Why Do We Make Art? PDF

# Why Do We Make Art? How Do We Use Art? What Is Art For? In this chapter, I will probe some answers to the questions posed in the chapter title: Why do we make art? How do we use art? What is art for? In a culturally diverse society, it is important that we both ask these sorts of questions and m...

# Why Do We Make Art? How Do We Use Art? What Is Art For? In this chapter, I will probe some answers to the questions posed in the chapter title: Why do we make art? How do we use art? What is art for? In a culturally diverse society, it is important that we both ask these sorts of questions and make attempts to answer them because here we find the unity in pluralism. The broad themes or functions of art across cultures should become the focus for effective multicultural curriculum development in art. ## Finding Some Unity in Diversity In Western culture, the word *art* itself suggests many meanings. It can be used to refer selectively to particular works-such as paintings, symphonies, sculptures, novels, dance pieces, films, or plays -or it can be used to describe a process. It can also be used in an evaluative sense, to qualify a work or artifact in a particular way (as in "Now that's art!"). Mann (1977) suggests that there are a series of questions that we continue to ask about art: * What is art? * What is it for? * What constitutes good art? * Who decides these things? * By what standards? We need to ask these questions and seek answers to them in ways that acknowledge cultural diversity because existing answers to questions about art usually are culture-bound. Even our use of a word like art is culture-bound. In a multicultural context, as Dissanayake (1988) notes, "in many cases categories are better approached by considering how they function rather than what they objectively are" (pp. 58-59). She points out that, "like many questions no one bothers to ask, 'What is art for?' only shows its intriguing possibilities when one starts prodding it about" (p. 3). ## What Do Social Scientists Say About The Why of Art? The ways in which anthropologists and sociologists study art have only recently been embraced by aestheticians, art historians, and critics. Sociologist Judith Blau (1988) suggests that sociologists of art tend to focus their attention on the material and social conditions and functions of art. This, she notes, "has resulted in a considerable advance in our understanding of the 'peopled' arrangements that help to define the matrix of art production and consumption" (p. 269). We in art education need to make use of such work, because we cannot really understand art without including such perspectives or lenses from the great variety of individuals and groups across cultures who make art, preserve it, sell it, collect it, steal it, study it, use it, and enjoy it. Despite the respectability given by philosopher-aesthetician Arthur Danto's (1981) work on art as a social designation, Blau (1988) suggests that it may still be heretical for a sociologist make a statement such as "Art is what an institution defines as art" (p. 270). However, it must be done: art is what a culture says it is. For art education, such a view is useful and important because it challenges what Blau (1988) calls "the traditional and tenacious Kantian assumption [discussed in Chapter 2] that ideas and aesthetic values are pure and recondite" (p. 270) and the belief that what one culture calls art will be recognized as art elsewhere. In her important book *The Social Production of Art*, Janet Wolff (1981) argues that "film, literature, painting and rock music can all, in some sense, be seen as repositories of cultural meaning, or, as it is sometimes put, systems of signification" (p. 4). Artistic creativity, she states, is not different in any relevant way from other forms of creative action. Wolff posits that an individual artist "plays much less of a part in the production of the work than our... view of the artist as a genius, working with divine inspiration, leads us to believe" (p. 25). She argues that many people are involved in the production of any work of art, that sociological and ideological factors determine or affect the artist's work, and that audiences and "readers” are all active participants in creating the finished product. Vasquez (1973) has written that to deny that the artist is subject to the tastes, preferences, ideas, and aesthetic notions of those who influence the market is absolute twaddle. Art educators must help students to see that art encodes values and ideologies. Likewise, how art is discussed and interpreted “is never innocent of the political and ideological processes in which the discourse has been constituted" (Wolff, 1981, p. 143). Aesthetic enjoyment and aesthetic experience are also socially grounded. The notion that most artists produce their works within a matrix of shared understandings and understood purposes has considerable sociological support (e.g., Becker, 1976, 1982; Dubin, 1986; Fine, 1977; Kadushin, 1976). It is the job of art educators to help students investigate those understandings and purposes. Art education should reflect the attention paid by sociologists to the socialization of artists, how artists acquire artistic