Ideas About Art E-Book

Kathleen K. Desmond

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 450

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Ideas About Art is an intelligent, accessible introductory text for students interested in learning how to think about aesthetics. It uses stories drawn from the experiences of individuals involved in the arts as a means of exposing readers to the philosophies, theories, and arguments that shape and drive visual art. * An accessible, story-driven introduction to aesthetic theory and philosophy * Prompts readers to develop independent ideas about aesthetics; this is a guide on how to think, not what to think * Includes discussions of non-western, contemporary, and discipline-specific theories * Examines a range of art-based dilemmas across a wide variety of disciplines - from art and design and law to visual and museum studies

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

1 Public Opinion/Public Art

I Don’t Know Anything about Art, But I Know What I Like!

2 Non-Western Ideas about What Art Is

Is Art Situational? Cultural? Biological? Universal?

3 Western Ideas about What Art Is

4 Beauty

Does Art Have to be Beautiful?

5 Expression and Aesthetic Experience

6 Art and Ethics

Morals and Religion

7 Political Art, Censorship, and Pornography

When Art Is Too Powerful, Cover It Up

8 Art and Economics

9 Feminist Art, Aesthetics, and Art Criticism

Where Were the Women in My Art History Books?

10 Postmodernist Art and Attitudes

11 Photography and New Media

12 (Re)Discovering Design

13 Art and Aesthetic Education

14 Artists, Art Critics, Art Historians, Curators, Museums, and Viewers

Making Art Ideas Your Own

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Praise for Ideas About Art

“What I especially like about Ideas About Art is the way it gives the artistic learner a natural starting point for thinking about and initiating discussion about ideas and concepts – meaty things in art – and then providing the reader with a place to go with those ideas.”

Mark Anderson, North Kansas City District Art Supervisor, Oak Park High School, Kansas City, MO

“Kathleen K. Desmond’s ideas not only validated some of my instincts, they gave me some specific and tangible suggestions. I thank her for her friendly and accessible tone. So much of what I read is informative and stimulating, but makes me feel like an outsider because I don’t talk ‘that way.”

Sandy Sampson, Interdisciplinary Artist, Parallel University

This edition first published 2011© 2011 Kathleen K. Desmond

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

9781405178839 hardback

9781405178822 paperback

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This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444395990; Wiley Online Library 9781444396010; ePub 9781444396003

Dedicated to Bill Desmond

Illustrations

1.1 GEAR (Mark Schweiger), Bade

1.2 Jun Kaneko, Water Plaza

1.3 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Shuttlecocks

2.1 Roxanne Swentzell, Kosha Appreciating Anything

2.2 Hung Liu, Mu Nu

2.3 Andy Warhol, Mao Tse-tung

3.1 Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive

4.1 Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon

4.2 Timothy O’Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, New Mexico Territory

7.1 Matthew Zupnick, Chain of Command

7.2 Luba Lukova, censorship from Social Justice

7.3 Luba Lukova, peace from Social Justice

7.4 Suzanne Klotz, House of Demolition

9.1 Joyce Jablonski, OV #3

9.2 Joyce Jablonski, Baker’s Dozen

10.1 Kyle Martin, Illustration of Baudrillard

11.1 Adam Fuss, From the Series My Ghost

11.2 Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Pollination

12.1 May Tveit, a lot more

12.2 May Tveit, what do you want?

12.3 Luba Lukova, ecology from Social Justice

13.1 Matthew Zupnick, Critics at Work

14.1 Kyle Martin, Illustration of Joseph Beuys

Preface

Annual College Art Association’s conference sessions conducted by the Education Committee, of which I was chair for several years, were packed with eager art faculty willing to step up to the microphone and reveal the need for teaching art theory to undergraduates at their institutions. Faculty reported that young artists were passionate about making things and were skilled in using a variety of media, but what they didn’t seem to know was what artists, art critics, curators, or art historians thought, knew, or did. These problems were found in every type of educational institution, from art schools and private colleges to comprehensive and research universities all over the United States. Educational systems in European countries didn’t seem to have this same need because in those countries there is an advanced familiarity with concepts and theory prior to higher education. My university tackled the problem by developing a course called “Artists in Contemporary Society” to infuse art theory, philosophical aesthetics, and ethics, and requires it of all studio art, graphic design, interior design, and art education majors.

