I think contemporary art is difficult for people because they don't understand that there are different reasons to make art and there are different ways to evaluate art. I didn't understand abstract art until I got to college. Prior to that, I didn't have any tools to look at it and evaluate its quality if there were no rendered objective images. It wasn't until I had seen more art and developed my eye and developed a way to evaluate ideas instead of just realism that I was able to appreciate contemporary art. If I came from a quality high school art program and didn't have those skills, how is the average person going to acquire them. This was one of the reasons that I started to rethink my art foundations course and what I really wanted to be foundational art skills. Our first unit is Artists Use Abstraction and we talk about how to evaluate abstract art. I show them the Art Assignment video and we talk about how our criteria to evaluate art has to move forward from 1870. Then we discuss how Modern art isn't really modern. We also talk about how art has context, and comes about in a certain place in a certain time. I got lots of ideas this week about how I could add to this presentation next semester. I think what was once old was definitely controversial in its time. Most people that I know of have an appreciation for art that ends around the Impressionists and Van Gough. When we talk about the Impressionists in my painting class, I introduce them as sort of old timey punks and rebels. They love the idea that when the Impressionists didn't get into the Salon, they just made their own. I can't imagine how controversial things like Dada were in their time, when they are still creating controversy nearly 100 years later. I imagine it was like rock and roll. I also wonder how accessible some of the work was at the time. Would the average person know of Duchamp or Picasso the way people might know Banksy today?
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AuthorMorgan Singleton is a secondary art educator with a Master's degree in art education. Archives
April 2017
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