identities in different societies, and the relation of artists to many different types of publics and patrons. Becker (1976, 1982) asserts that art involves all those people and organizations whose activities are necessary to produce the kinds of events and objects that a particular group defines as art. This includes people who might conceive the idea of the work (patrons and special interest groups as well as artists), people who execute it (either individuals or groups), people who provide necessary equipment and materials (donors, manufacturers, technical experts, community representatives), and people who make up the audience for the work (including critics, aestheticians, and, later, historians). Becker argues, as do an increasing number of art historians and other scholars, that it is sociologically sensible and useful to see art as the joint creation of all these people. Who are the artists, the facilitators, and the audiences in different cultures and subcultures? The cross-cultural similarities in the roles of artists, patrons, and publics need to be studied. For example, the cultural context in which a new pole is commissioned, executed, and raised in an Alaskan First Nations community might be compared with a story of the creation and reception of an altarpiece in medieval Europe, or with the erection of a contemporary public sculpture in a large city. The owning of art can have a special correlation to social status. For example, Berger (1972) has shown that from the Renaissance, a relationship has existed between European oil painting and property, inasmuch as the possession, size, subject matter, and display of paintings often constitutes a visible sign of wealth and status. Bourdieu (1980/1984), who studied the use of art as a form of cultural capital, concludes that art-related cultural participation provides individuals with increased power and prestige. His claims have been supported by studies in non-Western societies (e.g., Gerbrands, 1957), where social status has been, as in Western culture, related to art consumption and participation. Art is used both to perpetuate and to change cultural values. Lukacs (1971), Balfe and Wyszomirski (1985), and Dubin (1986) have studied the role of art in cultural imperialism as well as in cultural change; their work has many implications for multicultural approaches to art education, and these are discussed in Chapter 4. ## What is Art For? Three Approaches In this section, I present three approaches to the issue of what art is for. Each has particular implications for the ways in which art should be taught in a multicultural society, and each provides opportunities for finding some unity in diversity. All three approaches promote a view of art as a powerful, pervasive force that helps to shape our attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors. Dissanayake (1984) identifies eight general and cross-cultural functions served or manifested by art. * First, *art reflects or echoes, in some way, the natural world of which it is a part. Art is therapeutic, because "it integrates... powerful contradictory and disturbing feelings,. allows for escape from tedium or permits temporary participation in a more desirable alternative world.... [Art] provides consoling illusions; promotes catharsis of disturbing emotions" (p. 37). Art can also allow direct unself-conscious experience. It “can temporarily restore the significance, value and integrity of sensuality and the emotional power of things, in contrast to the usual indifference of our habitual and obstructed routine of practical living" (p. 37). Art has been called "essential" because it exercises and trains our perception of reality. In many cultures, art may have "the unique faculty of preparing us for the onslaughts of life" (Jenkins, 1958, p. 295) by turning our attention to things that should concern us, as members of that culture; art recommends particular subject matter to our attention. Art helps to give order to the world. Although it contributes to order, Dissanayake also calls attention to the dishabituation function of art, that is, the fact that we may respond to art in unusual, nonhabitual ways. Art provides a sense of meaning or significance or intensity to human life that cannot be gained in any other way. Finally, art is a means through which we can reach out to others for mutuality; it is a means of communion as well as communication.* * Lankford (1992) posits that art is valued for a number of different reasons, including the pleasurable experiences it provides, its economic worth, its emotional impact, its usefulness in social criticism, and its potential political clout. It is valued also for its sometimes sentimental associations; for its abilities to beautify, surprise, inspire, stimulate the imagination, inform, tell stories, and record history; for the insight it provides into the human condition; for its technical accomplishments; for its characterization of particular cultural spirits; and for the status it might afford its owner.