Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

THE VALUE OF ART EDUCATION.
1) I was trained in art history, art theory, art criticism, and far less so in the craft itself. In effect my education was in the philosophy of art. I don’t think you can get a decent theory education any longer. If you can I don’t know where.

2) So imagine sitting in a u-shaped set of desks three hours a day, critiquing (in the art sense) art from every period and movement, and being required to state a meaningful judgement and explain that judgement on each piece. (More like law school interrogation of students.)

3) Imagine going to a review at the end of the semester and being eviscerated by the profs and more than half of the students leaving the room in tears. This was ‘adversarialism’ in art education.

4) The value in learning to criticize art is that it’s criticizing taste, and you quickly learn that taste consists of not only your own metaphysics, the relationship you identify between yourself, the art, the venue, the context, and the polity, and your relative ignorance.

6) So you learn about yourself, others, your people, civilizations, and all mankind through art and art criticism BEFORE you learn about economics, and politics, and norms traditions, and values. You learn through aesthetics. And in adversarial conditions where you can’t ‘cheat’.

7) So this is probably one of the reasons why I have an easier time isolating intuition (aesthetics) with facts. I started with war, history science, and art, and only then politics, economics, and law.

And this is the education of ARISTOCRACY: Rule. Not governance, but RULE.