While designing and teaching “Artists in Contemporary Society,” a search for useful books ended with the adoption of Puzzles about Art: An Aesthetics Casebook (1989) by Margaret Battin and three other philosophers. It features contributions of case studies in the arts, mostly visual, but including music and poetry, by a host of other philosophers, at least one whom is also an artist. Puzzles about Art explains classical aesthetic philosophies and uses case studies both to “develop insight into aesthetic issues and ultimately to test and challenge aesthetic theories” (p. v), as explained in the Preface. Authors Margaret Battin and Ronald Moore were well aware that puzzle cases “play an important role in both teaching and research in aesthetics” (p. v) and wrote several articles about using the case method for teaching aesthetics. Teaching and learning using the case method is well documented in educational literature and widely used in medicine, business, and education. Puzzles about Art, however, was the first case study text for learning about art. I was enjoying using Puzzles about Art in “Artists in Contemporary Society” when a bright graphic design student told me that although this was a good book, he thought it was outdated. “You need to write a new one,” he told me, “one that has current stories we can relate to and includes art and design theory.”

Well, I thought, he’s right. Puzzles about Art did not address contemporary art or the significant developments in the disciplines of photography, design, and art/aesthetic education, major areas in most universities. Further, there was no mention of non-Western art or aesthetics or postmodern theories. I added Howard Smagula’s Re-Visions (1991) to the required readings because at least it included feminist aesthetics, Ellen Dissanayake’s ethological studies of art, and articles by and about cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. But that still wasn’t current enough; thus the birth of Ideas about Art. As Chair of the College Art Association Education Committee, I collected and used the data from those sessions to inform and support this text.

Ideas about Art is the result of what I have learned from living and teaching in London, Amsterdam and Maastricht (the Netherlands), the Midwest, Southwest, and Northwest United States, and from traveling extensively in Europe, North and Central America, and especially from living in and teaching near Kansas City. We may scoff about the myopic, bi-coastal orientation of much of the artworld, but it is a reality. And some may think Kansas City is provincial backwater rather than the thriving cultural art scene that it is. What occurs here, where I live, is a very valuable inclusion to this text because it speaks to the authenticity and the usefulness of the contents beyond that “artworld reality.” Noted art critic Peter Plagens (2007) extolled the vitality of the Kansas City art scene in an article for Art in America. He credited the Kansas City Star’s full-time visual art critic, Alice Thorsen. Very few cities have full-time art critics in the first place, but Kansas City continues its support of the arts with art critics writing for the Kansas City Star and the regional arts journal, Review. Art journals and even newspapers are becoming defunct these days, but not in Kansas City. In 2008, Kansas City was lauded again in Art in America for its significant standing in the artworld (Maine 2008). “Everything is up to date in Kansas City,” as the song goes.

Contemporary stories gleaned from the mainstream world news and artworld news are included in Ideas about Art to make content current and engaging to an art-interested (and student) audience. Discussions of non-Western, feminist, and postmodern philosophies are featured in addition to classical Western aesthetic philosophies in order to illuminate art and design theories, cultural theories, and contemporary art theories. Of course not all philosophers, cultural or art theorists, artists and art movements, art critics, and art issues are included. Some concepts are noted and not fully explained, providing readers with an invitation to review, research, and add new ideas to their personal repertoire that support their arguments and defend their positions. Provocative questions nudge the reader to further thinking and consideration of ideas perhaps previously not considered. “Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way before.”