* * McFee (1986) proposes that art has six primary functions that operate to varying degrees, individually and in combination, subjectively and objectively, to affect the experiences of people in all cultures. *Art objectifies*, in that it is used to make subjective values, emotions, ideas, beliefs, and superstitions more sensuously tangible, so that they can be seen and felt. *Art enhances and is used to enrich celebration and ritual in human events.* *Art also differentiates and organizes; it confirms ranks and roles, telling people who others are.* *As communication, art is used to record, transmit, and generate meanings, qualities, and ideas.* *Finally, art has a role in cultural continuity and change. It helps to stabilize cultures by perpetuating culture members' convictions of reality and the identities and accomplishments of individuals and groups. By identifying problems, satirizing particular conditions, and portraying alternative views, art can also destabilize cultures.* ## Conclusion: Broad Themes for Studying Art in a Culturally Diverse Society Using the viewpoints summarized in this chapter, educators can develop possible cross-cultural themes for art education curricula in a multicultural society. For example, some lessons could be devoted to art from many cultures that objectifies and perpetuates cultural values and functions to promote continuity and stability in such aspects as religion and politics. The study of art that urges change or encourages social reconstruction might include students' initiation of their own related studio projects. Students could collect art images used to enhance and enrich different cross-cultural environments. The study of different holidays and festivals is one way to show students that, across cultures, many types of art are used to celebrate and enrich major cultural events. Other lessons might concentrate on art used to record and to tell stories in several cultures. Studio projects can encourage students to tell their own important stories. Still other lessons can focus on the technical skills and accomplishments of artists from a variety of cultures. Students could be asked to compare and contrast cross-cultural examples of art through which the makers have become * **ascribers of meaning** (e.g., carvers of First Nations poles in the Pacific Northwest, decorators of Ukrainian Easter eggs, makers of traditional patchwork quilts); * **ascribers of status** (e.g., clothing designers, jewelers, tattoo artists, oil painters); * **catalysts of social change **(e.g., graffiti artists, Chilean arpilleristas, gallery-based performance artists); * **enhancers and decorators **(e.g., makers of printed and woven textiles and ceramic tiles); * **interpreters **(e.g., Chinese and European landscape painters); * **magicians **(e.g., sand painters, holographers, mask makers); * **mythmakers **(e.g., commemorative artists, portraitists); * **propagandists **(e.g., political poster artists); * **recorders of history **(e.g., sculptors of public monuments, Australian Aboriginal bark painters, photographers); * **sociotherapists **(e.g., makers of images in a variety of media that allow us to dream and escape); * **storytellers **(e.g., quilt makers, picture book illustrators, those who commissioned and created Trajan's column); and * **teachers **(e.g., stained-glass window makers, mask makers, sand painters). In their own art making, students can embrace some of the above roles. In contrast to some topics commonly used in art education, these theme organizers, which I will discuss in more depth in the following chapters, are far from trite. They encourage us to see the multicultural common functions of art. They focus on art, and they all require cross-cultural study using lenses from all the art disciplines (art production, aesthetics, art criticism, and art history). If the focus is on the why of art, art teachers in multicultural societies need not worry that they do not know enough about art in a plethora of cultures. Rather than viewing teachers as transmitters of huge bodies of knowledge, we should see them as leaders and facilitators who are able to focus on the process and assist students in their investigation and understanding of commonalities in the functions and roles of art across cultures. A teacher is a leader who initiates action, maintains the teaching-learning process by setting individual and group guidelines, and evaluates students' experiences and products. When the focus is on the why of art, teaching is viewed as facilitating, and learning is understood to be active, the above themes offer a wide scope for learning about and making art. Such a perspective requires a questioning, problem-solving, and inquiry-based approach to instruction. In this chapter, I have argued that in a culturally relative approach to teaching art, the "content" area that must be considered by teacher-facilitators has most to do with three issues: why we make art, how we use art, and the functions art serves. With some knowledge of the functions and roles of art across cultures and a willingness to learn about art with students, multicultural art education is not as daunting as it may first appear. Teachers do not need to know everything about all cultures in order to teach the why of art. Art educators can embrace and implement a multicultural art curriculum based on the universal functions of art for human beings. They can focus on why cultures need art.