Where's the Art in Today's Art Education?

For its latest advocacy campaign, the National Art Education Association (NAEA) has adopted the slogan "Where's the Art?"-meaning: What place, if any, does art education now occupy in our schools? To judge from many of the sessions I attended at the NAEA's annual meeting held in Miami Beach last March, however, as well as from recent articles I've been reading in the organization's two journals, Art Education and Studies in Art Education, the question that should be asked is: Where's the art in today's art education?

Having long striven to establish the visual arts firmly as a subject of study in school curricula, advocates for art education have made inroads toward that end at both the national and state levels in recent decades. To all those who value art, this may seem like good news, at least from a distance. On close examination, however, there is cause for deep concern. For, while many schools have been taking steps to integrate art education into their curricula, serious art of high quality has been rendered more and more marginal to the content of their programs. It has been largely displaced by trivial works of popular art and by cultural artifacts of all kinds, selected more for the hidden sociopolitical messages that can be wrung from them than for their expressive power or esthetic value.

A "Paradigmatic Shift"

What is now happening in art education is, quite naturally, a reflection of trends in other cultural arenas. In the opening pages of What Art Is, Louis Torres and I called attention to disturbing trends in the academic study of art history, for example. As we noted, academic art historians-whose focus has traditionally been the visual arts of painting and sculpture (with an emphasis on those works considered to be of particular esthetic value and cultural significance)-increasingly believe that no works are more deserving and rewarding of attention than any others. In addition, many claim that the "so-called" key monuments of art history are worthy of study only for what they reveal about unacknowledged sociopolitical agendas. We also noted the growing tendency to interpret art and culture solely in terms of the contemporary politics of division, with its emphasis on issues of race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. Finally, we cited the astonishing recommendation by some art historians that they should now concern themselves broadly with "visual culture"-in particular, with images that are not art. In other words, they propose to ignore the very distinction between art and ordinary imagery that lies at the base of their discipline.

Such notions have made their way through the educational system with breathtaking rapidity. Coupled with an already widespread "multiculturalist" emphasis, these ideas are compromising every level of education in the visual arts. As a result, what is under way is nothing less than a "paradigmatic shift, a redefinition of content and practice in art education," to borrow the words of a recent Art Education editorial by Pat Villeneuve, associate professor and associate curator at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. Evidence of this shift to a hybrid endeavor termed "visual-culture art education" is manifold. A paper prepared in 2001 for an independent study group called the Council for Policy Studies in Art Education was entitled "Visual Culture: Broadening the Domain of Art Education." Teachers College Press will soon issue a new textbook, Teaching Visual Culture. The author, Kerry Freedman, is co-editor of the NAEA's Studies in Art Education, which is soliciting papers for an issue to be devoted to visual culture. Art Education is doing the same. And this comes hard on the heels of the May 2002 issue of Art Education, which focused on classroom approaches to visual-culture studies and contained Villeneuve's portentous editorial advocating the new emphasis: "Back to the Future: [Re][De]Fining Art Education."

The Postmodern Trap

A key factor in the shift to visual-culture studies has undoubtedly been postmodernism, which has all too swiftly gained wide currency among art educators, as in the art world itself. Freedman's Teaching Visual Culture, for example, will feature a section on postmodern concepts, an excerpt from which was distributed at the NAEA meeting in Miami Beach.

