Reading Reflection 3

As I made my way through the readings this week, amidst the peaks and valley's of comprehension I have come to associate with Freedman's challenging, but occasionally transcendent text, I kept coming back to last week's riveting class discussion on defining art. One of the more memorable summits of clarity came when I reached the section on Judgments of Quality which seemed to be a determining factor for some of my classmates in their process of classification. Freedman points out that “Even the term art has traditionally signified a judgment of quality” and that “the term carries with it assumptions of quality, value, and enrichment ”(p. 53). She goes on to explain the importance of context especially when assessing the quality of pop culture or multicultural objects, stating that “To contextualize learning is to help students understand that many conditions influence judgments of goodness and that those judgments are made based on the relationship of those conditions.”(p. 54)

Essentially, what this means to me is that “art'' that may not widely be considered good might still have very important things to teach us about cultures, history, and perhaps most importantly, ourselves. Personally, I see arts education as having great potential as a vehicle for exploring a wide range of subject areas, which is largely why I chose it as an area of emphasis.

Regardless of our subjective and mercurial judgments about the quality of certain artistic objects, the debate over what defines art will never be won or lost. Nor should it be. It is that very question that drives modern movements and experimentation. It is the act of pushing those parameters that has shaped the progression of art, especially over the last century, and arguably for much longer. Therefore, in our role as educators “we must ask, What art is worth teaching? (which is not the same as, What art is good?) and ask, What about art is most important to learn? From an educational standpoint, we can conceptualize quality not as great (inherent) value, but as powerful (social) influence.”(Freedman p. 54).

As I continue with my classes during my first semester here, it becomes ever more apparent to me that, as arts educators, one of our most crucial responsibilities to our students is to help them to make meaning from the chaos of today's densely saturated visual/media/material culture. Achieving this will require us to go beyond formalist skills training and critique, beyond the exemplars bestowed on us by western institutions of art history, using the kinds of transmedial techniques described in the article by Judith Fueyo and Ladislaus M. Semali, to help students “capture the postmodern reality of multiple texts, multiple meanings, and multiple interpretation.

On that note, I finally wanted to touch briefly on Micheal Kimmelman's review of the Richard Serra retrospective. Among a number of compelling observations about the work, Kimmelman notes that “What matters in the end are your own reactions while moving through the sculptures, at a given moment, the works being Rorschachs of indeterminate meaning.” When it comes to what art is, what always matters in the end are our own reactions, our own meaning.