Stories from mainstream everyday artworld goings-on with embedded questions that require knowledge about art history, art theory, aesthetics, and ethics to discuss judiciously replace traditional case studies. Some stories function as case studies, but most of them are narratives with aesthetic or ethical dilemmas intended to engage readers. Stories include diverse forms of visual art in contemporary Western and non-Western cultures. Answers to questions posed are not so much right or wrong as they are insightful, interesting, and thought provoking. Responses to these issues and questions help develop critical thinking.

With its coverage of Western and non-Western aesthetics, ethics, economics, censorship, feminist aesthetics, and postmodernism, along with discipline-specific chapters on design, photography, art/aesthetic education, and artists, curators, and art critics, the book aims to provide an art-centered and up-to-date read. Within the short chapters, everyday stories about art, artists, art critics, art museum, and gallery professionals found in newspapers and art journals provide provocative stimuli in diverse contexts. Grappling with current art issues that these narratives initiate provides opportunities to substantiate ideas and practice arguments supported by philosophies and theories in the visual arts.

Chapters on design (graphic design, interior design/architecture), art/aesthetic education, and photography are included because many university art departments and art schools grant degrees in these areas and this book is intended for students of art and design and art education who want to understand theories that support their studies. A chapter about photography is included because so much of contemporary art depends on theories of reproduction, from Plato’s mimetic theory to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to cultural theories espoused by postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. The chapter on art and aesthetic education focuses on aesthetic education with historical notions of philosophical inquiry and movements in art education that provide a foundation for art and aesthetic education at all age levels.

Individual chapters about the disciplines of crafts or material arts, ceramics, and sculpture are not included because concepts about these disciplines are featured throughout the text. There is no art vs. craft discussion because it is not germane to contemporary art debates. Stories are mainstream artworld examples rather than culturally specific or traditionally specific to disciplines because the stories are intended to highlight everyday global art ideas found in any media in many places around the world, even in the Midwest.

Some may wonder why there aren’t more female philosophers in this volume, just as readers of art history books in the 1970s wondered why there weren’t women artists in their books. Peg Brand addressed the dearth of women philosophers in her American Society of Aesthetics article “Mining Aesthetics for Deep Gender” (2005), and concluded: “Answering, ‘Why so few women?’ naturally leads to a feminist critique of art, art history, and the philosophy of art.” This is sometimes called feminist aesthetics. One simple answer to the question is that in the past there were few educated women and few women in the arts, both as practitioners and as theoreticians. Feminist aesthetics seeks to dismantle long-standing foundations of philosophical aesthetics, to question underlying assumptions both historically and conceptually. Because males have historically been the authors of Western art histories and because current scholarship is dependent on knowledge of the past and the present, efforts to include non-Western and feminist theories are presented here. The chapter “Feminist Art, Aesthetics, and Art Criticism” specifically addresses these exclusions, while the entire text seeks to be inclusive.

The text explains philosophical aesthetics, art theories, and art practices in accessible language with stories that provide a supporting foundation for forms of art and careers in art that readers aspire to or in which they currently find themselves. Useful active learning strategies, founded in constructivist learning theories and based on educational psychology about how people learn, are effective for employing the content of this text in group or classroom settings and are included below. Strategies for teaching aesthetics to artists are outlined in “Actively Teaching (Artists) Aesthetics” (Desmond 2008a).

Actively Learning Critical Thinking and Art Theory

Active learning requires participation. Learners cannot sit back and wait to be “filled up” with knowledge; they must engage with the readings, the images, and with each other. Group processing theory and educational experience supports learners working in groups or teams. Groups are assigned sections of the text to present to the class. They cannot simply make a powerpoint presentation, or “lecture” at the front of the class. Presentations must engage the entire group in working out the concepts being studied. This can involve creating artworks to make a point, or developing symbols to understand what Nelson Goodman meant by a symbol system, or engaging in debates about whether something is a work of art or not by taking the positions of different philosophies like essentialists (Plato and Danto), antiessentialists (Wittgenstein and Weitz), or anti-anti-essentialists (Dickie). Debates about censorship and asking questions like in what places, under what conditions, and for what reasons should this artwork be shown are always good for active engagement. Dirty Pictures, a film about Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment portfolio shown in Cincinnati, starts a conversation about how censorship goes beyond the issue of the First Amendment and and affects people’s lives and our rights to view or make art.

