How might we distinguish between TOK claims made about the nature of art?

The youtube clip below begins with the claim, “Art is anything that anyone creates which evokes a reaction from someone else.”

Other claims made include:

“Just becasue you say its art, it doesn’t mean it’s art…”

“the monkey that throws pooh, he’s making art, because he’s living the experience….that’s art…”

Learning from Art

Just what do the arts have to offer school children? Are they really important? Put most directly, what do the arts have to teach?

First, the arts teach children to exercise that most exquisite of capacities, the ability to make judgments in the absence of rules. There is so much in school that emphasizes fealty to rules. The rules that the arts obey are located in our children’s emotional interior; children come to feel a rightness of fit among the qualities with which they work. There is no rule book to provide recipes or algorithms to calculate conclusions. They must exercise judgment by looking inside themselves.
A second lesson the arts teach children is that problems can have more than one solution. This too is at odds with the use in our schools of multiple choice tests in which there are no multiple correct answers. The tacit lesson is that there is, almost always, a single correct answer. It’s seldom that way in life.
A third lesson is that aims can be held flexibly; in the arts the goal one starts with can be changed midway in the process as unexpected opportunities arrive. Flexibility yields opportunities for surprise. "Art loves chance. He who errs willingly is the artist," Aristotle said. Creative thinking abhors routine. Routines may be good for the assembly line, where surprise is the last thing you want. As our schools become increasingly managed by an industrial ethos that pre-specifies and then measures outcomes, there is an increased need for the arts as a counterbalance.
The arts also teach that neither words nor numbers define the limits of our cognition; we know more than we can tell. There are many experiences and a multitude of occasions in which we need art forms to say what literal language cannot say. When we marry and when we bury, we appeal to the arts to express what numbers and literal language cannot. Reflect on 9/11 and recall the shrines that were created by those who lost their loved ones, and those who didn’t. The arts can provide forms of communication that convey to others what is ineffable.
Finally, the arts are about joy. They are about the experience of being moved, of having one’s life enriched, of discovering our capacity to feel. If that was all they did, they would warrant a generous place at our table.
These are but a few of the lessons that art teaches. What is ironic is that the forms of thinking the arts develop and refine are precisely the forms of thinking that our ever-changing world, riddled as it is with ambiguities and uncertainties, requires in order to cope. Can we make some room for the arts? Perhaps.

by Elliot W. Eisner
Elliot W. Eiser is a professor of education and art at Stanford University and the author of The Arts and the Creation of Mind. This article was reprinted by permission from the Stanford University School of Education Alumni Email Newsletter

Forgeries

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced on December 7, 1967, that it had removed from display a bronze horse supposed to have been sculptured about 475 B.C. this “quintessence of the ancient Greek spirit” was suddenly declared a modem fraud, made in 1920.

The museum’s Handbook at the time described the horse as summing up “in eloquent way the achievements of the Greek sculptor in this period,” and added that “the artist’s conception has embodied it with an additional quality which is essentially Greek - a quiet beauty which removes it from the individual to the typical.”

Why was this exquisite sculpture, admired for decades by millions, placed in storage? How did it change? Similarly, the fake Vermeers painted during the 1930’s by Van Meegeren are so good that some art experts continued to maintain that the paintings were authentic even after Van Meegeren announced his hoax. Why were the paintings removed from the galleries? They had delighted many observers.

In 1762, James MacPherson published some “translations” from the third century Gaelic bard Ossian; they were greatly admired by such notable literary figures as Blake, Herder and Chateaubriand; Goethe wrote, “Homer has been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian.” But when it was revealed that MacPherson himself had written the poems, no one took any further interest in them.

On August 2, 1961, some prankish B.B.C. announcers in London broadcast an “avant garde composition by Piotr Zak” entitled “Mobile for Tape and Percussion”. The “music” was a random collection of whatever sounds could be made, by banging on whatever objects happened to be in the studio.

The problem presented by forgeries in the arts is not that intelligent and responsible critics may be deceived, but rather that whatever interest may be retained by paintings, sculptures, poems, and so on, that they are exposed to forgeries, they are no longer accepted as works of art.



Reuben Abel

Exam pits pop's lyrical prowess against Raleigh

Cambridge University finalists have been asked to demonstrate their three years of intensive study at a world-class institution in an exam question that compared the poetry of Sir Walter Raleigh with the lyrics of the pop singer Amy Winehouse.
The final-year paper in "practical criticism", sat by English students at the university, asked for a comparison between Raleigh's poetry and a choice of songs by Winehouse, Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday. The university defended the move, saying it proved their academics lived "in the modern world".
The text of the paper, taken last Thursday, read: "The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] defines 'lyric' as 'Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung'. It also quotes Ruskin's maxim 'lyric poetry is the expression by the poet of his own feelings'. Compare poem (a) on the separate sheet [a lyric by Raleigh, written 1592] with one or two of the song-lyrics (b)-(d), with reference to these diverse senses of 'lyric'."
The three songs were Fine and Mellow by Billie Holiday, Boots of Spanish Leather by Bob Dylan, and Love is a Losing Game by Amy Winehouse.
Winehouse's song, which last week won her a songwriting prize at the Ivor Novello awards, includes the lines: "Love is a losing game/One I wish I never played/Oh, what a mess we made/And now the final frame/Love is a losing game." The Raleigh stanza the students had to look at - As You Came from the Holy Land - reads: "But true love is a durable fire/ In the mind ever burning/ Never sick, never old, never dead/ From itself never turning."
The students could have suggested that the writers shared regular brushes with the law and a fall from grace.
Winehouse, 24, is as well-known for her struggles with drugs as for her music. Her biggest track to date, Rehab, documented her addiction and her loved ones' attempts to get her treated. She has sold millions of albums around the world, and won a Mercury prize, a Grammy, Brit awards, and, twice, the Ivor Novello award. But she has also regularly cancelled gigs, been cautioned for common assault and arrested on suspicion of possessing drugs. Her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is in jail awaiting trial for assault.
Raleigh (1552-1618), a poet and explorer under Queen Elizabeth I, suppressed Irish rebellions and discovered the "New World". He was held in the Tower of London for marrying a lady-in-waiting without permission and was later sentenced to death, accused of plotting against King James I. He wrote a history of the world as well as some of the best poetry of the Elizabethan age, and was an MP representing three counties.
A spokesman for the university said the question was not "usual", but added that it showed the university was firmly rooted in the 21st century.


Polly Curtis, education editor
The Guardian Wednesday May 28, 2008