John Stinespring, a rare dissenting voice at the meeting, lamented that postmodernism is now "all the buzz" among art teachers. Offering a well-articulated contrarian view, in an NAEA session entitled "Moving from the Postmodern Trap," Stinespring argued that postmodernism is governed by a series of major fallacies, which teachers have uncritically accepted. They include:

• an "ever-broadening definition of art"
• the acceptance of anything put forward as art as having equal value
• the rejection of all standards of qualitative judgment
• the denigration of individual creativity and originality
• an emphasis on multiculturalism at the expense of the personally meaningful
• the insistence that all art makes implicit or explicit statements about socioeconomic or political issues-with the implication that there is only one correct position on each issue, invariably to the left of center

Echoing a concern expressed several years ago by the prominent Stanford University educator Elliot Eisner, Stinespring strongly objected to postmodernism's tendency to make art a "handmaiden to social studies." Since he is himself a former social studies teacher, who subsequently earned a Ph.D. in art history (and now teaches art appreciation in the School of Art at Texas Tech University), his remarks warrant particular attention. But the sparse attendance at his session, in contrast with the ample turnout at that of Olivia Gude, a vocal proponent of postmodernism in art education, indicated that Stinespring's message is failing to get much of a hearing among his colleagues.

Visual Culture versus Art Education

The tendency to make art a handmaiden to social studies is glaringly evident in the visual-culture art-education movement. This tendency should be of concern even to those who place no great value on the arts as such, for underlying it is a fundamentally political agenda for "social reconstruction," in which teachers of art will presume to enlighten (more often indoctrinate) students regarding complex social and economic problems. Predictably, it is a direct outgrowth of the politically inspired multicultural emphasis Torres and I were critical of in our discussion of art-education programs in What Art Is.

Proponents of visual-culture education pay lip service to the fact that visual culture includes art. If one reads carefully, however, it is clear that they are more interested in other forms of cultural expression than in estimable works of painting and sculpture, to which they impute no greater value or significance than they would to a magazine advertisement, a documentary photograph, or a child's toy. Some adopt the term "art/visual-culture education" to indicate that they would make no sharp distinction between the visual arts and visual culture.

Nor do these proponents even limit themselves to cultural imagery. According to Freedman and her fellow advocate Patricia Stuhr, "Visual culture is the totality of humanly-designed images and artifacts that shape our existence." In their view,

The increasing pervasiveness of visual culture, and the freedom with which these forms cross traditional borders, can be seen in the use of fine art in advertising, realistic computer-generated characters in films, and the inclusion of rap videos in museum exhibitions. The visual arts are part of this larger visual culture, including fine art, advertising, popular film and video, folk art, television and other performance arts, housing and apparel design, mall and amusement park design, and other forms of visual production and communication.

Quite an inventory. Invariably, it is the non-art elements of visual culture that these educators are most apt to focus upon. In a recent article in Studies in Art Education (Spring 2002), Anna Wagner-Ott, who teaches in the department of art at California State University, Sacramento, concluded: "Teachers may find that [as another educator has observed] . . . everyday objects 'are more influential in structuring thought, feelings and actions than the fine arts [are] precisely because they are the everyday.'" Her article, entitled "Analysis of Gender Identity Through Doll and Action Figure Politics in Art Education" (adopting the dubious postmodernist usage of "gender"), echoes the view expressed in the same journal three years earlier by Paul Duncum, a prominent advocate of visual-culture studies who teaches at the University of Tasmania. Duncum had called for an "art education of everyday esthetic," including the study of such things as "shopping malls, theme parks and television."

Evident throughout the visual-culture movement, then, is a fundamental lack of understanding or appreciation regarding the distinctive nature and value of art. Desperately seeking to be socially "relevant," art teachers who have never sorted out the contradictions of either modernism or postmodernism hold so confused an idea regarding the nature of their proper subject matter that they are easily seduced by urgent claims of the need to train students in "visual literacy," to enable them to detect the powerful subliminal messages conveyed by popular and commercial culture.

To quote Duncum, from an article in the May issue of Art Education ("Clarifying Visual Culture Art Education"):

Mainstream art education begins with the assumption that art is inherently valuable, whereas VCAE [visual-culture art education] assumes that visual representations are sites of ideological struggle that can be as deplorable as they can be praiseworthy. The starting point [for VCAE] is not the prescribed inclusive canon of the institutionalized art world, but students' own cultural experience. A major goal is empowerment in relation to the pressures and processes of contemporary image-makers, mostly those who work on behalf of corporate capitalism, not the cherishing of artistic traditions and the valuing of artistic experimentation. The basic orientation is to understand, not to celebrate.

