Aesthetics Making Sense

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National Art Education Association

Making Sense of AestheticsAuthor(s): E. Louis LankfordSource: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 49-52Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1320434Accessed: 24/11/2010 07:51

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STUDIES in Art Education Copyright by TheA Journal of Issues and Research National Art Education Association1986, 28(1) 49-52

Commentary

Making Sense of Aesthetics

E. Louis Lankford

The Ohio State University

One of the best things likely to come out of all of the discipline-based rteducation hoopla is that art education as a whole will have to start makingsense out of aesthetics. For aesthetics o make sense in art education, t mustbe comprehendable, nd its relevance ought to be readily apparent. This ap-plies whether one is talking about theoretical propositions which guide teacherpreparation, or art lessons for six-year-olds.

Aesthetics has long been regarded by most art educators with a keep-your-distance reverence: acknowledged as a key element of the world of art yetavoided as a cloudland wherein only self-proclaimed sthetes and inscrutablephilosophers dwell. Because aesthetics has been inadequately understood, ithas often been misrepresented y those whose task it has been to make the art-world more real and meaningful o the general public. Consider for examplethe application of Formalism n classrooms. As often as not it is represented sbeing essentially about composition; elements and principles of design becomethe most vital vocabulary of art education. This interpretation s only partiallycorrect; t reduces art study to a set of surface arrangements hat are irrelevant

to much of contemporary rt, and robs Bell (1958) and Fry's (1965) theory ofits heart: the fulfillment of aesthetic experience. I am not championing Bell'stheory here, only trying to make a point.

Some art educators have simply ried to ignore aesthetics, and in this regardmany have done a sterling ob. Studio art methods have been taught withoutdiscussion of why or how people express themselves through art. Criticalmethods have been applied without consideration of the efficacy of themethod used. There are probably many more art educators, however, whohave used aesthetics without realizing t: when talk turns to the function of artin

society,for

example,or when students are asked why

theythink a work of

art is good.Before we can use aesthetics eally well, we need to have some idea of what it

is about. Basically, aesthetics s asking questions and searching for answersabout the nature of art. An important part of understanding aesthetics islearning o accept ts grey areas, living with alternative nswers o single ques-tions, viewing what it offers with a critical eye, and making decisions basedupon fairness, reason, and experience. That is why I thought t apt that Lanier(1985) encapsulated esthetics n the form of a question: "What s art and whydo we respond o it?" (p. 255). Here is an instance of an art educator decoding

complex aesthetic concepts and jargon nto terms everyone can understand. Of


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E. LOUIS LANKFORD

course one could claim, and rightly so, that this question is rather like a crackin the dike; if we pry into it, we're liable to drown in a flood of convoluted in-

formation. The trick is to shore the damn thing with knowledge and experiencealready acquired in studio, history, and criticism, and to approach the ques-tion with the conviction that an answer is worth having.

Lanier's question touches upon two major components of aesthetics: thetheory of art, or the classification of objects as art; and the theory of theaesthetic, which deals with aesthetic perception and response. Another ques-tion will round out the scope of aesthetics: How should we approach art sothat it is meaningful? This would seem to be within the purview of artcriticism, but a more accurate perspective on the question is that it reflects the

integrated characterof

criticism and aesthetics. Criticism deals with the waysand means of approaching art in a significant way; aesthetics, being aphilosophical pursuit, is concerned with, among other things, how art isvalued and what is worth valuing, the rightness of critical decisions and sound-ness of reasons, and the implications of judgments.

The fact that aesthetics does address these questions about art places it inperhaps the most broadly overlapping position in the DBAE scheme.Aesthetics addresses the social context in which art is created (e.g. Danto's"Artworld," 1977); it helps critics justify what they do; it speaks to artistic ex-pression from the standpoint of the artist and the audience (e.g. how is it thatart communicates ideas and emotions?) Art theory informs history: conceptsof the nature and function of art have guided art's evolution and revolutions.

DiBlasio (1985) recognized the importance of art theory to a general under-standing of art, and proposed that an open-ended version a' la Weitz beadopted for art education. This is not the only alternative to acceptance of too-narrow essentialistic theories. Socially dependent theories such as Dickie's(1971) should also be considered. Dickie asserts that objects become art not byvirtue of what they are but because of what people do with them and how theyare perceived. This idea carries explanatory power while allowing for artistic

open-endedness. There is the hope that further study can take us beyond the"Operational Definition of Visual Art" found in the NAEA's Purposes, Prin-ciples, and Standards for School Art Programs, wherein a laundry list ofmedia and methods is aired in lieu of a more substantive discussion of arttheory.

