Sunday, January 31, 2010
The arts teach about lives and times
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Most people who go out for entertainment don't want a lecture about it. But a significant minority is grateful for context and guidance, and knows that docents at museums and pre-concert talks can increase appreciation and enjoyment of artistry."
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5 comments:
I'm glad that Joe Horowitz is taking action towards reestablishing the arts in the pre-college classroom. I can't imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't had band, choir, theatre, and tech theatre in junior high and high school. For me, it’s hard to imagine what school looks like without the arts, but that’s the sad fact for many in the country and around the world. Making Dvorak and Rachmaninov accessible to students is really great, especially since I love their compositions, and using all of Dvorak's work really brings out the importance of the arts. I think its great that Horowitz is trying to bring Dvorak into the classroom and I hope that he will draw attention to the need for the arts in schools.
I definitely agree that the arts should have more of a place in pre-college schools' curriculums. In a way, I think that the arts are the remains of past time periods and we are able to learn about the history of our country, and other countries and areas of the world and their developments through pieces of art, architecture, music, theatre, etc. The arts that we create today will serve to teach future generations about our lives at this point in time, but if the arts were to die out in our schools, and consquently, in the lives of the next generation, we won't have much to show to people in the future.
I think we can all agree on the fact that cutting art programs from educational facilities is wrong for so many different reasons. The part that hit home the most for me was when it talked about museum curators and pre-concert talks. For me, understanding what is behind the art is usually more fun that looking at it. That's the huge drive behind reading literature, and a lot of people don't realize how essential it is to producing good art as well, whether it's on the stage or on a canvas. For example, I went to a Guggenheim exhibit of Kandinsky over winter break, and while I had never appreciated his artwork before, I'm a big fan after seeing that exhibit because I took the time to go through the tour and understand his process. It's a pet peeve of mine when people criticize art without knowing anything about the artist or why it was created. People think that dabbing a paintbrush has no intellectual stimulation and is "pointless" when it comes to the real world, when really our roots and foundations come from a much deeper place. You read any good book, or look at any good painting, and I firmly believe there is a theme or a deeper meaning underneath. So basically, you can't just exclude a huge part of society by eliminating art programs, because for a lot of people it's who they are and how they communicate.
While it's very unfortunate that art education is slowly vanishing in this country, the way this article talks about how the younger generations have an inferior vocabulary seemed to make the article's writer come off as too pretentious to really focus on what he was talking about. I think that while the decline in art education is a horrible thing, I think that the decrease in art education is possibly due to the fact that the art education experts think of themselves as superior simply because art education what highly valued when they were born.
This is one of the biggest issues I have with the decrease in arts programs in elementary and secondary schools. The arts are not only useful for character and personality growth, but as tools in academic classes. The arts are a valuable way to educate students in history, culture, and values of societies they are studying. Theaters and arts institutions across the country offer many instructional programs before and after their performances and offerings. Like the article states, these programs are not only valuable for understanding the work and also allows audience members to gain an appreciation for the world around them. As we learn in Foundations, the world around the art affects the art itself.
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