And as usual Menino reacts once again to an issue rather than anticipates and plans for it. And also as usual the solution is "MORE MONEY" despite Boston having the second largest budget per capita in the state of our larger communities. How about a candidate who says we should a) learn to live within our means and b) plan for things like schools, development, parks etc.
Sadly the one candidate running on that message, McCrea, is the one getting the least amount of financial support according to another article in the Globe today.
super reactive. plus, i think a concerted push for alumni outreach would be more sensible. it would help not only athletics, but the schools overall. but i'm guessing the SLCs have had negative impact on alumni involvement and them feeling less of a connection to 2-4 different schools as opposed to 1 school. for example, i wonder how many alumni of Hyde Park High are still connected?
These are just as important as athletics but don't seem to be getting nearly as much attention from the Globe. (And what's a high school football game without a marching band, anyway?)
I've done a lot of school art over the years.... for whatever reason, school art class doesn't teach you to make art or be an artist. The difference is that school athletics actually teach you to accomplish the thing, such as get the ball through the hoop.
School math class doesn't teach you to do math, nor to be a mathematician.
School English class doesn't teach you to write, nor to be a writer.
School provides a starting point of intellectual tools and materials. Terminal skills and concrete accomplishment, not so much.
(School also provides some socialization. And, if we're going to be honest, K-12 tries to condition an acceptance of government/employer authority, as well as burn kids' time and energy to distract them from mischief.)
I think parents can see and appreciate the results of school sports spending a little more. The results of visual arts are probably a mystery to them, as they are to me, and I'm a painter ferGodssake. I just don't think parents get that excited around most visual arts produced at school, and that's the fault of visual arts, not the parents. I'm not blaming school art teachers, art is just in a confused period right now.
they can teach rendering (painting, sculpting, sketching, etc.), which is very concrete, and can be accessible and impressive to parents.
Besides, you shouldn't attempt art until you've proven you can render, so people know you're rendering what you mean, and not just whatever you knocked over while you were fumbling about. :)
Schools can also teach music and (classical) dance performance, which are also concrete and can be appreciated to some degree by parents.
I guess that sports are a bit different, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean. "Look! He's running back and forth, and he made the ball go through the hoop, like Magic Johnson! He learned that in school!" "Look! He's leaping through the air, and spinning around, and lifting that girl up, like Alvin Ailey!" and "Look! He's playing guitar and singing like some guy on WBUR!"
Well if you want to get down to it, I think that people appreciate physical accomplishment. The development of a physical talent like rendering doesn't happen much in visual arts, it's easier to learn some ironic approach and then make your art that way, and schools budgeting the way they do, they will choose to take the easy way.
I've heard all the explanations for why physical talent has not attracted money in visual art, and even if I don't find them convincing, the result is still there. We can't forget that much of the thought in visual art for the last 40 years has been to break down and baffle the middle class, a class which every parent in BPS is either a member of or struggling to get in. Visual art in art college is a direct attack on them, so it's no wonder they don't support it.
The skills learned in art class are actually applicable to the workaday world, not just the rarefied strata of the handful of superstars who actually support themselves via sports or art.
A sense of color and layout is used every time you make a power point presentation or an excel graph for your boss. Putting the ball through the hoop -- well, your boss won't give a damn if it takes you two throws to hit the trash can. In addition, many people employed in graphic arts, advertising, film, and gaming use art every day.
The overwhelming majority of basketball players will never make a thin dime from their skills. Likewise, the world of professional art, which never tires of finding yet another ways t épater le bourgeois, is absolutely irrelevant to the art taught in school and the skills students may find useful as adults. One group of superstars gets televised, and the other gets exhibited; they're both largely irrelevant to what kids should learn in school.
You're talking about formal training in art, I just don't see it happening, maybe in some high schools but it was mostly gone at college level. As for use in your life, I really don't think this is true. We're surrounded by terrible-looking crap all the time. People put up with many more mishits visually than they would from their sports team. Why is that?
2d and 3d material is produced in high volume, from consumer products to signs and maps and presentations, by millions of people. Some people do it very well, and many others do it poorly. Some people do it constantly, and many others only infrequently. In comparison, your sports team has a very very small number of people participating, even if you add up the entire league. So of course they have fewer errors. That is all they do, and they are the result of extensive and constant competition. In comparison, the artistic products you see around you every day are largely the product of untrained and unselected people. You rarely see the sporting efforts of untrained and unselected people.
