CHAPTER 7

ARE WE TEACHING HIGH ART OR LOW ART?

We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own tatse and apprehension; but some find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. (Hume, 1965, p. 3) References to high-art notions span the globe. Centuries of continuous and changing conceptions of high art have involved, for example: ideas about the grand and the common, the technical study of its rhetoric concerns, its indifferent morality or lack of any firm moral basis to it, its notions of beauty, perfectionism, emotion, idealism, formalism, the sublime, taste, academic painting and correctness, can be found in the work of Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume and Clive Bell. So consequently, we are sometimes asked in art education whether the art we are teaching is: ‘high art’ rather than ‘low art’, ‘high culture rather than low culture’, ‘high art rather than popular art’, ‘high art rather than student-centered art’. What are all these different distinctions with ‘high’ and ‘low’ in them segregating? What are their contrasts? Can we segregate what we teach in art in these ways and ought we to do so? ‘High art’ is poor art if, as Marcel Proust satirically mocks, we confuse art with ‘high society’, ‘social ambition’ and ‘special friendships in the art world’ (Proust, 2001, p. 59–67). Proust was aware that in the history of art no continent, nation and single group of people have a monopoly over what is ‘high art’. The above terms with ‘high’ and ‘low’ in them certainly imply a clash of ideas about teaching in art, but if so, why should popular teenage music necessarily clash with classical instrumental music, since on the one hand classical music can perform in instrumental ways Beatles songs rather well, and popular music can have instrumental orchestral influences that can benefit its music interest. A teenager can like popular hip-hop music, jazz, soul, rock and blues and at the same time equally enjoy Mozart concertos and symphonies. Should we discourage students from liking a whole range of musical tastes in art? From some of Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder’s thinking, Isiah Berlin explains (Berlin, 1998) that art throughout its history has produced populist, expressionist and pluralist movements of art mutually attached, self-realising and reinforced by the social common life of different communities. All manner of different voices, accents, sentiments, melodies, roughness, coarseness, delicateness and elegance has been part of art expression, stress, volume, ideas and metaphors. Aristotle wrote an important work about rhetoric that clearly is not the language

75 CHAPTER 7 used by poets, musicians and painters for example, who will often arrange their work so that it expresses the quality and imagination of a humanising experience. The art of poetry, for instance, uses particular words to communicate individual experiences of life as evidence of a relative truth. It does so often with sympathetic insight of how human beings may see each other, imaginatively revealing their intimate thoughts, attitudes and ignorance with emotional evocation. The poet Stephen Spender writes: My parents kept me from children who were rough Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams. (Spender, 2000, p. 134) “Poetry is an aural art like music” (Arbuthnot, 1959, p. 4) and is usually full of sensitive, sensory human images, a cocophany of literary, rhythmic and clashing sounding words, emotional embodiment, a physical, concrete and imaginative sense experience of being in the world, with verses, similies and metaphors, for example. Stephen Spenders’ poem is typical of such art and is a poem expressing a reaction against disenfranchisment, dehumanising experiences and brutality in the world. The temper of this poem is not designed to be academically clever, smug, logical or high-minded. Rather in a poetic, imaginative manner what it is signifying instead is how an insensitive Machiavellian human mind, possessed of a skewed superority of itself, can dismissively and gratituitously reject other human beings. Art is a way whereby we can understand our world and ourselves better but it does not do as the above poem indicates by insisting on objective language, nor necessarily insisting on cosmopolitan, bourgeois or avant-garde notions of art, because in the teaching of art we can can just as fruitfully turn to primitive common utterances, which as Berlin mentions, is not the literal speech of humans but the imaginative, subtle and sophisticated speech of humans expressing metaphoric significance. For example: “blood boiling within him...the teeth of ploughs, the mouths of river, or the lips of vases...with necks and tongues, metals and minerals with veins, the earth had bowels, oaks had hearts, skies smiled and frowned, winds raged” (Berlin, 1998, p. 344). Plato, we know, objected strongly to the use of poetic language, but students can learn how to recognise, recapture, attribute and alter the character of a person and express a landscape, feeling or object that in associative ways has involved us thinking differently, imaginatively and senuously that is an important notion of social growth (Berlin, 1998, p. 360). Plato’s way of thinking could never replace, for example, the quality satisfaction we justly feel of the sense of human comfort, joy and meaning that Herbert conveys when he visits the Greek Doric temple in Paestum: “the sky is bronze. The golden chariot of Helios rolls down to the sea. For Homer ‘all paths darken’” (Herbert, 1985, p. 29).

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