 | | | |
| |||
| the possibility of mistakes and false starts? Another contributing factor to the trivialization of art, to the lack of conviction that art communicates important and valid perceptions, may stem from the way people react to the forefront of art. Neither students nor the general public are expected to extract meaning from a contemporary issue of the Physical Review. Their education starts with reexpressed ideas of Newton, Galileo, and Faraday. But contemporary artists tend to either sneer at people who cannot extract meaning from their works or, alternately, deny that their works have meaning, insisting that they should be appreciated as meaningless aesthetic experiences. An abysmal contradiction in terms! (I do not imply any verbalized meaning when I talk of meaning.) This current attitude has permeated art education. There is no longer a felt need to start children (or art students) with simple pattern perceptions and long-ago discovered ways of recording them. Art is not taught to students in a manner that heightens awareness of the world around them or of themselves; nor is it taught as a way to relate to and make their world more accessible. It is not taught as a process to learn, discover, and communicate what has been learned. It is not taught as a way to unify separateness. Rather, it is too often taught, as science is also taught, as a nonexperiential and hollow mimicry of what artists (or scientists) are publishing at the forefront of the field. The realization by art teachers that it can be destructive to tell children that their efforts are right or wrong has led students to believe that there is no way in which they can find out for themselves about the rightness or wrongness of their efforts. They are not even encouraged to believe that they can convey something important through their paintings. The process of setting all this down has made me feel more like a fraud than ever. | With best wishes for your conference. Frank Oppenheimer | ||