with a visual perception disorder that did not think she could draw at all. However, through classical drawing, she has become quite good. This has been very empowering to her as a person, and enhancing to her life. She tells me that she is really “seeing” the world in a way she never did before.
To summarize, I can only testify to what I have seen in my own classical classroom, and it is indeed empowering students both intellectually and emotionally.
Ms Davis;
I applaud your successful efforts to teach all students to draw. I fully agree that perceptual drawing enhances thinking and sharpens feeling. I fully agree that past art, including the art of the Renaissance and later down to the present provides models for aesthetic and even civic values. Where we differ is in your notion of “classical” design and other art principles. Of course there is value in them, even though it’s not clear what you mean explicitly. I have have lectured, published, and taught (over 40 yrs) on all facets of art including art anatomy, systems of proportion and perspective, color theory and more. The division between “classical” design principles and mainstream contemporary art is very frail. Yet some new art is “propositional” and deliberately tests presumed values and methods just as happens in all fields. It was especially true in the Renaissance and in the Greek art of antiquity. Your students won’t gain by judging some new art by the principles it deliberately violates. Better that they seek the organizing principles in new art and see how and why they differ from “classical” art. Michelle may not show this post, but if she does I would be happy to continue a discussion with you by direct email.
Thank you Holly for inspiring the young to learn about all forms of art. Your students discover they can draw whether it’s between the lines or outside of the lines. It’s okay. You and your fellow teachers leave a lasting imprint on people.
I’m pleased Holly Davis is teaching the young budding artists about art. You can’t deny that traditional art explores [engages with] math, science and especially history. Thanks Holly.
Hello,
I am very glad to have found your blog. I am new to the National Art Education Association. I teach in a classical school, grades 1-11, and we use a classical, drawing-based, curriculum with an emphasis on the appreciation of art history. Our curriculum is based on the same atelier methods taught in 19th century Europe. The students love it and are truly empowered spiritually and emotionally by what they are learning. We believe every student can learn to draw and, at our school they do! We emphasize the work of the Renaissance through 19th-century masters and find that the appreciation for these artists brings a sense of understanding and wonder to their other subjects such as history, science, and mathematics. Comparatively, most of what I have encountered with NAEA has been generally boring, silly and leaving me wondering how this extreme emphasis on non-skill-based modern art serves students intellectually at all. It has troubled me to think that this is the mainstream mindset for art education. Your blog is a breath of fresh air and common sense. Thank you.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
I greatly appreciate your comment, Holly. It is heartening to know about the success of your school’s program. As it happens, the approach you follow is much like the one I recommend in the chapter on art education in Who Says That’s Art?. So I’m delighted to know that it works!
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
WC, I meant for you to write me through the Contact form on my website. Blog comments should be restricted to the subject of the relevant post. But since you’ve raised the debate about abstract work here, I’ll respond to it briefly, albeit belatedly. If as you say, “The jury is still out on the matter of cognition and art,” then the value of abstract work, too, is still moot. The art world has been offering its account of the value of such work for a century, but many thoughtful, intelligent art lovers have not been persuaded. I have offered a reasoned defense of their response, showing why they should not be regarded as philistines on this matter. You are free to debate my points, offering specific objections. But it is not fair to suggest that my “campaign” has no legitimacy. School children have long been presented the art world’s one-sided view of abstract work. Yet students often sense that something is missing. I have provided an alternative to the established view, and leave it to others to decide which position is more convincing.
I thought your writing was about arts in education week. Mr, Conger did not address education but writes about theory and metaphors and defending his position on modern art. Teach kids how to make paint and apply it, study light and composition or how to read a stone to carve, build an armature. Do like the old masters did for centuries for their young apprentices. There is not a business in the world that doesn’t teach the principals first then in time they can explore with theories. Too many in the academic world want to focus on psychology first. To be an artist you must know your craft. Those who can-“DO”. Those who can’t become “Critics.”.
I don’t know if Mr Burgess is addressing me in his comment. If so, he should do some homework before instructing me about the proper way to teach art. My former students include nationally known ‘traditional’ painters and ‘avant garde’ abstractionists and conceptualists. There are no skills without theory. There is no art practice that does not embody a theory of art. Mr. Burgess seems to confuse the teaching of ‘fine art’ with the teaching of ‘applied art’.
Mr. Conger you are boring me with your art speak. Good luck with your teaching.
Mr. Burgess; I am no longer teaching art. I am professor and chair emeritus of art theory and practice, Northwestern University. And you?