Even the most basic art classes in elementary school include experimentation with balance, color combination, etc. I'm not talking about formal training. Maybe it is different now than it was decades ago when I went to school, but we would usually look at good art and talk about why it was good and what made it good and then experiment with our own creation. That was the fundamental model for just about every class I remember.
If too much of what you see around you looks like crap it's in part because too much money is wasted on sports in school instead of being spent on something useful like art.
Edward Tufte has had a lot to say about the visual display of information, to be certain. I'm not sure I share his views about powerpoint per se, but he does present some solid evidence of how mechanization of graphics has lowered standards and how poor visual display of information has led to bad ends.
I think the LIQUIDATION signs exploding across our visual landscape and graduate student posters built directly from powerpoint templates are the low point of graphic design (if you don't count the sperm donor ads and some junior college car cards in that). There probably is something about the intersection of arts being cut in schools at a time when computerized graphics methods were proliferating that has resulted in a lot of dreck.
I think things are different now. In art college, formal training in observational drawing is optional and may not be very good if you do take it. Art schools are devoted to the conceptual model, where it doesn't matter what it looks like. Art teachers are trained at the schools with professors who have to accept the conceptual model to be accredited.
I don't think this happened by accident, this is what people want, on one level at least. But the whole thing is a bit of a sham, and everybody knows it, which is why it's indefensible in a public budget.
What does any of this have to do with art in elementary, middle, and high school? Where are you getting this conspiracy theory stuff?
Having toured MassArt and RISD very recently, I'm not sure your account of art education has much if anything to do with what is taught in art schools - as if artists ever tow the line or all adhere to a single school of thought (as if!). Sure, there are any number of conceptualists around - but most students are studying graphic art, videography, photography and digital editing, architecture, design, graphic design, fashion design, and other design fields that will pay their student loans and rent. Students spend their entire first year learning the very basics of drawing, life drawing, painting, etc. These are considered foundational courses, not optional courses! Many of the teachers have day jobs or outside practices or galleries or studios - they don't just exist in academia, but make money in the real world, too.
In fact, I'm completely baffled as to where you are getting all of this you are speaking about - especially this "all art teachers want to do is teach kids to destroy the middle class" stuff. Do you have any references supporting this supposition that art education is all conceptualist communist whateverist indoctrination so we must destroy it NOW! To be honest, your arguments all sounds as if they are coming from some rightwing or tax revolter list of anti-art talking points or something. Please tell us more about the source of your arguments because what you are postulating is totally far out there.
In any case, it is very far off the mark with art in the schools in practice - particularly with regard to the education of children in public schools. It is most certainly inconsistent with the kinds of curriculum and the sorts of projects that I see my own children engaged in through the arts at school.
Dude, she's politely and rationally spelling out several points. No one's saying you have to agree with her point or her way of arriving at it, but you're really not getting anywhere by just name-calling. It comes across as especially whiny and juvenile when you name-call in response to posts that are pretty undeniably clearly spelled out.
then it stinks. Here and I thought conceptual art died in 2002.
It's funny how ideas permeate and cross disciplines. This seems the same sort of nonsense as letting kids spell words any way they want to. Conceptual art dovetails very nicely with the "self-esteem" movement in elementary education. Just let the kids talk about what they felt they were doing, and forget about judging the result. Now throw out real literature for Readers Digest excerpts expressing the approved range of points of view, and you've succeeded in bowdlerizing the whole damn intellectual world.
If it's nigh-universal, then it's time for the pendulum to swing back to classicism. Maybe you could start a guerrilla drawing circle to teach children the forbidden secrets of symmetry and proportion. I could contribute by forming an underground cabal of juvenile poetry reciters (that's right: memorizing! bwa ha ha ha ha!)
What the ICA shows has little or nothing to do with school art, beyond a field trip or two. Statements about "breaking down and baffling the middle class" are completely irrelevant to what is taught in the schools.
