|
I couldn't agree more about the need for more education in the arts. The preoccupation has been with science and math scores as a basis for measuring education. Therefore support and staffing of these programs come at the expense of subjects like music and art. I'm not sure that it was ever any better. My elementary education devoted two or three hours a week to art and it happened only if everyone behaved the previous week and the good nuns offered it only as a reward.
I participated recently with six local artists in "Art Day" at a local elementary school where we showed landscapes, portraits, sculpture, and drawings in representational and modern approaches. Response was enthusiastic and their questions ran the gamut of the expected, some insightful, and many not related. (As in "how old are you"? Do you have kids?). The classrooms and hallways were filled with a surprising range of subjects, styles, and media. In talking with those teachers and often with my daughter who has taught high school art and recently had K thru 6 students it seems that the programs aim to make students familiar with and construct things with a broad range of materials employing a wide variety treatments. Fortunately, to my mind, they are not steered toward any particular style and not judged on the basis of realistic/modern. Students then have open discussions on what they have learned and observed. From what I have learned there does not tend to be much awareness of any ongoing argument about realism versus realistic art and it would be my hope that being visually literate (?) will make them both sensitive and articulate in the visual arts. I hope teaching children to be knowledgeable and capable of producing good art doesn't mean that they must accept any one school of thought over another.
And an open question: How ignorant do we believe the public to be and how much "training" do they need to respond to the visual arts. And secondly, for lack of any evidence that I am aware of, why do we think there is such a division in the broad art community over realism and modern art?
|