Sometimes class debates become very heated! Students learn that their arguments weigh more if they can back them up with theory and clear thinking. Arguments surround current issues. The 2008 election included the copyright controversy over artist Shepard Fairey’s use of a photograph of Barack Obama to design the internationally known image of HOPE. Damien Hirst’s auction at Sotheby’s is controversial for economic and ethical reasons. There are news items every day that can be used to “incite” thinking about art, for instance, Artdaily.org (www.artdaily.org/index.asp) or one of the newspapers with a full-time visual art critic, like the Kansas City Star who employs art critic Alice Thorson full time. There is always something interesting, even in the comic section, to discuss or argue about. Developing critical thinking, writing and speaking, supported by philosophy and art theory, provides students of art with ideas for their own artwork and helps them understand what artists, art critics, and art professionals do, what they think, and how they go about their work.

Learning

Cognitive learning theories support that we learn from experience, by doing, and that learning comes from placing experience within a framework of existing knowledge. Doing involves repeated practice and use of rewards to encourage perseverance. Experience and repetition encourage learning that includes a psychological concept called depth of (information) processing and allow learners to claim ownership of knowledge and apply it in problem solving.

Learning is more effective (i.e. ‘deep learning’ rather than ‘shallow learning’) if it is active rather than passive during the process. Learning by doing (experiential learning) is generally more effective than learning by listening or reading or looking. When learning is active (using information to solve a problem), learners are more likely to remember what they have learned and more likely to process the information and reflect on how they learned, especially if there are incentives to do this. Incentives include being able to see the relevance of what is being learned so the information is connected and in a context. When learning is active, several skills are learned at once, i.e., finding and processing information and being able to explain it to others.

Active Learning

Active learning has foundations in constructivist theory and is based on the notion that different people learn in different ways, that the process of learning is about self-development, and that learning is only meaningful when learners make knowledge their own. Elements of active learning are talking, listening, writing, reading, and reflecting. Strategies for active learning include group projects, presentations, short writing exercises, and case study debates. Teaching resources consists of outside speakers, content-specific assignments, and appropriate textbooks, like Ideas about Art.

According to research studies, the lecture method of teaching has the lowest learner retention rate. Teaching others has a 90 percent retention rate, practice by doing 75 percent, and discussion groups 50 percent. Strategies that incorporate active learning elements promote learner self-development and the learning process.

Empirical studies prove that active learning is more successful than individual learning. The most significant study was in a large medical school that assigned a team of first-year medical students, enrolled in the required anatomy course, a cadaver and teacher-generated assignments for students to learn, in teams, what had previously been taught in large lecture classes. Students were required to develop their own strategies and actively learn anatomy. Scores on the national anatomy exam, which all medical students must pass in order to continue in medical school, were significantly higher when students were given the opportunity to learn actively in teams rather than in a lecture format.

Active learning can engage students in critical thinking and philosophical dialogue. The Socratic method is a kind of active learning. Group processing and team-based learning are also a kind of active learning. Active learning allows learners to engage with content, making knowledge meaningful and contributing to self-development and their own learning process. Active learning provides learners with opportunities to exercise their creative and critical thinking and to make knowledge relevant and their own.

Today’s Learners

William Perry (1970) described the concrete thinking and the dualistic nature of beginning-level adult learners with an example of a typical question of the teacher – “just tell me what you want.” Students at this level of intellectual development regard their instructors as the ultimate authorities. They often consider the development of their own thinking skills to be a “frill” of or an intrusion into the real substance of learning as they conceptualize it.

