Anyone who's ever taken or taught an art class knows that art education is at best more complicated than other kinds of organized learning. James Elkins, a brilliant art historian and professor of visual theory at the Art Institute of Chicago has even convincingly argued that Art Cannot Be Taught at all. I think that one of the reasons for this difficulty, at least in serious college and graduate level art education, has to do with the emphasis on teaching students how to talk about their work and evaluating them on how well they do so.
In a talk on Human Nature he gave at Pop! Tech 2004, Malcolm Gladwell told the story of a sociology experiment in which college students were given free posters to put up in their dorm rooms. In exchange, the students had to agree to live with the posters on their walls for three months. The students were divided into two groups. The first group was sent alone into the room with the potential posters, told to pick whatever poster they wanted, and take it home. The second group was given the same instructions with the addition that, before taking their poster home, they had to explain why they picked it.
When the three months were up, it turned out that the students in the first group still liked their posters. They'd largely picked reproductions of impressionist paintings and suchlike. The second group, who had to explain why they liked the posters they were taking, hated them, couldn't wait to take them down. They'd chosen hang-in-there-kitty-style inspirationals and pictures of sunsets. In other words, they'd chosen posters for which they could easily explain their affinity: 'it's pretty', 'it's happy'. Having to articulate their reasons for liking something had changed their criteria for choosing from whether or not they liked it to whether or not they could think of something to say about it, two criteria between which there is no strong reason to expect a correlation.
I think something very similar happens in most art education. As a student, you make work with a giant neon "Why?" hovering over your shoulder, always thinking about how you'll explain the things you make, communicate their meaning, in critiques and artist statements, and residency applications. The skill you master is being able to make work about which you are good at talking. This is not the same as mastering the ability to make work the even you like, let alone anyone else. I am very good at talking about working as a waiter at a a french dessert shop, but that doesn't mean that working there is the thing I most enjoy doing.
In the real art world, the artists that succeed are not necessarily the ones that are best at explaining why they make the things they do. Often times they are the ones who either are completely incapable of talking insightfully about their own work or intransigently refuse to do so, Jackson Pollack or Mathew Barney. The division of labor is split between people who make work that is liked (artists) and people who eplain why we like the work we do (critics). In my own experience both as an art student and an avid amateur, I've found that the items amongst my own work that I like best in the long run are the ones that just pop into my head as things I'd like to see rather than well-thought out concepts about what would make good or, even worse, interesting or meaningful work.
I'm not trying to advocate for unfiltered stream-of-consciousness in art making or the power of intuition or anything like that. The issue is simply articulability: there is plenty of good art that for which there is no pre-existing pitch and for which had the artist tried to come up with one, they could never have made the work. As Gladwell so effectively points out, one of the biggest obstacles to knowing what things we actually like are the things we think we like or those think we should.
Tagged: Malcolm Gladwell, art, education, criticisim, James Elkins, human nature, intuition