This blog is the third in a series and has kindly been provided by
Vanessa Corby
Professor Theory, History and Practice of Art
York St John University
In England the National Curriculum for Art and Design from Key Stage 1 to 3 (ages four to fourteen) hinges on the ‘appreciation of great artists and designers’ (DfE, 2010; 2013). This pedagogical focus is consistent with what Herbert Read called the ‘common assumption’ that developing an appreciation for culture is a positive, transformative force whereby ordinary people learn the ‘language of the strange country’ of art and ‘gradually lift’ themselves ‘on to the cultural level’ (Read, 1941). Read, writing in 1941, knew that this common assumption was ‘fundamentally wrong, and fundamentally undemocratic’. Just as Diane Reay, speaking in 2019, blasted Ofsted’s new ‘authoritarian and elitist’ emphasis on the acquisition of cultural capital as an act of middle-class acculturation (Guardian, 2019). What Read and Reay both comprehend is that appreciation doesn’t secure the veneration of the arts in British society. Rather it is a key instrument in the poverty of aspirations for the discipline because it tells most people in this country that art and design are not for them, that their culture isn’t good enough.
The educational requirements for art and design Key Stage 1-3 continue to be set out in accordance with this common assumption however. In a document numbering fewer than two full pages, appreciation forms the critical framework that views creative outcomes as product of the ‘ideas’ and artistic ‘intentions’ of creative individuals, made legible by their categorisation within a seemingly aesthetically coherent succession of canonical styles and movements. At GCSE and A Level, the curricula for art and design ask students to take risks and demonstrate competence in the handling of materials, but Key Stage 1-3 does nothing to facilitate the development of those skills. As John Steers pointed out, the scant treatment of art education in the Coalition Government’s The Importance of Teaching (DfE 2010) made ‘no reference to practical creative activities’ (2014).
The cluster of bullets points that the National Curriculum puts forward as a guide to ten years of learning in art and design do not merit comparison with the seven pages it allots to history Key Stage 1-4, or, if you really want to be depressed, the forty-seven pages of detailed guidance for science. The absence of any substantive content on those (almost) two pages has nothing to do with the deficiencies of art and design as a subject and everything to do with the paucity of disciplinary understanding in education policy. In 1991, a Working Party chaired by archaeologist Colin Renfrew, responded to the first iteration of the National Curriculum for Art and Design in 1988 by recommending that the teaching and assessment of the discipline should give precedence to its ‘creative and practical elements’ via processes of ‘investigating, making, and understanding’ (Burlington Magazine, 1992). These excellent suggestions were watered down by the National
Curriculum Council, under the guidance of the then Secretary of State for Education, who placed ‘a much greater emphasis on the historical and chronological study of art’ to facilitate ‘“curriculum coherence and manageability” and the development of an appraisable core of knowledge’ (Burlington Magazine, 1992). Under the auspices of art appreciation, the education system has assimilated the study of art and design within performance culture’s programme of rote learning. This false step removes art and design from their capacity to enrich and make sense of the world we live in. It misses the fundamental point that making is a thought process, driven by material challenges, situations and uses, not ideas figured at the level of the abstract in pursuit of greatness. As such the National Curriculum is blind to both art and design’s imperatives and their means of achieving original, innovative insights and outcomes. Appreciation is ultimately a profoundly reductive means of engaging with art and design that has not only constrained the potential of pupils and teachers, but effectively rendered the subject meaningless and socially redundant, legitimating its exclusion from Key Stage 4 in the 2015 Strengthened English Baccalaureate.
Young people coming through this curriculum are woefully unprepared for the challenges and realities of making work both at university and in the creative industries. As my twenty-third Semester One gets underway, the rhetoric of appreciation ensures that most of my new students have begun university equipped with a disciplinary understanding they might as well have gleaned from a coffee table book. The notion that pre-formed ideas and intentions are the driver of the creative process is an incredibly seductive obstacle to their learning, built on historical misconception. Its power hails from the agency that its biographical narratives ascribe to individuals, a historiographical methodology that shaped the birth of art history in 16th Century Renaissance Florence (Soussloff, 1990). In the late 1800s the triumphs of the great artist (great man) became the cornerstone of the meritocratic ideology that invested new citizens of the French Republic in the wealth of the nation state put on display in the newly instituted Louvre Museum, a move emulated in the formation of the National Gallery, London (Duncan and Wallach, 1980; Arnold, 1995). Hot on the heels of nineteenth century Romanticism’s celebration of the noble sensibility of the artist, which supposedly set them apart from the concerns of ordinary people, the twentieth century mobilised the artist as hero/anti-hero as the antidote to the alienation of the atomic and industrial age, and the totalitarianism of the USSR (Rosenberg, 1972; Read, 1970 & 1970 [1966]; Orton and Pollock, 1996). This mythology retains its popularity today because it preserves the hope of individual agency and difference in a culture that is increasing homogeneous, just as the key to the power of neoliberalism lies in its promise of freedom which, as Chomsky argued, veils humanity’s increasing servitude to global corporate interests (1999).
The history and criticism of art and design has spent the last fifty years steadfastly distancing creative practice from reductive biographical explanation, styles, and movements. Contrary to the standards of the discipline, however, the rise of neoliberal economic government policy, to refer again to Godwin and the happy marriage I intimated earlier, has ensured that the appreciation of self-determining, self-interested, entrepreneurial ‘creatives’ has become the foundation of contemporary art and design education. Since the 1990s the study of art and design has been a task of mining the work of past ‘greats’ in the unthinking pursuit of aesthetic novelty and short-term profit. In the twenty-first century the self-perpetuating algorithms of AI can do that. It is time that education policy crafted a National Curriculum for art and design that is worthy of the discipline, the young people who study it, and the society to which it should belong. And that will take more than two pages.