I have seen very little modernist art in school art curricula, and a heck of a lot of emphasis on composition, technique, theme, and style - things we all need and use. Trades people who build stuff need this sort of training to make things look right and fit right, to communicate designs and find creative solutions to problems (e.g. the clever furnace installation in my basement), and professionals who have to communicate with increasing amounts of graphics need art training too. Of course there are always those so very unmiddle class positions like food service workers, bakers, hair dressers, graphic artists, technicians and designers that depend on artistic sensibility and training too.
If you look at how many professions and trades benefit from art, then it would be more accurate to say that NOT having art is an attack on the middle class.
I'm not even sure you are on the right planet here - visual art is an attack on our way of life??? Bullshit. Visual art is everywhere and more pervasive on this coast than I have ever seen it - signs, maps, powerpoint, advertizing, print copy, figures and diagrams in Scientific American is all visual art or heavily informed by visual art! Even scientists need it - I just spent this morning putting together an FAQ for the design and composition of maps for our scientific publications. Informed, of course, by a minor in visual art as an undergraduate.
Sure, there will always be Shepard Fairey and Serano and collectors who go googly over shit and sticks and hair in a twirl on canvas. So what? The existence of OBEY and Piss Christ have little or nothing to do with scholastic arts. That's like saying "gee, athletes take steroids so we should kill all school sports just because sports conflict with DARE indoctrination". It is an equally asinine position.
I think you have been looking in the mirror too much. Oh, but that might actually be a visual, which means its an art attack on the working class!
If I have no clue, then why do sock puppet and I pretty much agree here, eh?
Remind me never to patronize any business of yours ... I like it when paint ends up where it is supposed to, my furnace works and my house stays up and my food looks nice.
Comments
Poor planning
And as usual Menino reacts once again to an issue rather than anticipates and plans for it. And also as usual the solution is "MORE MONEY" despite Boston having the second largest budget per capita in the state of our larger communities. How about a candidate who says we should a) learn to live within our means and b) plan for things like schools, development, parks etc.
Sadly the one candidate running on that message, McCrea, is the one getting the least amount of financial support according to another article in the Globe today.
super reactive. plus, i
super reactive. plus, i think a concerted push for alumni outreach would be more sensible. it would help not only athletics, but the schools overall. but i'm guessing the SLCs have had negative impact on alumni involvement and them feeling less of a connection to 2-4 different schools as opposed to 1 school. for example, i wonder how many alumni of Hyde Park High are still connected?
How about art, music, and drama?
These are just as important as athletics but don't seem to be getting nearly as much attention from the Globe. (And what's a high school football game without a marching band, anyway?)
school art
I've done a lot of school art over the years.... for whatever reason, school art class doesn't teach you to make art or be an artist. The difference is that school athletics actually teach you to accomplish the thing, such as get the ball through the hoop.
School music classes, however
...can teach students to play (sing) and understand music.
It's prep
School math class doesn't teach you to do math, nor to be a mathematician.
School English class doesn't teach you to write, nor to be a writer.
School provides a starting point of intellectual tools and materials. Terminal skills and concrete accomplishment, not so much.
(School also provides some socialization. And, if we're going to be honest, K-12 tries to condition an acceptance of government/employer authority, as well as burn kids' time and energy to distract them from mischief.)
art vs sports
I think parents can see and appreciate the results of school sports spending a little more. The results of visual arts are probably a mystery to them, as they are to me, and I'm a painter ferGodssake. I just don't think parents get that excited around most visual arts produced at school, and that's the fault of visual arts, not the parents. I'm not blaming school art teachers, art is just in a confused period right now.
In the arts...
they can teach rendering (painting, sculpting, sketching, etc.), which is very concrete, and can be accessible and impressive to parents.
Besides, you shouldn't attempt art until you've proven you can render, so people know you're rendering what you mean, and not just whatever you knocked over while you were fumbling about. :)
Schools can also teach music and (classical) dance performance, which are also concrete and can be appreciated to some degree by parents.
