Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art (original) (raw)

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND education at all levels. In a sense, art is an education. Art is communicative and can help people understand aspects of the world that they could not gain access to through other means. A work of visual art can even teach people how to look at itself superficially. Many examples of the visual arts have surface qualities that are understandable without the need for formal instruction. Those visual qualities that interact with our biological processing systems to enable humans to live in and adapt to new visual environments have enabled us to survive since early human history, and now allow us to process realistic imagery quickly. Even young children can interpret those surface visual qualities. However, those visual qualities are not what define visual forms as works of art and culture. It is not the fact that we can see and interpret basic forms that makes them worthy of academic study. Rather, it is the amazing human capability that enables people to make images and objects that other people want to look at, create meaning from, and come to value. Although the potential for making things is "hardwired" into our brains, the skills and concepts needed for creating, understanding, valuing, and critiquing the visual arts are learned. The process of learning to make and adequately respond to the complexities of the visual arts is unlikely to occur without guidance. Unless people are given instruction, they may never get beyond the surface of the images and designed objects they see every day. When students develop a deeper understanding of their visual experiences, they can look critically at surface appearances and begin to reflect on the importance of the visual arts in shaping culture, society, and even individual identity. Unfortunately, most people have no formal art education after early adolescence and many have no instruction in the visual arts at all. Insufficient art education is a concern not only because the visual arts have been historically important, or because the visual arts are important as forms of human expression, but because much contem-Introduction xi xii levels of education and has been illustrated by the organization of the visual arts fields. The separations between primary, secondary, and higher art education and between the art education in schools and other cultural locations, such as in museums, in community programs, and on the web have long been problematic. Course boundaries based primarily on differences in media techniques now make less sense at a time when many professional artists regularly switch media, and the separation of fine arts from popular arts reduces opportunities for studying their connections. Advancing knowledge of visual culture depends on good foundations at all levels, including connections as well as distinctions between and among forms, ideas, and processes of visual culture.