Research in Visual Arts Education - The National Society for ...

ISSUES IN VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION
Picture analysis
Picture analysis is a corner stone of an education preparing for visual literacy
and visual communication. From the early 1970s, more than a dozen books
on picture analysis were published by art educators at the Swedish University
College of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm. Most of these texts
applied semiotic concepts and techniques to analyse pictures from popular
culture. These instrumental pictures lend themselves well to analyses of
manifest and hidden messages; however, a unique work of art required another
approach, e.g. inspired by Erwin Panofsky instead of those applied by
the early Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. Gert Z Nordström (1984), the
first Swedish professor of visual arts education, looked upon the semiotic
analysis and the methods used by art historians as supplementary.
In the United States, where art education has mainly concentrated on fine
and multicultural art, Edmund Feldman (1987) outlined several stages that
the critic of a work of art should pass. The fourth and final stage, the judgement,
is where many novices start, according to Feldman. In order to make
a judgement, however, you do not only have to know what you are judging,
that is, describe, analyse and interpret the piece of work that you are looking
at. You must also have a rationale for your judgement. Good arguments, that
is, ones that are open to discussion, are not taken out of nowhere but are
based on a philosophy of art or an idea about why art is important.
Theory and history of art, media and design
Do children produce art What about an artisan A designer A press photographer
– These and other questions concerning whether particular objects
or events are “really art” are often looked upon as a concern for the philosopher.
However, such questions can also be answered within the framework
of theory and history of art, media and design. A sociologist, for example,
would answer those kinds of questions by analysing when, where, and how
participants in various social worlds, including the “art world”, would draw
the lines that distinguish what they want and do not want to be taken as
“art” (Becker, 1982). From this point of view paradoxes may appear. Thus,
artist Andrea Fraser (2005) makes the following claim in an article called
“From the critique of institutions to an institution of critique”:
It is artists – as much as museums or the market – who, in their very efforts to escape the
institution of art, have driven its expansion. With each attempt to evade the limits of
institutional determination, to embrace an outside, to redefine art or reintegrate it into
everyday life, to reach “everyday” people and work in the “real” world, we expand our
frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it (p. 282).
26 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION