Kenneth M. Lansing. Photo courtesy of Laura Lansing.
I first heard of Ken Lansing in 2002 at the annual convention of the National Art Education Association. In the Q&A of a session entitled “Educating the Museum Educator,” I suggested that not everything displayed in art museums nowadays truly qualifies as art. Following the session, I was approached by a colleague who introduced himself as Herman du Toit, then head of Museum Research at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Art. In response to my comment, he kindly informed me that the question of nonart being treated as art had been raised as far back as the 1970s by Kenneth Lansing in his textbook Art, Artists, and Art Education.
In that book, as I later learned, Lansing had insisted that art teachers needed to adopt a definition of art in order to “operate efficiently and avoid the production of nonart in [the] classroom.”
Though I had only recently begun to delve into the field, it was clear to me that the Lansing caveat had fallen on deaf ears. It was therefore to my considerable surprise and no small delight that just a year later an essay by him entitled “A Definition of Art” was published as an NAEA Advisory (Summer 2003). In it, he renewed his conviction that “art can and must be defined if we are to make any sense out of what we do in the classroom.” He also noted that he had presented a more detailed argument supporting that view in an article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education.1 Rather poignantly, he added: “I have received no reaction to [that] piece since it was published.” Deaf ears indeed!
The JAE article astutely identified basic flaws in the reigning philosophical claim that art could not be defined. Most important, Ken recognized that at the root of both a highly influential 1956 essay by philosopher Morris Weitz and the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein that it drew upon was the mistaken assumption that “usage can never be incorrect.” They accepted as art any avant-garde invention put forward as such, and were therefore constrained to formulate a definition that would include it—an increasingly impossible task.
In his NAEA Advisory, Ken recommended “entertain[ing] the idea that we may have assigned the words ‘work of art’ unjustifiably to certain things in the past.” He therefore advocated adopting an “honorific” definition, based on long-accepted referents. That essentially traditionalist view effectively excluded the problematic inventions of the avant-garde.
Having argued along similar lines in What Art Is, Lou Torres and I welcomed Ken as an ally, and wrote to seek his permission to reprint his Advisory article in Aristos, the online review of the arts we co-edit. Our letter to him noted that we “were struck by how closely [his] concerns regarding the subject correspond to our own.” He readily agreed, responding that learning of our work was a “breath of fresh air,” but warning: “The forces that oppose you are enormous. Art educators at all levels resist attempts at logic and clarity. I think it threatens them.”2
To borrow the memorable last line from the film Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
We soon published Ken’s Advisory article in Aristos (December 2004), in slightly revised form, under the new title “Why We Need a Definition of Art”—with some supplementary material, including an open letter to colleagues. In that letter, Ken roundly castigated fellow educators for scholarly pretensions that increasingly misled them to “venture into speculations more appropriate for psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, mathematicians, psychiatrists, and politicians” while they ignored the fundamentals of art education. Though we wanted to reprint his JAE article as well, we were regrettably unable to obtain the journal’s permission.
To afford Ken a more complete sense of our viewpoint, we sent him a copy of What Art Is, and were delighted when he informed us that, having read through it twice, he agreed with virtually everything we had written.3 His one “friendly disagreement,” as he put it after reading other work by us, pertained to the place of studio art courses in the upper grades.
Most prominently, in a chapter on art education in Who Says That’s Art? (a copy of which I sent him in December 2014), I argued that past 8th grade studio art courses should be offered only as an elective. He, however, firmly believed in their value for general education. That difference notwithstanding, he lauded the book as “absolutely wonderful . . . both scholarly and readable,” and noted that my definition of art had set a “higher standard” than his own.4 A later message advised that the book was one that “every art educator should read, and read carefully.”5
In August 2021, Ken sent us a summary outline of his own thoughts about art and art education. In it, he noted the significant difference between meaningful works of representational art and essentially “decorative” abstract work, stressing that the former should be the primary focus of art education. He also cautioned against “endless boundary breaking,” as well as the moral and ethical relativism he had observed in a student of his decades ago who went on to become prominent in the field. Teachers, he held, have an obligation to promote work embodying beneficial values. Finally, he appended this kind note to Lou and me: “Even if we disagree here and there, I want you to know that I think you have made the most important contributions to art education in my lifetime.”6
Last June, I had the pleasure of sending Ken a copy of the published version of “The Lamentable Consequences of Blurring the Boundaries” (Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 10:2, February 2021), previously sent him in draft form. In it, I credited him for his prescient insistence on the need for teachers to define their subject. He didn’t respond, but some weeks later I was surprised by a message on my answering machine from his daughter Laura. When I phoned back, she explained that she was helping her dad make phone calls to people whose friendship he valued.