Concrete thinkers can be challenged with abstract art ideas if they are given an opportunity to make art part of their everyday existence in ways that will remain with them and be useful and meaningful for the rest of their lives. It’s important that learners think critically and become comfortable with ambiguity. This can be accomplished in a community of learners. “Hook” learners with the stories and case studies in this book. Find your own relevant stories. Make up your own stories with a few facts.

Some learners are introverts and need time to think before they can come up with responses that won’t embarrass them. When you call on a student who responds, “I don’t know” when you know they do, it’s probably because they are an introvert and need time to prepare their answer. Giving students a few minutes to write answers to questions will allow for reflection and better answers from both introverts and extraverts. Time to think and write and reflect allows extraverts to prepare better answers than those they are immediately ready to volunteer. You know the extraverts. They volunteer answers before you even have the question out of your mouth. Active learning provides for a variety of learning differences, including psychological learning differences.

Cognitive development theorists promote strategies for different learning predispositions and for different levels of readiness for learning. Learning differences are described in cognitive and developmental psychology as well as in educational psychology literature. Encouraging learners to recognize and use their own creative energies in constructing knowledge by providing them with a framework for learning is an essential component in teaching. Creating a variety of active learning strategies for engaging students in discovering how knowledge is essential to and meaningful in their lives is on ongoing challenge.

Teaching as Art

Critical thinking skills developed through practice arguing about relevant stories fosters a deeper understanding of any discipline and allows for continued learning. Think about teaching as an artwork, a “performance,” and story telling as key to teaching performance. Influential twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys claimed, “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.”

In order to connect content to something important in students’ lives, seek relevance. What is important to students? Ask questions. What kind of music do students listen to? What kinds of posters hang on their walls? What designs on CD covers do they think are effective? Why? Ask learners to define art or music or film. Ask these questions often.

It’s surprising how the answers to these questions change over time and from group to group. Learners, no matter what age, connect with the familiar – with what they know. They connect with what is important to them now, at this time and in this place, making context vitally important. (See the matrix in Gracyk 2008.)

Because students today learn differently than they did thirty years ago, professors must go beyond using powerpoint and look to new technologies like Facebook, blogs, and maybe even text messaging! In the humanities it means keeping up with cultural theory, visual culture, and contemporary practices.

When the College Art Association conducted a session called “Alternative Modes of Pedagogy: Theory and Practice in Teaching Art History,” it was based on Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), which supported Carnegie Foundation findings that 70 percent of today’s professors acknowledged that teaching was their primary interest. (Boyer was a former director of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.)

In a later CAA session, “What Do First Year College Students Know about Art, Anyway?” (Desmond 2001), professors reported that young art students have little or no knowledge of theory or aesthetics and they had not been taught to think critically. So important is critical thinking and aesthetics to the CAA that in 2006 noted philosopher Arthur Danto was keynote speaker. Danto (2006) detailed contemporary aesthetics brilliantly that evening and his published remarks are required reading in “Artists in Contemporary Society.” Current trends call for teaching critical thinking, art theory, and aesthetics in college art curriculums. In 2010, “WTF? Talking Theory with Art and Art History Undergrads” was presented at the CAA (Desmond 2010). It was with this continued interest in teaching and learning aesthetics and art theory that pedagogical theories and practices are explored at the CAA. Ideas about Art can be used as an effective method in a pedagogical framework for teaching and learning aesthetics and art theory.

Active Teaching with Stories about Art

Stories and case studies are useful in connecting content to something relevant in students’ lives. Local newspapers or Internet news sites provide relevant stories. Case studies can be examined in terms of values as well as consequences. Rarely does a week go by without at least one artworld news item appearing that is conducive to a case study or story. (This encourages students to pay attention to world issues.) Short writing experiences can provide practice for more formal essays. Develop your own stories to connect learners to daily life issues and content of your class in which critical theory plays a part.