I guess that sports are a bit different, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean. "Look! He's running back and forth, and he made the ball go through the hoop, like Magic Johnson! He learned that in school!" "Look! He's leaping through the air, and spinning around, and lifting that girl up, like Alvin Ailey!" and "Look! He's playing guitar and singing like some guy on WBUR!"
traditional art vs easy art
Well if you want to get down to it, I think that people appreciate physical accomplishment. The development of a physical talent like rendering doesn't happen much in visual arts, it's easier to learn some ironic approach and then make your art that way, and schools budgeting the way they do, they will choose to take the easy way.
I've heard all the explanations for why physical talent has not attracted money in visual art, and even if I don't find them convincing, the result is still there. We can't forget that much of the thought in visual art for the last 40 years has been to break down and baffle the middle class, a class which every parent in BPS is either a member of or struggling to get in. Visual art in art college is a direct attack on them, so it's no wonder they don't support it.
On the other hand
The skills learned in art class are actually applicable to the workaday world, not just the rarefied strata of the handful of superstars who actually support themselves via sports or art.
A sense of color and layout is used every time you make a power point presentation or an excel graph for your boss. Putting the ball through the hoop -- well, your boss won't give a damn if it takes you two throws to hit the trash can. In addition, many people employed in graphic arts, advertising, film, and gaming use art every day.
The overwhelming majority of basketball players will never make a thin dime from their skills. Likewise, the world of professional art, which never tires of finding yet another ways t épater le bourgeois, is absolutely irrelevant to the art taught in school and the skills students may find useful as adults. One group of superstars gets televised, and the other gets exhibited; they're both largely irrelevant to what kids should learn in school.
we're surrounded by crap
You're talking about formal training in art, I just don't see it happening, maybe in some high schools but it was mostly gone at college level. As for use in your life, I really don't think this is true. We're surrounded by terrible-looking crap all the time. People put up with many more mishits visually than they would from their sports team. Why is that?
Volume
2d and 3d material is produced in high volume, from consumer products to signs and maps and presentations, by millions of people. Some people do it very well, and many others do it poorly. Some people do it constantly, and many others only infrequently. In comparison, your sports team has a very very small number of people participating, even if you add up the entire league. So of course they have fewer errors. That is all they do, and they are the result of extensive and constant competition. In comparison, the artistic products you see around you every day are largely the product of untrained and unselected people. You rarely see the sporting efforts of untrained and unselected people.
Even the most basic art classes in elementary school include experimentation with balance, color combination, etc. I'm not talking about formal training. Maybe it is different now than it was decades ago when I went to school, but we would usually look at good art and talk about why it was good and what made it good and then experiment with our own creation. That was the fundamental model for just about every class I remember.
If too much of what you see around you looks like crap it's in part because too much money is wasted on sports in school instead of being spent on something useful like art.
The World According to Tufte
Edward Tufte has had a lot to say about the visual display of information, to be certain. I'm not sure I share his views about powerpoint per se, but he does present some solid evidence of how mechanization of graphics has lowered standards and how poor visual display of information has led to bad ends.
I think the LIQUIDATION signs exploding across our visual landscape and graduate student posters built directly from powerpoint templates are the low point of graphic design (if you don't count the sperm donor ads and some junior college car cards in that). There probably is something about the intersection of arts being cut in schools at a time when computerized graphics methods were proliferating that has resulted in a lot of dreck.
things are different now
I think things are different now. In art college, formal training in observational drawing is optional and may not be very good if you do take it. Art schools are devoted to the conceptual model, where it doesn't matter what it looks like. Art teachers are trained at the schools with professors who have to accept the conceptual model to be accredited.
I don't think this happened by accident, this is what people want, on one level at least. But the whole thing is a bit of a sham, and everybody knows it, which is why it's indefensible in a public budget.
Explain
What does any of this have to do with art in elementary, middle, and high school? Where are you getting this conspiracy theory stuff?
Having toured MassArt and RISD very recently, I'm not sure your account of art education has much if anything to do with what is taught in art schools - as if artists ever tow the line or all adhere to a single school of thought (as if!). Sure, there are any number of conceptualists around - but most students are studying graphic art, videography, photography and digital editing, architecture, design, graphic design, fashion design, and other design fields that will pay their student loans and rent. Students spend their entire first year learning the very basics of drawing, life drawing, painting, etc. These are considered foundational courses, not optional courses! Many of the teachers have day jobs or outside practices or galleries or studios - they don't just exist in academia, but make money in the real world, too.