The unspoken subtext was that in his 97th year, Ken sensed that the end was near, and that this would be our last conversation. He once again expressed his keen appreciation for our work and thanked us for our friendship. I, in turn, took the opportunity to repeat our gratitude for the interest and support he had given us over the years. Rarely does one have the chance for such closure, and it is a testimony to the calibre of Ken’s character that he had made it possible.
A week before Thanksgiving last year, Laura Lansing wrote to let me know that Ken had died on September 21st. I told her of my intention to post this tribute to him and asked if there were any information she would especially like me to include. In addition to noting that Ken had been a devoted husband and father, she reported that he was especially proud of having received the NAEA’s Manuel Barkan Memorial Award.
Conceived in honor of Manuel Barkan, the award is presented to an individual who, through published work in either Art Education or Studies in Art Education, has contributed a “product of scholarly merit to the field.” Ken’s winning article was “The Effect of Drawing on the Development of Mental Representations” (Studies in Art Education, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1981]). Reporting on a series of drawing exercises done with kindergarten classes, it dealt with an important cognitive aspect of a foundational skill in art education, and presents a marked contrast to the latest Barkan Award article: “Art Education Beyond Anthropocentricism: The Question of Nonhuman Animals in Contemporary Art and Its Education,” by Mira Kallio-Tavin in the same NAEA journal.
According to the University of Georgia, where Kallio-Tavin is a “Distinguished Professor of Art,” her award-winning article
recognizes current problems in human co-existence with nonhuman lives and speaks to the urgent needs of environmental, ecological, ethical, and social justice concerns of current times. The publication develops and decenters humanist-centered philosophy in art education through posthumanist lenses, introducing critical animal studies to the field of art education.
Attempting to unpack that turgid account would go far beyond my scope here,7 but it surely calls to mind Ken’s observations quoted above about scholarly pretensions that increasingly lure art educators into arcane speculations while they ignore the fundamentals of art education.
More telling evidence of that point is the sort of work Kallio-Tavin regards as art. Here is one example:
Joseph Beuys explored the human separation from other species and made a point on human-centeredness in his 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which he spent 3 days in the René Block Gallery in New York with a wild coyote.
Whether one regards that bizarre example of “performance” as a sincere expression of some sort or rather as the product of either an artworld charlatan or a deranged mind, it is not a work of art, properly speaking. It is instead an example of postmodernist anti-art.8
An award-winning “distinguished professor of art” should surely recognize the difference. Her failure to do so is a clear indication of the extent to which nonart is now the subject of art education, fully realizing the fear Ken Lansing so presciently sounded decades ago.
Notes
- “Is a Definition of Art Necessary for the Teaching of Art?,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 1980), pp. 51-58. ↩
- Letter from Kenneth Lansing to Louis Torres and me, November 19, 2004. ↩
- Email message from Ken to Lou Torres and me, March 23, 2005. ↩
- Email message from Ken Lansing to me, December 23, 2014. ↩
- Email message from Ken Lansing to me, March 19, 2017. His assessment presents quite a contrast to the deprecating review posted on the book’s Amazon.com page by Paul Duncum, a professor of art education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—in the same department where Ken had taught for more than two decades until his retirement in 1986. ↩
- Email message from Ken to Lou and me, August 1, 2021. ↩
- Yet I cannot refrain from observing that the very goal of “decenter{ing} human-centered philosophy” strikes me as absurd. Every living species and organism is necessarily self-centered for its own survival. What is remarkable about human beings is not our “human-centeredness” (which is natural and not at all blameworthy) but the extent to which we consider, and accommodate to, the needs of other organisms in our frame of reference. ↩
- On the distinction between art and anti-art, see “Understanding Contemporary Art,” Aristos, August 2012. ↩
I never met Ken Lansing but thanks to Michelle Kamhi, I can see that he was a wonderful human being who really understood what art is about and what the needs of art education are.
As co-translator of a forthcoming Dutch edition of Michelle’s book Who Says That’s Art?, I wholeheartedly agree with her and Ken Lansing on the need to define art.
The lack of such definition has led to a lot of unwarranted frustration. Skillful creators of figurative art are often turned down in art competitions by judges who cannot draw or paint themselves but are guided by taste based mainly on what is trendy at the current moment. Without standards, meaningful criteria, or a definition of art they fail to recognize the fundamental difference between the contemporary artworld’s apples and oranges—between skillfully made, content-rich art, on one hand, and abstract work and postmodernist anti-art, on the other.