One could spend an entire article analyzing the mistaken premises and misleading implications of this brief passage, but suffice it here to point out that, though Duncum begins by questioning the traditional assumption that art is inherently valuable, his emphasis on "contemporary image-makers . . . who work on behalf of corporate capitalism" reveals that he is, in fact, concerned almost exclusively with visual representations that are not art.

Teaching Visual Illiteracy

"Visual literacy" may well deserve a place in the school curriculum, as visual-culture advocates insist, but it should not be confused with art education. Nor is there good reason to think that art teachers are the best qualified to promote visual literacy. Indeed, disturbing evidence indicates that some of the leading proponents of visual-culture studies are not at all qualified for the task. A case in point is the article "Multicultural Art and Visual Cultural Education in a Changing World" by Christine Ballengee-Morris and Patricia Stuhr (Art Education, July 2001), offprints of which were distributed at one of the NAEA sessions I attended. As leaders in the movement to transform art education into visual-culture education, the authors, who teach at Ohio State University, which boasts one of America's leading schools of education, might be expected to exemplify the best thinking on the subject. In fact, however, their article is so rife with erroneous assumptions, mistaken inferences, and muddled logic that it should give pause to all responsible educators, regardless of political orientation.

To begin with, though Ballengee-Morris and Stuhr refer to the "unique contributions of individuals from diverse groups," and they advocate multicultural education as a means of "providing more equitable opportunities for disenfranchised individuals and groups," their main focus is not on individual self-realization but on group identity and biological and cultural determinism. Their account of "personal cultural identity" cites such factors as age, sex, class, religion, ethnicity, and racial designation, for example, but says nothing about the role of personal choice in diverging from the group identities one is born into, much less of the role art can play in the forging of a personal identity. Their bald assertion that "national culture is primarily political" further suggests that, though they advocate "multiculturalism," they fail to grasp the essence of American culture: its profound individualism. Moreover, their premise that "making and interpreting . . . art" can in itself "disenfranchise" anyone plays fast and loose with both the nature of art and the concept of disenfranchisement, which means depriving someone of legal rights or privileges. In the absence of peer review from individuals deeply immersed in these multi-faceted social and political issues, art teachers freely disseminate misinformation and simplistic analyses, without the sort of challenge to their claims that a social studies or history teacher might encounter from a knowledgeable colleague or department chairman. That absence makes the efforts of such visual-culture educators doubly dangerous.

The sample lesson proposed by Ballengee-Morris and Stuhr further demonstrates how unsound their thinking is, not to mention how far it departs from art education. In a lesson designed to teach sixth-graders about the concept of violence, for example, they do not even focus on a work of painting or sculpture on this theme, but choose instead to discuss an advertisement: a promotional page for Time magazine. If I were to grade Ballengee-Morris and Stuhr on their own visual literacy based on this assignment, moreover, I would have to give them an F, for they deplorably misread the image in question, completely ignoring the most important clue to its intended message: the caption that accompanies it.

Even with respect to those skills that advocates of visual-culture education insist art educators are most qualified to inculcate, then, these leaders of the movement are woefully deficient. If such an article in a major art-education journal represents the advanced thinking in the field, we should all shudder to think what rank-and-file teachers may make of it in the classroom. And the further price of these dubious lessons in visual literacy is that children will be robbed of the experience of art, with all that it can bring in terms of personal pleasure and enhanced awareness.

Michelle Marder Kamhi is the co-author, with Louis Torres, of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Open Court, 2000). This article originally appeared, in a somewhat longer version, as part of "What Art Is Online" (http://www.aristos.org/whatart/arted-1.htm), a continually updated supplement to the book. It relates to the section "Teaching the Arts to Children" in Chapter 15: "Public Implications."