This is Michelle Kamhi’s blog and I have submitted more than a fair share of comments. I wanted to discuss her new book, Who Says That’s Art, with her via private email but she directed me to this space. Actually, I have no objections to her views in support of — let’s call it traditional realism — and she does extend her view to include some variance from imitative realism. I am a big fan of all good art and that certainly includes traditional realism for the same reasons she offers. In my earlier career I practiced it. Some life-long artist friends are highly esteemed realists, like James Valerio, whose work is in many museums, including the Metropolitan and Whitney. My own realist drawings have been included in drawing texts and exhibitions. I taught anatomy for artists. I am well informed in art history. In the early 60s I turned to abstraction and have had a well-recognized career. My problem with Kamhi then is not about what art she favors but what she rejects: abstraction. I think her argument against abstraction is weak and narrow and wrongly excludes its contribution to enriched human experience. I am troubled by her campaign against modernist abstraction, seemingly aimed at schoolchildren, as if to turn them away from new art. One of my abstract paintings (from the Art Institute of Chicago) has been used in school instruction posters (common in many schools) and I’ve received wonderful letters from students and teachers who say they learned from the experience. Children should not be taught to reject a serious genre of art on the grounds that it seems to ask more from them — and offers more to them — than “common sense”. Indeed, if all subjects and learning were suddenly validated solely by common sense our society would disintegrate into chaos and ignorant incompetence.
Most teachers are followers. They simulate what their teachers taught them. Today the art instructors need to show a young impressionable artist the building blocks of creating a painting or sculpture. The same techniques that were first used in cave drawings in France 30,000 tears ago.
Just like building a house, you start with a plan, a foundation then you build using materials in traditional manner. You can vary the design but it has to be functional. Unfortunately many art instructors allow students to explore thought and theory art that leaves the ordinary person confused with use of materials or lack of. It serves no purpose
to general population only to the art elite salesman/marketeer.
China, Romans, Greek, Islamic, Mayan, Persian, all the great civilizations left behind art that tells the story of their people, cultures and social structures that we all can understand. Non objective art doesn’t tell the history of the world that is so important to future cultures and archaeologists . Art is supposed to communicate not baffle.
The analogy that making art is like building a house from a plan and traditional methods is too narrow. Sometimes yes, often no. Much historical art uses symbols whose meanings are lost to us. The content and uses of much ancient and medieval art, at least, is not at all self evident and has required dedicated scholarship to understand, an ongoing endeavor. It is all but impossible to claim that an artwork is “non-objective” because anything one sees prompts likening it to a reference, usually many. Further, so-called non-objective artworks always look like other similar artworks and thus also refer to other art. The history of art traces those likenesses as a way to relate a given artwork to its time and culture and also to the collective efforts of artists. No artwork is without precedences in art and culture or historical contexts. Even the most radical efforts to make an artwork that is independent from influences, referents, traditions, and its own cultural era can’t take it very far from known contexts.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
But the meaning of earlier art was probably not lost on its contemporaries. The problem with our “contemporary art” is that it’s largely inscrutable or meaningless to the audience it’s created for. The irony is that earlier art often speaks to us more profoundly than work of our own time.
We need to keep in mind that private artworks prior to the modern era were mostly made for an elite class of patrons. Even in the Renaissance, paintings often employed — on purpose — very obscure allegories and references to mythology and scripture that only a highly literate and informed audience could understand. During the 17-19C It became a fashionable pastime for elites to gather at art patrons’ banquets to discuss and show off their knowledge of art iconography. Before cheap and widespread reproduction technology in the 19C serious art aimed at the newly emergent public, or middle class, representational and illustrating commonplace narratives or everyday scenes was more rare than many suppose. Anyway, the relationships connecting artist and art, the patron and public are complicated and all affect art content and style in each era. Today’s ubiquitous ‘easy’ story-centered imagery in advertising, entertainment, TV, film. comics, etc., has led everyday viewers to ex-ect the same from serious art. Pop art, for example exploited that popular culture taste but with a heavy dose of irony. So-called abstract art tends not to be ironic and instead usually celebrates altruism and cherished humanist values.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Well said, Roy, especially that last sentence!
