Making Sense of Aesthetics

One of the best things likely to come out of all of the discipline-based art education hoopla is that art education as a whole will have to start making sense out of aesthetics. For aesthetics to make sense in art education, it must be comprehendable, and its relevance ought to be readily apparent. This applies whether one is talking about theoretical propositions which guide teacher preparation, or art lessons for six-year-olds. Aesthetics has long been regarded by most art educators with a keep-yourdistance reverence: acknowledged as a key element of the world of art yet avoided as a cloudland wherein only self-proclaimed esthetes and inscrutable philosophers dwell. Because aesthetics has been inadequately understood, it has often been misrepresented by those whose task it has been to make the artworld more real and meaningful to the general public. Consider for example the application of Formalism in classrooms. As often as not it is represented as being essentially about composition; elements and principles of design become the most vital vocabulary of art education. This interpretation is only partially correct; it reduces art study to a set of surface arrangements that are irrelevant to much of contemporary art, and robs Bell (1958) and Fry's (1965) theory of its heart: the fulfillment of aesthetic experience. I am not championing Bell's theory here, only trying to make a point. Some art educators have simply tried to ignore aesthetics, and in this regard many have done a sterling job. Studio art methods have been taught without discussion of why or how people express themselves through art. Critical methods have been applied without consideration of the efficacy of the method used. There are probably many more art educators, however, who have used aesthetics without realizing it: when talk turns to the function of art in society, for example, or when students are asked why they think a work of art is good. Before we can use aesthetics really well, we need to have some idea of what it is about. Basically, aesthetics is asking questions and searching for answers about the nature of art. An important part of understanding aesthetics is learning to accept its grey areas, living with alternative answers to single questions, viewing what it offers with a critical eye, and making decisions based upon fairness, reason, and experience. That is why I thought it apt that Lanier (1985) encapsulated aesthetics in the form of a question: What is art and why do we respond to it? (p. 255). Here is an instance of an art educator decoding complex aesthetic concepts and jargon into terms everyone can understand. Of