Aesthetics and Imagination

What can teachers and schools do to help encourage and further develop students' imaginative abilities andenquiry?

I think one of the most important strategies that we have as educators is to look artwork and spend the time to analyze artwork with your students. I think it’s important to look at historically important artwork, both in the context of aesthetics and of how the artwork is placed in historical and cultural significance of both then and now. It is also important to look at contemporary popular culture and encourage students to analyze the impact and significance of things like advertising. Being able to look at visual culture with a critical eye is a life long skill and can also open up creative possibly for them to be participants in their own visual culture. Dewey says "..the explanation of the feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with esthetic intensity. It explains also the religious feeling that accompanies intense esthetic perception." This is a description of a feeling of connectedness one has when they find their own meaning in a work of art. It takes practice now a days to slow down and let the work sink in.

I agree with Greene's theories that art is a way to process reality. Developing imagination is an active process, that it requires more than a tourist's walk through the art museum. It requires real thought as to what the artist was doing and feeling. I agree with Dewey that nothing stands in isolation. Art must be considered by what came before and what came after. I agree that the physical act of the making the art, the process, is equally if not sometime more important than what the art looks like in the end. I agree with the Lanier that much of the way I grew up in the secondary art room, and perhaps some of the ways that I teach art is outdated and irrelevant to the way my students relate to the world. I try and keep up with the technology and trends that my students are interested in, and try and incorporate them into classes. I still teach technical skills and have conversations about aesthetics, but I only bring up the elements and principles of design if they are relevant to the work a student is choosing to do. I think that one of the ways to encourage student imagination is to give them as many choices as possible in their art making practice. I change my teaching practice every term, always adapting to students individual needs and interests.

What is the role of aesthetic experience in schooling?

I feel that the best way to heighten student’s aesthetic experience is to give them more than what Green refers to as a tourist’s walk through an art museum. When students can make connections to their own lives and when they discover something they believe in, that makes them want to take action or speak out, that’s when school makes a real difference. Helping students realize connections to their personal lives, and connecting aesthetic experiences to meaningful moments in history, makes a deeper connection than simply showing students the way the elements and principles worked in a pleasant work of art.

I think I nailed down why Scruton’s video upset me so much. I do appreciate beauty in art. I appreciate it in fine art, in commercial art and in my student’s art. Though I may have come close to being a very conceptual artist in college, my own art is and always has been very aesthetic in nature. However, as I mentioned in class, a huge turning point in my life was when I took a couple of art history classes from a brilliant man who specialized in Dada. He shed light on the philosophy and history of art surrounding the world wars. We read manifestos and poetry by people who were creating subversive artwork in the face of fascism because they felt it was important. They were trying to change the world. I was probably 19 or 20 years old and I felt a passion for the act of creation that I never felt before. My own art making practice exploded in 25 directions at once. I was awake. I could see. I could feel. I was in the middle of that sought after state of mind I later read was called “creative flow.” The process and the idea of my art making was what mattered. The end result may have been aesthetically pleasing, but that was not the point of the work.

For Scuton to so crudely dismiss art based on the idea, or art geared toward cultural, social or political change hurts me. Beauty is objective, and as art teachers we need to keep that in mind. We should expand students’ idea that art has to be beautiful. It is important to have the “what is art” conversation with students. I encourage students to make ugly drawings for a reason. I learned relatively late how to let go of beauty and to enjoy the process of creation. Art can be simply about beauty and there’s nothing wrong with that, but to teach students that art is only good if it is beautiful is heartbreaking to me. For the most part artwork being shown in contemporary museums are not paintings. Artists are still pushing boundaries, experimenting with social, political and cultural issues and may be showing them in ways that make people uncomfortable. This type of artwork is usually not taught in schools, possibly because it is difficult to talk about, or because teachers are simply unaware of it. This is unfortunate because students can really benefit from discussing and analyzing contemporary artwork, and they may be able to more closely identify with it than art work created in a pre-digital age. Very few students are going to be able to make a living selling artwork for a living. Painting pretty pictures is a worthwhile hobby, but it’s not as long lasting as challenging students to think, developing their creativity and teaching them to analyze visual culture.