On Mar 12, 2010, at 10:09 PM, William Conger wrote: > If, as you suggest (contradicting yourself) it's up to the student then how can you predict what the student will want learn and provide for it in your curricula?
No, I didn't contradict myself. I said, "Learn the stuff, if you find it useful and to your liking, and then do as you please with it." If you don't like it, leave. Be an artist on your own. Go to Black Mountain. But if you choose to go to a traditional art school because you think you'll get four years of concentrated work and lessons, fine. Be ready to accept that the school will teach courses in topics of its choosing and that it might require you to take certain ones *in order to earn a degree*. Or you can just take what suits your fancy outside a curriculum path. But I'll pretend I am starting an art school. I'd teach some of the "traditional" introductory courses in drawing and painting and sculpture. That's to start; I'll grow into film and media, printmaking, other things. I'd teach the basics of drawing, painting, and sculpture to achieve two goals: First, to teach the skills for themselves--because mastering them liberates the artist to be able to execute his or her ideas without struggling with the frustration of incompetent execution. And second, to teach the students how to see and interact with their own artwork as a separate thing, seen as much as possible without the maker's eyes that are inevitably distorted with "intentionalism," to see their work as open to all influences and 'readings' after they make it--even in the process of making it. You can't think, at least at a high level of abstraction, without words. And you can't learn words without learning to speak and hear. So, you learn to speak and hear, then learn to think, and then learn to write. Likewise, to produce competent works of art you must learn how to speak and hear in your art's terms, which is color, line, volume. All the ideas come later, as you learn to control and reassemble the materials of art. I don't look to art schools to teach art or produce artists. I look at art schools to teach how to do the essential work and the rudimentary thinking of art, and the art fruits will come. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