Ideas about the transformation of found objects, about the temporary nature of art, and about the need for participants to engage with the art to make it art came to life several years ago when a young artist collected all the garbage bags from in front of houses in his neighborhood on garbage day. He took them to his studio, spray-painted all the bags white, and installed CD players that played “Return to Sender” that were activated when the bags were lifted. He replaced the bags, not on the streets, but on the front porches of the houses from which they were taken.

Most of the residents understood, but one resident became afraid. After all, memories of the 9/11 attacks were still fresh. This resident called the police and the police called the bomb squad. When the young artist heard this news he went directly to the art school where he was enrolled and explained he had performed this act. The young student appeared in court with his parents and was required to write “What I learned from this experience” by a city judge.

What did this art student write about what he learned? What would you or your students write about this or a similar experience? A discussion about whether this is art or not, or how it is art, or what philosophies or art theories support or refute it being art are active learning exercises that develop and hone critical thinking skills.

A contemporary example surrounding Picasso’s Guernica, chosen for reproduction in the lobby of a new Omni Hotel (now a Doubletree Inn) by a design group, was perfect for active learning activities. The design group explained, “Guernica will help create the ambiance we want for the Omni: a mixture of Midwestern warmth and European sophistication. We’re trying to create almost a European, worldly type feel, an eclectic blend that says you’re in the heartland, but with a very up-scale feel. That’s picked up in the artwork” (Karash 1995). The spokesperson went on to admit she was not aware of the work’s historical significance and her choice of Guernica for the Omni “has nothing to do with what it means.” Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard, intended his painting to be a moving protest against the bombing of the small town of Guernica, in Basque Country Spain, by German and Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts on innocent civilians.

How could anyone miss the severed head or arm, the broken sword or the woman with the dead child in her arms screaming in horror? There are a bull and a horse in the painting. Maybe that’s the heartland part? Where would the Midwestern warmth be? What part of Guernica contains the European sophistication? Could it be war? Or Cubism? Letters to the editor of the local newspaper encouraged aesthetic debate with headings like “Picasso’s Angry Protest,” “Elevator Art,” “Back to School,” “Damage Control,” and an editorial with the heading “Guernica is to cows as this city is to ...” (In the end, the idea to reproduce Guernica was abandoned in favor of a medieval tapestry. The property has changed hands since and the Doubletree has absolutely no information on this. It is documented in the newspaper archives.)

If people did not know about Guernica, how would they be able to form an argument or even comment on this event? Knowledge of art history, art theory, and critical looking and thinking all become relevant to those who experienced this issue.

Some Teaching Strategies for Active Learning

A powerful (and scary) teaching strategy is to model your own thinking by demonstrating how you work through problems using critical thinking and theories. The physical evidence of a wastebasket full (or computer trash icon) of first drafts or thumbnail sketches can be effective. Another effective approach can be to think out loud in class and allow students to follow your process. Visually track your process on the board or on an overhead.

Armed with stories and case studies and related questions for as many groups of three as you have previously organized, ask students to read case studies, answer the questions, and prepare their answers for presentation. (Each group member has a job: recorder, spokesperson, and facilitator.) Give groups five to seven minutes to process the assignment before calling on groups to report to the entire class. This allows thinking, writing, and oral presentation practice. Asking students to write their answers before being called on allows all learners to think more carefully about their answers.

Providing practice as part of classroom participation is a successful active learning teaching strategy. Allow students to work in groups answering questions. In small groups students can present their thinking and receive comments from their peers before they present their thinking to the entire class. This allows students to learn how to think critically and support their ideas in a safe environment. After practice, students will feel confident enough to present their well-supported ideas to the entire class.

Develop strategies that allow students to work in cooperative teams. Studies show that having uneven numbers of students, given specific roles in groups like spokesperson, facilitator, and recorder, leaves less room for slackers and more room for team work and learning, work that will be useful in future work environments.

