On Jun 6, 2008, at 11:46 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Michael, it's clear the thing you didn't get is that my bit of
twitting was
to convey that your polysyllabic disquisition did zero to make us
"understand"
your notion of "understanding"
"To make *us* 'understand'"?
I actually thought it was pretty easy and clear. A lesson from the
show, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire": Some poor guy missed the $100
question, a gimme. And other contestants won the big jackpot,
$1,000,000.The lesson from that: The easy question is the one you know
the answer to. The hard question is the one you don't.
I did a stint teaching art history to general college students just
trying to eke out their humanities requirement before they went on to
majors in other fields. I told them that art history is not like math
or science, which, to some extent can be predicted from the present
theorems, etc. "History," as Clare Booth Luce put it, "is just one
damned thing after another."
So, I told them, you can either memorize every picture and artist in
the book, a gargantuan feat. Or you can learn a small number of key
works by style and fixed in a historical chronology, and then learn to
place other, unmemorized works into the timeline by looking at the
stylistic qualities of them. This would be hard, rote work at first,
but, I assured them, that as they learned to see certain properties or
qualities in the works, they would be able to locate them
historically. AND, as they expanded their visual skills, they would
find that they would become more skilled at visual discernment, etc.
The more they knew, the better they could see the works. Ta da,
understanding.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
