Get'em, Ryan.
I agree with you, no surprise and I see it every day. I have been teaching intro to painting for 5 years, at a State University. 90% of students are pantie waste, in the beginning. But here is this opportunity to change that. I don't teach, I show, I profess, I get it out there as a language not just pictures. I stress the power of an image and how it can change the world, First day PBS "Entarte Kunst".
Much for the same reason that there is racism, it is just that people hate what they don’t understand. Kinkade, people like him because they can understand, on the other hand people don’t understand. In College most everyone takes an art history class or two. It is very rare that a non-art major will take a contemporary class though. So here it is, a college-educated business major that took two art history classes Stone Age – Gothic and Renaissance to Impressionism, feels that they have an understanding for art. It is not their fault they only know to Impressionism.
I propose we go backwards, start from now and trace every movement to the movement before and so on.
If we were to create a timeline of the planet and draw it out from LA to NY, humans have been here for 40 yards, the Renaissance to now is about ½ in, your lifetime is thinner the linen canvas the painting your talking about is on. Where am I going with this? At this point we should teach art history alphabetically.
So I will be changing my name to “A-David Michael Lee”
2 comments:
Good posts, guys.
A few points:
There are pitfalls in any strategy of teaching art history.
With the most common approach of linking periods and movements chronologically, many teachers can't help but spend more time on earlier things and truncate the newer stuff. "Getting through" art history seems to be the primary goal, depth of analysis suffers, as does any hope of possibly understanding the context. Again, good teachers will juggle these facets of their subjects admirably, but there is always a sense of incompleteness at the end of any art history course.
Going through alphabetically, artist-by-artist would work just as well, and would encourage making more flexible associations, rather than, "The rennisiance looks like this.", "A gothic arch looks like this.", etc. There is a danger there of getting overly biographical, or anecdotal, or glib. Also, mythologizing artists, which seems to be some art historians' job, is dangerous and dumb, and part-and-parcel of what they call "art appreciation" courses.
This comes down to a high culture/ low culture distinction which I believe is an anachronism. (As an aside, I was joking about the end of capital-A art.)
We can, and should, use the term art in lots of different ways. Art brut, raw art, though, I feel should be kept seperate from any standards of profundity, correctness, craft, or quality. I try to keep my, admittedly very broad, personal definition of art seperate from these things because I know that they are all symptoms of conventionality, which is the anethma of raw art, or rather the other side of the coin.
Historically, between raw art and convention lies a region called style, as in Doric, Byzantine, Federalist, etc. I feel indebted to the modernists for turning things around and making the name-of-the-game, "individual vision, above all else". What is taught in survey is the pigeon holes these artists were put in after the fact.
(Writing several days later.) Anyway, the long and short of it is that I think it's dangerous to say something isn't art simply because it is banal or hackneyed. I think the presence of a fictive world, presented either representationally or by exemplification, is enough to make the case for the presence of art.
yes, but if enough people believe that they are looking at the genuine article (which I believe a LOT of people are) then the fictive reality becomes the only thing they know about art and they are taken even further off course then they already were.
They may even start making Bob Ross Painitngs at home and spending money to have them framed and present them to friends as an act of 'self-expression'.
or
One might, while walking through the food court of their local mall see a Thomas Kincaid gallery and think to oneself,
"I sure like the way he paints these very soothing landscapes. I wish my life was more like it is this these paintings. My wife thinks I should be more cultured. I will buy this 'artwork' and take it home and put it on my wall."
and voila! the slight of hand illusion is complete. while the art community was looking at the left, the right hand has made the bait and switch and the culture has been sold down the river by people who never asked to be qualified to do so because they knew that the average-joe mallshopper knows even less then they do about art, and think can get away with selling their fool's gold.
The victim of the exchange is the art under-educated bourgeoisie.
My only question, and I guess my point of all this is, If enough people believe it to be true, does that fictive reality become so prevalent that it actually DOES make it true?
And if so there should be clear road signs to MoMA's or Museums of Contemporary Art--- or we should recognize that people's conception of what art is will be determined by malls and tv & movie stereotypes.
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