What Are We Teaching When We Teach Art?

Abstract

This paper presents a historical account of the art curriculum, in order to understand what is being taught in art today. It explains how present-day conceptions of art owe much to Romanticism and the social order which emerged in Europe under the influence of the Enlightenment. These conceptions have been tempered and disrupted by a hundred years of modernism, following from the 1960s by contemporary art. The art curriculum owed much to a combination of apprenticeships to teach skills and art academies to teach drawing and aesthetics. Only in the twentieth century did modern art exert an influence and when it did it was in the form of self-expression and formalism. Both of these have been challenged by contemporary art, which embraces mechanised means of producing art, places the emphasis on ideas, theories and contextual knowledge while subverting some traditional hierarchies. Contemporary art influenced significant art education movements, such as discipline-based and issuesbased, learning about visual culture, as well as the use of mechanical means of making art, such as lens-based media. The core of art education is now the ability to explain, contextualise and even theorise. This should abet but not eclipse some of the things art can be, such as thought provoking, entertaining and moving.