Not to be missed: TNC regular Michael J. Lewis’s splendid essay about the Aliza Shvarts affair and what it suggests about the things elite schools aren’t teaching their students. In all of the did she-or-didn’t she hullabaloo a simple question was neglected: Do a mere three years of undergraduate art instruction really produce the technical mastery one ought to have before switching over to, say, installation art? Lewis explains the way it ought to work:
A traditional program in studio art typically begins
with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics
of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process,
not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber
scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for
which we have the most familiarity—and sympathy. Students invariably
bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage
where they make “real art,” but in my experience, students who skip the
drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to
see where a good idea might be made better.Following this introduction, students might specialize
in painting, sculpture or such newer media as photography or video. A
rigorous college art program provides a strong vertical structure, so
that students take a sequence of ever more challenging courses in the
same medium. . . .It is often said that great achievement requires in
one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the
rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But
they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare
one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a
modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be
liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make
pastiches of the liberations of others.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this idea expressed more succinctly or forcefully. All the same, I’m at pains to see why students are in such a hurry to get to what Lewis calls “real art,” which often has little to do with the creative activities that draw one to art in the first place. (I should confess a bias, though: I took life drawing classes for years, then abandoned a Studio Art minor in college just to avoid making “real art.â€) You can always get better at the fundamentals, and that applies to other departments, too. How many students are shuffled into literary theory courses long before they’ve mastered expository writing? How many are introduced to postcolonial studies before they can list the 13 Colonies?
There’s an obvious reason for this: Teaching the basics is no fun for the teacher. I was introduced to Howard Zinn’s writing in middle school by a teacher who couldn’t be bothered to make our class memorize names and dates—a fact I didn’t mind at the time but which I now deeply resent. Perhaps college professors don’t realize that this neglect of entry-level competence is occurring in high school and even, as my example illustrates, in grade school. Well, that’s what diagnostic tests are for. They aren’t being paid to amuse themselves, and they should be held accountable for everything their students don’t know. After all, as Lewis points out, even the jargon buttressing Shvarts’s inane project was out of date.