Tales about art and art education

This paper recounts seven tales about ways in which conceptions of art in the professional art world have influenced what is taught in post-secondary art education. It begins with a tale about some pertinent aspects of art history, which provides reference points for the six other tales. The paper proceeds with two tales about traditional skills learning, copying and the importance placed on drawing, which dominated art education in the west until the twentieth century. The next two tales tell how this kind of art education was disrupted by the influence of modernism in two manifestations: self-expression and formalism. The rest of the paper tells two tales about the influence of contemporary art and, in particular, a conception of art from the mid 1960s, going under terms such as ‘postDuchampian’, or conceptual. Amongst the changes in art education this has ushered in are an emphasis on process rather than the final product and a requirement that the learner can explain and justify every stage of the production. This is connected to the need to have a theme which informs the art. Discourse about this kind of art has seen the displacement of connoisseurship by critical theory (with implications for assessment). At the same time there has been an extension of art practice into a range of non-traditional media (lens based and digital in particular) and often with skills taught on demand. Art making has been reconceptualised as a strategy (rather than an inner need) and art practice professionalised.