Post ONE: Survey of Art Ed

I found it very interesting that at the end of Kamhi’s article on Rescuing art from ‘Visual Culture Studies’ she answers questions posed by others and in my opinion contradicts her own reasons against Visual Culture Studies.
First read her response to this question, “Is an artist's expression personal? or communal and cultural?" Kamhi responds:  "It is both, in the sense that every artist, though an autonomous individual, lives and functions in a cultural context. That context--its assumptions and values, language and manners--inevitably exerts an influence. But the degree and result of that influence varies widely from individual to individual. No one need simply be a creature of the Zeitgeist, doomed to reflect only the dominant assumptions of his culture. As an individual, an artist is always free to reject, question, or challenge what he sees around him.”

If Kamhi truly believes this why can she not see how a Postmodern art practice welcomes and encourages an artists freedom to reject, question, challenge, deconstruct, decode and reimaging a historical esthetic into a relevant, conversation infused with contemporary meaning?

On the other side of the coin, Olivia Gude states how Arthur Efland described how school-art style projects, mainly “recipes to make things without the possibility of making meaning.” Gude says, “good art projects encode complex aesthetic strategies, giving students tools to investigate and make meaning.  She says they are not just exercises in which, “students manipulate form according to teacher prescribed parameters without any intrinsic purpose.”

However Kamhi thinks that, “since the attitude of suspicion fostered by the "decoding" approach in Visual Culture Studies impedes a sympathetic engagement with works of art, it is likely to deprive children of the deep emotional enrichment that painting and sculpture can afford. The main emotions inspired by the Visual Culture approach are all on the side of anger, resentment, and moral outrage, leaving little place for such feelings as love, pride, compassion, admiration, tenderness, courage, grief, hope, honor, reverence, or joy.”
I don’t get it? How can children even derive any meaning that is more then a flash of like or dislike when viewing a piece of art if they have no real interest or ties to relate and make deeper connections with?? And why does she assume decoding is fostering only negative emotions??

I dont think that students always need to decode images to enjoy or appreciate them and I dont think they always need intrinsic purpose to create, but to dismiss the powerful tools of visual literacy is, in my opinion, like objecting to teach a student to read and comprehend what the words mean.