2002-10-27 -

Art Appreciation

Due to reasons of sour disposition, I made no effort whatsoever to be social this weekend. My usual suspects were out of town, and I didn't want to call Fairmer or Naiad over to "hang out" when I really just wanted to read, sleep, and bitch. (I insert all this gratuitous elaboration because I feel, to some extent, that any weekend where I don't hang out with some of my friends is wasted. This was necessary waste.)

Anyway, I watched Ed Harris' Pollock yesterday, and I realized all over again that the alleged "art appreciation" program in the Birmingham public schools sucked ulcerated ass. In fact, all of the something-appreciation programs did.

They seemed to think that if you expose a bunch of little kids to art early, they will magically gravitate to it. Since I didn't, I always assumed I just wasn't an art sort of person. Then last year we took Liralyn to the art museum, and I started looking at the paintings from the viewpoint of a rather wretched miniature painter, and suddenly there was interesting stuff there.

I didn't have quite that experience with Pollock, but I did realize my gross level of artistic ignorance all over again. Hearing the dialogue about the theory behind the art of the times, and the way Pollock talked about Picasso, forced me to realize that there was a real continuum of work and theory of art in the Twentieth Century that I had just never been exposed to.

If anyone from a school board is reading this, lay off a little bit on the practical art and music courses. By the time someone gets to the eighth grade, they're able to handle a little discussion of how to appreciate the arts, not just dabble in them. Give the kids a term off from turning out crappy watercolors and concerts in what only a complete optimist might call two-part harmony. Use that time to make them listen to some classical and some jazz, to appreciate the moods you can evoke with a time change or an unusual chord. Show them the great painters and break down the things that made them great- their breaks with tradition, their improvements on tradition, their methods and weaknesses.

If you aren't going to do that, drop the charade. Kids who think they've experience something and didn't like it are much less likely to ever give it a shot again than kids who just never learned. If too much is never enough, too little is just a damn crime.

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