http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/damien-hirst-art_b_1250175.html
...and my thoughts:
I'm sitting at my desk trying to think of how to articulate my response to that article. I'm frustrated by this passage especially: "Also, by detaching art making from past necessity of developing hand-skills he made it possible for anyone with an idea to become an artist. What a chess move that was!" What's wrong with making the arts more accessible to people? To make becoming an artist more accessible to people? I think the danger in only teaching about works like The Mona Lisa or Starry Night is that students see the technique involved and achieving it seems impossible. If the definition of "what art is" is broadened, then students with great concepts have a starting point. Once they've got a concept, they can hone their skills to execute it well...or not. But I'm not comfortable with the idea of silencing an artist or individual - or degrading them - because of their technique. Maybe part of it is that I'm not an artist. I don't have much talent for "technique." When I look at a work, I don't really evaluate the skill-level or technical quality. I might, however, evaluate how a particular technique brings the work meaning. What I connect with in a work is the concept behind it, the "idea".
I can connect this to conversations we've had in my AP English class this year as well. With both Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, students feel like the authors have no skill, no technique, no craft. The plots don't advance. The characters are unlikeable. The diction is dry or too casual. And I challenge them to consider that if these works are part of the Canon, clearly they have some merit. But now - after reading this article - I don't think I'm going to use that justification because it assumes that if something is a classic, it's automatically good. And you can't use that argument to defend contemporary works, like the one mentioned in the article - Damien Hirst's "spot" painting. And so in the future I'll keep my defense of Hemingway and Salinger to these other points: cyclical plots might be intentional to show stagnation, aimlessness; unlikeable characters are human and reveal to us the darker facets of humanity; dry diction can show emptiness, lack of emotion, rationality; casual diction might be used to engage the reader, make the characters more relatable. It's not necessarily that there's a lack of technique; instead, the techniques used might just be different from the norm, make the work ambiguous.
And then - let's just say that the work does have no technique. The artist made it as a joke. Whatever. I don't know that I care, really. Because more often than not, I don't know the author's intent in making the work. I don't know what they meant for it to mean or if they deliberately made it to be meaningless. I'm more interested in my own personal interpretation of the work. So for those critics who think people who buy into Damien Hirst's "spot" paintings are stupid, that they'd been hoodwinked...maybe they just saw something in the work that neither that artist nor the critic saw themselves.
UPDATE: 3/1/2012
Last night when I got home, I started telling my husband Kyle about this article and we ended up having a great conversation about it. We talked about how scary and disappointing it is that students' priority is fame - not greatness, not fulfillment, not making a contribution to the world... And Kyle brought up how if technique becomes less important, replaced instead by provocative ideas, it could lower the bar for students and result in less great art. My counter-argument to that was if we glorify technique over concept, some students might be turned off to art-making, resulting in less great art. A catch-22.
This all reminds me of our conversation on one of the first days of the 2010 summer institute where we got into a heated conversation about teaching art in a way that balances the elements and principles with themes and concepts and ideas. The answer seems simple enough, right? That we scaffold the elements and principles within a thematic framework to help students communicate their ideas more effectively through good technique. But when students see artists or celebrities making the big bucks for seemingly meaningless work - but cute work or provocative work - how do we motivate them to do better than that? How can we help them to see the value in conceptual work, the value in technique as a vehicle to create more meaningful work, when meaningful work isn't necessarily what pays the bills?