Art does not really communicate in the sense of active meaning/feeling transmitted to a passive receiver. Art communication is two way process that invites a recipient/viewer to construct meaning, mindful of complex allusions to personal and cultural experience.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
I fully agree that “communication” in art is a two-way process. But to say that the viewer “constructs” the meaning misleadingly seems to suggest that it has no necessary relation to the work itself or the artist’s intention. I find Ayn Rand’s account much clearer. In her view:
An insightful and important take on the sad condition of the current world of art, in this case in academia. We on the front lines of the battle to return visual excellence to art are grateful for any rational counter-attack, and Michelle here provides another. Thank you.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thanks, Robert.
We are in a phase of social activist art. Call it political art. Call it protest art. Call it partisan art. There is a very long history of such art across all cultures. I suppose that might include religious art. Certainy it includes war poster art (which has been exhibited in major museums) and of course there’s Jacques David, Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya, and even Picasso, among the many masters who have produced art that was intended to stir political action. I agree that the shoes project you mention above is likely an example of bad social activist art….it sure sounds corny to me. But modernist art is like that in some respects. It proposes something as art. Most of that is dismissed. Whenever there are great social upheavals, or great public topics, one can expect artists — and the art establishment — to want to tie in with it somehow. Modernist art is based on the notion of crisis, a crisis of culture, aesthetics, criticality, style or even esoteric issues of formalism. When there’s a big social ‘crisis’ at hand, one can be sure artists and art will be engaged with it. In modernism, it’s true that art excludes nothing even though almost everything proposed as art is excluded. It’s not that anything is art nowadays but that anything can be proposed as art. Big difference. There are no fixed standards for anything made in society. Whatever is made is open for being changed, improved or discarded. Why should it be different for art?
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
There are, however, epistemological standards and principles for how we name things. By such principles, Goya’s Third of May and Picasso’s Guernica are art. Judy Werthein’s “shoes project”—Brinco—is not. What I most object to about today’s “social activist art” is that much of it (like Werthein’s piece) does not qualify as “art” by rational standards. It is rooted in the anti-art provocations of the 1960s. And as I’ve long insisted, anti-art is not art.
Those epistemological principles would need to identify something objectively inherent and unchanging in art. I can’t expect to find anything in art that is not changeable. The see-saw between regarding a thing for what it is and for how it it used seems to stay put on the heavier side of use or function. That also places art on the side of subjectivity since then its meaning and identity is in its use.
There may be objective conditions for the essential Being of art but they are transient and always subject to change. Or, they are so abstract that any effort to describe them falls short and one cannot list th all. One role of the artist might be to seek those art conditions not yet recognized. In the same way a scholar pursues what is possible within the context of some field.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
In my view, the essential nature of art is not subject to fundamental change, since it derives from the way the mind works—from the interaction between perception, cognition, and emotion. On this view, the traditional forms of art evolved naturally and cross-culturally from our primary modes of sense perception. As I document in my book and elsewhere, modernist and postmodernist challenges to these forms flout the way the mind works. That is why I regard them as either failed art or anti-art.
Kamhi’s appeal to science implies that in the ongoing debate over the conflicts of science and the humanities, science trumps all. But her references to the neuroscience/art authors, Zeki, Lakoff, Damasio, Solso, Dutton, others, don’t fully support her convictions that art is essentially mimetic and centered on imagery. I’ve got the books by all those authors, and more, including V.S. Ramachandran, Barbara Stafford, and the landmark Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 6 at hand. The issue is extremely complex with no conclusive findings. The Buddhist notion of ‘non-ego’ and its kinship to Kant’s notion of the sublime which lead to the essential meaninglessness of our awareness urging some constructive context for understanding suggests that meanings are made and chosen. (see J.A.Goguen). There is also the whole issue of analogy and metaphor (Lakoff and Stafford) and mirror neurons (Ramachandran) which lead one to question the notion that art experience fully relies on images. The jury is still out on the matter of cognition and art. And, further, the views of J. Robinson (Deeper than Reason) argue for the precognitive assessment of experience in relation to emotions (somewhat like the non-ego idea). Even if we grant that art relies on (mental) imagery, there’s no necessary requirement that a pictorial source be imitated in a picture or that the source is crucial to meaning.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
The lack of conclusive findings by such researchers is not surprising. As I’ve argued in my book and elsewhere, the neuroscience of art has been muddied by the inclusionboth of work belonging to the anti-art tradition that began with Dada and of nonobjective work whose roots ultimately lay in the abstract pioneers’ (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich et al.) explicit yet futile desire to create a wholly New Art divorced from the material realm. Both traditions broke fundamentally with all past art and should therefore be called by some other name.