As someone who taught music and art for decades in various international schools in Africa and Asia, I witnessed firsthand what our youngsters craved. Students of all ages were drawn to the fine art of the past, fascinated by both its form and its content. Those who enjoyed making art themselves wanted to acquire technical skill in drawing, painting or sculpting in order to create work following in the footsteps of the great masters. They sensed what is truly worthy of admiration, and were confused by the profusion of anti-traditional work that is considered art today. Their instinctual reaction upon seeing abstract or postmodernist work in a museum was often to ask “Is that really art?” As Michelle so beautifully argues in her book, why would we try to convince them that it is?
Ordinary people—who live outside the snobbish, opinion-manipulating bubble of the artworld—generally appreciate well-crafted, meaningful, emotionally evocative, figurative art. This was obvious to me during my time as a Belgian expat in Morocco when we discussed Who Says That’s Art? within the book club of the American International Women’s Association. My fellow members responded to the book with a sense of pure relief. It gave them their own voice back, freeing them to express their genuine preference for traditional representational work over modernist abstractions and postmodernist concoctions. It was—to echo Ken Lansing—a “breath of fresh air” for all of us. He was right to urge all art teachers to read this book. All teachers as well as parents should read the works by Michelle, Louis Torres, and Lansing himself in order to rid themselves of the false notions and fashionable fake taste promoted by the contemporary artworld.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thanks very much for this international perspective.
Just as fine art evokes the highest forms of human creative endeavor so Kenneth M. Lansing’s seminal publication Art, Artists, and Art Education stands at the pinnacle of significant scholarship in this field for artists and art educators alike.
Lansing’s grounded concepts continue to provide the most lucid and relevant guidance in this field of vacillating and arbitrary aesthetic philosophies of our day. My work as an art museum educator, and the many hundreds of thousands of visitors to the museum, have benefitted in a very real manner from the application of these fundamental principles.
I am grateful for Michelle Kamhi’s fine tribute to such an outstanding art educator and thinker for our day – it is long overdue!
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Herman, I’m glad for this opportunity to thank you for introducing me to Ken’s inestimable and too-long-neglected work!
Thank you for this excellent overview of Ken Lansing’s work. With regard to the role of studio art classes in general education, it’s fascinating that, in Book VIII of the Politics, Aristotle argued for the value of learning to draw, both because it is “useful for a more correct judgment of the works of artists” and because it “makes [people] judges of the beauty of the human form.” Aristotle’s position on the matter is grounded in the importance he attached to the beautifully right use of serious leisure (schole) in human life.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Many thanks for this edifying comment, Peter! I agree that there is value for everyone in learning to draw. The problem in the current state of art education is that few teachers are prepared to give good instruction in that useful skill and it is largely downplayed in the current curriculum—a vicious cycle!
“An Open Letter to Colleagues in Art Education” (Lansing, 2004) is a resounding, pragmatic appeal to the field. Art Education spent much of the last decades struggling to be seen as a valid part of American education as an institution–“Advocacy!” being the battle cry. We struggle to be taken as a serious content area, to maintain importance amid the ever-insistent Core Content. Once we arrived to a place with national and state standards for Visual Art, and most public schools providing an Art course for students, the slide toward concept and social commentary now bring us to a place where 96% of my high school students entering an Art 1 class provide some version of, “Art is how to express emotions,” as a definition of Art. No grasp of any fundamentals, as Mr. Lansing points out in the aforementioned essay. Every higher education Art program has a version of “Foundations Courses,” perhaps PreK-12 should take notes. Seems to me when one studies Art for employment purposes, a specific, much more formal, definition is applied; therefore, as in the words of the aforementioned Open Letter, “They want us to put the cart before the horse. If we could really succeed in teaching the fundamentals, our students’ mastery of such things might carry over into other fields that employ artistic skills.”
I would have enjoyed meeting Mr. Lansing and certainly mourn the loss of a bold voice for defining our profession. My deepest condolences to his family.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
This comment from the recipient of the 2022 Ohio Secondary Art Educator award is especially appreciated!
I find it amazing that art teachers don’t think they need to define their topic. As someone who has taught mathematics, engineering, and psychology, I always have to be able to define my topic and why it is important. If I can’t define what it is I am teaching, how can I possibly grade it? Why should art education be any different? My father spent his career trying to get his colleagues to understand that simple truth. I didn’t understand it as a child, but as a professor myself now, I can say that he was correct! I am so glad the Michelle Kamhi and Lou Torres have taken up the cause.
Wonderfully and boldly written. It is so great to hear opinions that are formulated through deep thought and experience. It is a shame that he passed; however, it is wonderful he was able to leave his mark on the world.
Thank you for your kind words…