Art teachers may wonder, "Why bother with art theory; isn't it too esotericto be useful?" As Lanier (1985) has pointed out, just because aesthetics dealswith abstractions of theory does not render it a subject beyond the reach of or-dinary people. Indeed, aesthetics can be practiced without ever uttering thatdifficult-to-pronounce word, "aesthetics". Consider a sample question, onewhich could well be asked by a puzzled student: What makes Christo's wrap-ping of the Pont Neuf art? The resulting discussion could range across artisticmotivations, historical contexts, critical decisions, and the proposal andscrutiny of definitions. If you're trying to find an answer that makes sense, ananswer that can be conveyed to others and quite possibly applied to other artworks, then you're not only art educating - you're doing aesthetics.

The theory of the aesthetic is not as adaptable to classroom situations as thetheory of art. We can develop a program of study aimed at making perceptionmore discriminating, and we can provide a knowledge base and interactive en-

vironments which we hope will engender greater sensitivity to the arts, but we

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COMMENTARY

cannot provide aesthetic experiences in the same measurable way that we canteach an understanding of art theory.

An accounting of why and how people attend to, understand, and respondto art in both spontaneous and deliberate ways is a desirable goal for thoseseeking to incorporate aesthetics into art education. Such an account could gofar in helping us shape art programs that are both meaningful and effective.But the integrated processes of perception and response are complex matters,and have been studied by psychologists, experimental aestheticians,phenomenologists, analytic philosophers and others bent on capturing theircombined essence. Cognition, mutable behaviors, enculturation, and holisticstructures of thought, feeling, and sensation all seem to come into play.

Aesthetic experience is something most of us: try to talk about but few of uscan satisfactorily put into words. Ralph Smith, who has been instrumental inintroducing aesthetic concepts into art education literature, has submitted oneof the most succinct explications for educational purposes (1983). But whetherone accepts Smith's conclusions or not, we should all know enough by now torealize that asking students how a painting makes them feel is, by itself, a naiveapproach to aesthetic perception. A deep and lasting encounter with art re-quires a capacity and a determination to derive significance from works of art.This assumption has guided much of art education's efforts, and should con-tinue to do so.

To be sure, there have long been those with a genuine interest in aestheticsworking in art education. Kaelin and Ecker, for example, published "TheLimits of Aesthetic Inquiry" in 1972; it is a classic in providing guidance toresearch and subsequent instruction in aesthetics. Grounded in Dewey and ex-istentialism, a model of inquiry is presented which includes individual ex-perience, criticism, metacriticism, theory, and metatheory. These levels of in-quiry still make sense, and deserve a second look.

Yet with this model, as in all areas of aesthetics, issues will surface whichhave no ready or absolute resolution. Perhaps there is no such thing as

aesthetic experience as a peculiar type of human response. Perhaps analysisdestroys the purity of the immediate perceptual moment. Perhaps the pursuitof a definition of art is fruitless, and we would be better engaged with other af-fairs. Perhaps any aesthetic concept is morally bankrupt unless it's tied to aphilosophy of social responsibility. These are all worthy topics for debate.

Of this we can be certain: in the coming months we can look forward to a lotof work and not a little nonsense as the field sorts out aesthetics and makes itusable. And to be really usable, it has to make sense.

References

Bell, C. (1958). Art. New York: Capricorn Books.Danto, A. (1977). The artistic enfranchisement of real objects: The art-world. In G. Dickie & R.J.

Sclafani (Eds.), Aesthetics: A critical anthology (pp. 22-35). New York: St. Martin's Press.DiBlasio, M.K. (1985). Continuing the translation: Further delineation of the DBAE format.

Studies in Art Education, 26 (4), 197-205.Dickie, G. (1971). Aesthetics. Indianapolis: Pegasus.Ecker, D.W. & Kaelin, E.F. (1972). The limits of aesthetic inquiry: A guide to educational

research. The Seventy-First Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp.

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258-286). Chicago: NSSE.Fry, R. (1965). Pure and impure art. In M. Rader (Ed.), A modern book of aesthetics (pp.

304-309). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Lanier, V. (1985). Discipline-based art education: Three issues. Studies in Art Education, 26(4), 251-256.

National Art Education Association. (no date). Purposes, principles, and standards for schoolart programs. Reston: NAEA.

Smith, R.A. (1983, Spring). The purpose and place of the arts in education. Viewpoints: Dialoguein Art Education, pp. 1-7.

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Aesthetics Making Sense