In fact, I'm completely baffled as to where you are getting all of this you are speaking about - especially this "all art teachers want to do is teach kids to destroy the middle class" stuff. Do you have any references supporting this supposition that art education is all conceptualist communist whateverist indoctrination so we must destroy it NOW! To be honest, your arguments all sounds as if they are coming from some rightwing or tax revolter list of anti-art talking points or something. Please tell us more about the source of your arguments because what you are postulating is totally far out there.
In any case, it is very far off the mark with art in the schools in practice - particularly with regard to the education of children in public schools. It is most certainly inconsistent with the kinds of curriculum and the sorts of projects that I see my own children engaged in through the arts at school.
enough from you
I don't mind you being dense, but then to be such an aggressive blowhard about it. Are you like this in real life?
Go read the lead story of Sunday's Arts section.
No, enough from you
In EM's paranoid dreamworld:
argument, facts, links, information = blowhard
unsupported conspiracy theory = truth
You are the one who needs to shut up.
wtf?
Dude, she's politely and rationally spelling out several points. No one's saying you have to agree with her point or her way of arriving at it, but you're really not getting anywhere by just name-calling. It comes across as especially whiny and juvenile when you name-call in response to posts that are pretty undeniably clearly spelled out.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
If that's true
then it stinks. Here and I thought conceptual art died in 2002.
It's funny how ideas permeate and cross disciplines. This seems the same sort of nonsense as letting kids spell words any way they want to. Conceptual art dovetails very nicely with the "self-esteem" movement in elementary education. Just let the kids talk about what they felt they were doing, and forget about judging the result. Now throw out real literature for Readers Digest excerpts expressing the approved range of points of view, and you've succeeded in bowdlerizing the whole damn intellectual world.
If it's nigh-universal, then it's time for the pendulum to swing back to classicism. Maybe you could start a guerrilla drawing circle to teach children the forbidden secrets of symmetry and proportion. I could contribute by forming an underground cabal of juvenile poetry reciters (that's right: memorizing! bwa ha ha ha ha!)
School Art not Museum and collector art
What the ICA shows has little or nothing to do with school art, beyond a field trip or two. Statements about "breaking down and baffling the middle class" are completely irrelevant to what is taught in the schools.
I have seen very little modernist art in school art curricula, and a heck of a lot of emphasis on composition, technique, theme, and style - things we all need and use. Trades people who build stuff need this sort of training to make things look right and fit right, to communicate designs and find creative solutions to problems (e.g. the clever furnace installation in my basement), and professionals who have to communicate with increasing amounts of graphics need art training too. Of course there are always those so very unmiddle class positions like food service workers, bakers, hair dressers, graphic artists, technicians and designers that depend on artistic sensibility and training too.
If you look at how many professions and trades benefit from art, then it would be more accurate to say that NOT having art is an attack on the middle class.
I'm not even sure you are on the right planet here - visual art is an attack on our way of life??? Bullshit. Visual art is everywhere and more pervasive on this coast than I have ever seen it - signs, maps, powerpoint, advertizing, print copy, figures and diagrams in Scientific American is all visual art or heavily informed by visual art! Even scientists need it - I just spent this morning putting together an FAQ for the design and composition of maps for our scientific publications. Informed, of course, by a minor in visual art as an undergraduate.
Sure, there will always be Shepard Fairey and Serano and collectors who go googly over shit and sticks and hair in a twirl on canvas. So what? The existence of OBEY and Piss Christ have little or nothing to do with scholastic arts. That's like saying "gee, athletes take steroids so we should kill all school sports just because sports conflict with DARE indoctrination". It is an equally asinine position.
comment
You're full of hot air, especially when you have no clue.
Hot air and clueless
I think you have been looking in the mirror too much. Oh, but that might actually be a visual, which means its an art attack on the working class!
If I have no clue, then why do sock puppet and I pretty much agree here, eh?
Remind me never to patronize any business of yours ... I like it when paint ends up where it is supposed to, my furnace works and my house stays up and my food looks nice.
partners in happy talk
You and sock puppet are partners in happy talk, except he doesn't boil over like you.
Substantive Counterarguments?
No? Well, okay then. Have a nice day.