Begin a problem-solving lecture with a question, a paradox, an enigma, or a compelling, unfinished story – some tantalizing problem that hooks student interest. The answer unfolds during the class hour with the answer revealed with only about five or ten minutes left in the period. The resolution could be an interactive process in which students’ tentative solutions are elicited, listed on the board, and discussed. Ideally, when the problem is resolved, most students will have figured it out themselves just before the teacher’s solution is announced at the end of class. Answers that can be well argued and can be backed up are the best answers. This needs to be reinforced – actively!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cavalliere Ketchum, Professor Emeritus of Photography, University of Wisconsin Madison, for introducing me to storytelling with his tales of growing up in the Wild West and “photographers-I-have-known” and for creating a seamless path to our shared mentor, Jack Taylor.

A special thank you to Jack Taylor himself, Professor Emeritus of Art Education, Arizona State University, master teacher, storyteller, and mentor extraordinaire who modified my behavior, supported my creativity, and fortified my teaching repertoire with stories, scholarship, and life lessons.

Thanks to Rudy Wohlgemuth for putting me up to writing this in the first place, and to Joe Hanson, whose knowledge and positive encouragement (even from the golf course) supported me beyond measure.

Thanks to too-many-to-name University of Central Missouri art, design, and art education students enrolled in Artists in Contemporary Society who knowingly and unknowingly contributed stories, ideas, and support.

Special thanks to Mick Luehrman, Professor of Art Education and Chair of Art & Design, University of Central Missouri, for his ever-positive attitude, spot-on advice, and generous support both intellectually and administratively. Thanks, too, to President Aaron Podolefsky, Provost George Wilson, and Dean Gersham Nelson for all manner of their support.

Thanks to Jayne Fargnoli, Senior Editor at Wiley-Blackwell, who found my College Art Association presentation interesting enough to help me develop this text and who supplied tough and enduring editorial sustenance. An exceptional thank you to the team at Wiley-Blackwell in Oxford: Lisa Eaton, Production Manager, for her competence and calm counsel, and Justin Dyer, Project Manager, for his extraordinary sensitivity and attention to detail and quality.

Thanks to my family, Ann and John Kadon, Tom Kadon, Jean Estrella, Lupe and Abby, and to friends and colleagues who granted me “cloistered scribe” status for a very long time.

Thanks to many friends, artists, and arts professionals for their significant support and contributions to this work: Mark Anderson, Porter Arneill, Jane Aspinwall, Robert Bingaman, Peg Brand, Marie Combo, Irina Corstache, Millie Crossland, Mo Dickens, Ellen Dissanayake, Michele Fricke, Elizabeth Garber, GEAR, Mark Getlein, jj Higgins, Joyce Jablonski, Jun Kaneko, Suzie Klotz, Hung Liu, Chris and Melanie Lowrance, Luba Lukova, John Lynch, Kyle Martin, Jeremy Mikolajczak, Armin Mühsam, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Jan Schall, Lisa Schmidt, Susan Schonlau, Steve Shipps, Stacey Sherman, Janet Stevens, Susan Stevenson, May Tviet, Renee Weller, and Matt Zupnick.

1

Public Opinion/Public Art

I Don’t Know Anything about Art, But I Know What I Like!

What about Graffiti?

Is graffiti art? Is it public art? It is exhibited in public, but not funded with public money. Does that make it public art – or not? Since it is illegal in most places, does that make it a crime and therefore not art? Do you have graffiti in your city or town? Do you have public art in your city or town? Who funded that art? Sometimes private donors supply the funds and choose the art for the entire community, like in Newark, Ohio, where a rich banker provided the money and chose the art for the community with no community input. Other cities, like Kansas City, Missouri, enjoy a public art program that includes citizens from all stations of the community on the selection panels. This kind of “ownership” in public art promotes pride not only in the art but in the city as well.