Reading Day 1
LearningCP #academic, #un-learning, #awareness, #constellation
‘Learning’ is defined as the process of acquiring knowledge or skills through study, experience, or being taught. As James Elkins exposes in his book Why art cannot be taught (2001), such an educational process is not as straightforward in the context of art academies. Being himself a professor of art history, theory, and criti cism, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Elkins voices criticism from within. He reveals the tension between the art institution—which claims to be capable of teaching art—and the difficulty teachers and students face when attempting to pinpoint exactly what it is that is taught to produce ‘good’ art/artists. Amidst Elkins’ institutional critique and his attempts to analyse rationally what is taking place in art classes, he concludes that what happens in the teaching of art is irrational and that it therefore can’t be rationalised in order to ‘improve it’. He describes his own position as skeptic and pessimistic, not believing that what we know about art teaching is a good base to decide on any course of action regarding changes in the curriculum, as well as believing that any course of action will just make it worse. If, as described in the Master Artistic Research’s reading document, one parts from the understanding that ‘artworks and artists often get credited as ‘good’ when they are about liminality, interstices, ambiguity, deviancy, or non-normativity’, which is something I personally agree with, then it would not be surprising that a big part of what plays a role in the production of ‘good art’ is not under the control of academies
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