It’s something that should not be reserved for the few we are willing to bet upon and we assume will reach success. And yet, this territory is not only present in everybody, but should be developed and honed in everybody. Students are therefore left to figure everything out on their own. It’s located between consciousness and the unconscious and is subject to magical interpretations. True art supposedly takes form in an area that is considered unreachable. It is the part that, helped along by myth, remains a private and intimate task for which nobody else should take responsibility. This is actually the area that most art schools neglect, at least since the time when Walter Gropius, while director of the Bauhaus, claimed that art is something that cannot be taught. The more important point left, however, is not how to make art schools and museums more relevant, but rather what to do with the perceptual/cognition relationship that makes the art part of the “work of art” term important. The hygrothermograph is one of the most common devices used to measure fluctuations in temperature and humidity caused by the presence of warm bodies in museum galleries. They would, instead, pay more attention to how many minds may have been warmed during circulation. And museums would not be obsessed with the amount of warm bodies passing through their ever-expanding buildings. In an open system, schools would instead put their energy towards educating those who need it the most those who seem to be lacking a future. They are motivated and ready for autodidactics. The few are those students who, in fact, will need the least amount of education to make it. If art schools operated under an open system focused on improving communal creativity and communication rather than on a specialized market they would not filter admissions with the intention of investing only in the futures of a few. And in its smallness, these processes are only good enough to feed into a closed system and not into society at large. It is, however, useful in that it helps to illuminate the relatively small space occupied by perception/cognition within the institutional picture. The above description of shifting responsibilities to the student is admittedly crude and close to a caricature. Angela Vettese puts this in nice positive wording: “ … art school is a school of doubt: one teaches a subject that cannot be described, since art is both endless challenge and an asymptote.” 1 Given today’s general erosion of the humanities and the passive openness to “what’s out there,” the cognitive part of the equation is left to the student’s discretion and initiative. Is the mission of formal art schooling then to prepare feeders into the market or to form researchers in cognition? The answer might be “both.” Curricula don’t seem to reflect any clear position on the subject. The conundrum that museums face is reflected in art schools as well. Mostly financed by philanthropic handouts, they need to prove their importance by having as many peeking visitors as possible. This setup makes museums concentrate on selling the act of getting a peek. People may take the art part with them, at least inasmuch as they can carry perception and cognition out the door. Meanwhile the “art” part remains essentially free or non-tradable. In the term “work of art,” the economic value is represented in the word “work.” Museums may hold the works, but not sell them. This process may be schematically described as a gallery system that assists with commercializing the “work” part, and museums that aim to extoll the “art” part. The art they produce is supposed to attract as great a quantity of appreciative viewers as possible in order to sustain the market by consumption of museum tickets or direct purchase of the art works. Those who make them are subject to the criteria of meritocracy and the educational system aims to distill the few that may rise to the top. In any case this divides people in two groups: those who make the objects, and those who appreciate them. “Work” refers to labor as much as to an object, while “art” means the discipline in which this is performed, although it is also used as a laudatory adjective. One of the problems we face when talking about art education is that we take the term “work of art” for granted.
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